august 19–september 1, 2019 | new york 15or personal relationship with him.”)
Patten and Bannon were scheduled to
have dinner at the Breitbart Embassy a few
days after the FBI raided his house. And
now that he was thinking about it, none of
this looked very good, probably, from the
outside. In fact, it seemed odd even to him
that so much of his life, so many of his
associations, appeared suddenly relevant
to the very thing the whole country seemed
to care about, seemed paranoid about. Or
was that paranoid? If he tried to look at it
as if he were someone else, he could see
these previously innocuous details as
pieces of evidence, piling up and crowding
around him like the books in his little
dungeon—but what did it prove? He was
pretty sure he hadn’t done anything that
was technically illegal. Eventually, he
pleaded to failing to register as a foreign
agent. Then he started to talk.O
n the mornings of interviews
with the special counsel, Patten
would make his way to his law-
yer’s office, located across the
street from the Trump Interna-
tional Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. His
lawyer would brief him, give him a pep talk.
Then “some FBI agent, usually friendly,
would drive us to the special counsel’s office,”
Patten said. “When I sat in the back seat,
once I sat, the doors locked, and the agent
looked at me. That sucked ... I’ve been in a
lot of dicey situations in my life, so you’ve
just got to roll with it. But yes, I was scared.”
“What they do is they go around the
block and they speed up and open the
garage door where the trash comes in, and
they take a hard turn because there were
cameras there. Sometimes they’d suggestyou duck down. Sometimes they would
have the glass that was filtered, shaded.”
Patten said they parked among the
dumpsters—he called it the trash bay.
“There’s a guy who’s waiting there, who
opens the door and closes it,” he said. “The
guy with the door, and he always had a
backpack. I asked him, ‘What’s in the
backpack?’ ”
He went on, “The rooms where I had my
interviews or debriefs were windowless, but
whenever we took a break or I was to use
my phone, you have to go stand by the win-
dow in the hall because their cell coverage
was shit.” In the windowless room with him
was his lawyer, the note-taker, and “lawyers
from the special counsel and FBI lawyers
and agents.” They sat before a “small confer-
ence table. Light walls. Prison chairs,” he
said, though they did sometimes offer
“Office Depot” chairs with a cushion. “They
don’t offer you water. However, in the break
room, there’s a vending machine, so my
lawyer would buy it in the break room. The
U.S. Attorney does offer me water, so it’s an
improvement,” Patten said. “My lawyer
would go out to a food truck or something
and bring me back something. There was
an opportunity to eat. It wasn’t like a Ukrai-
nian oligarch who feeds you caviar.”
His “interrogations,” as he called them,
lasted a full day—six to eight hours—and
were conducted mainly by Andrew Weiss-
mann, Mueller’s No. 2. “I think we liked
each other,” Patten said. “I liked him more
than I intended to. They call him the pit bull.
During the Enron investigation, he was said
to have led a trail of human carnage.”
Weissmann “destroyed a lot of people for
no reason” in that investigation, Patten said,
but the look on his face suggested that he
admired the guy. “I like smart people,” he
continued. “He was surprisingly gentle with
me. I thought he would thrash me around
more than he did. But he didn’t—they had
me by the balls, so I guess he didn’t have to.”
“They had all of my emails in binders,” he
said. “They had binders of my emails with
tabs. They’d say, ‘Okay, now we’re on tab one.
Now we’re on tab two,’ and they’d go through
it. They’d say, ‘We’d like to talk about this’ or
‘We’d like to talk about that.’ ” Patten said he
wasn’t particularly bothered by the expo-
sure. “Privacy is a quaint European notion,”
he said, adding that he is “no tech expert,”
but, he said, “I’ve lived and worked in
enough authoritarian countries that it
doesn’t freak me out as much as it might
freak others out. If I wrote something,
I meant it. In other words, I stand by it. I’m
not generally a lawbreaking motherfucker,
right. I’m more or less an honest person.”
Senate investigators, he said, implied
they were offended by some of the languagewasn’t paid by him. Not technically. Patten
and Kilimnik had formed a company, in
which they were equal partners, to perform
their work; over two years, they brought in
more than $1 million through an offshore
Cypriot account. After the election, Patten
joined Manafort and Gates for dinner. He
remembered what Manafort said to him
then, like a mobster talking to his errand
boy: “You earned your money, kid.”
Now, everybody who’d set foot in the
Kiev Hyatt seemed of interest to
investigators—not just Manafort, with his
despotic clients and ostrich-leather
jacket, though he was certainly a special
focus for the special counsel.
And then there was Bannon, whom Pat-
ten said he met for the first time during the
2016 campaign, before Bannon had offi-
cially joined Trump’s operation, when he
was still at Cambridge Analytica and Breit-
bart News. At the time, Patten was lobby-
ing for the Committee to Destroy ISIS, and
he met Bannon at the Breitbart headquar-
ters, nicknamed “the Embassy,” near the
Supreme Court. Bannon supported the
agenda of the group and invited Patten on
his radio show and onto Breitbart’s opin-
ion page, which Patten now calls an
“unfortunate” résumé item. “It’s something
I’d prefer to go away and not be high on the
SEO,” he told me. He continued to talk to
Bannon through his time in the White
House, when Bannon served as chief strat-
egist to the president, even meeting him,
Erik Prince, and Sebastian Gorka in the
Executive Office Building to discuss Iraq
when Bannon’s office was moved there
during West Wing construction.
More recently, Patten had met with Ban-
non about his new projects, which mostly
involved exporting his far-right worldview.
“He asked me if I would be interested in
helping him with the European thing,” Pat-
ten said. “I’m a little bit embarrassed, but
I thought about it. It’s the professional-
vanity thing. Steve Bannon—I think there
are aspects and associations that he has
that are suspect, but I find him an interest-
ing guy, and to have him ask you to run his
foreign project is a compliment, and I didn’t
have other offers, so I needed to make
money, and I was thinking about it.” Laura,
who says she’s a liberal, thought the idea
was terrible. “I have learned that a success-
ful partnership is sometimes just to say,
‘Oh.’ And then let the person make a deci-
sion,” she told me. But as Sam worked out
the pros and cons in his head, Laura said
her own internal monologue went some-
thing like, “No way in hell is that gonna
happen.” (A spokeswoman for Bannon
wrote in an email, “Mr. Bannon has met
Sam Patten in passing and has no business
“It wasn’t
like a Ukrainian
oligarch
who feeds you
caviar.”