Sam Patten: Russiagate Defendant and Author of Dangerous Company

We were honored to host Sam Patten, a communications strategist and longtime political operative who became the ninth American convicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as our July 2023 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Sam had never spoken publicly about his memoir Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a ‘Foreign Agent’ before that night, and he gave the hour to the raid, the cooperation deal, and what pleading guilty actually cost him. You can watch the full recording above.

If you are being asked to cooperate, or you already did and still cannot work out why it failed to protect you, give this hour to it. Sam went into the Mueller investigation as a voluntary witness and came out a target, with a big firm lawyer and an assurance about what would not be asked, and none of it held.

He was charged for placing op-eds

The conduct underneath Sam’s criminal complaint was placing op-eds in American newspapers. The law that made that a crime was written before the Second World War to stop Nazi sympathizers here from spreading German propaganda, and eighty years later he became, by his own count, the ninth American ever convicted under it.

Standing in a Washington courtroom to enter the plea, the moment he stopped being a non-felon, he got a warning from the bench.

She said, you realize that if the Supreme Court should later invalidate the law to which you’re pleading guilty to violating, that your conviction will stand?

He knew what fighting would have cost. Challenging the statute through trial and appeal might have killed it outright, and he priced that at three million dollars, which the government knew he did not have. Plenty of us have done a version of that arithmetic at a kitchen table. Watch this hour next to P.G. Sittenfeld, who turned the deal down and went to the Supreme Court, and Rachel Barkow on why prosecutors hold so much of the board.

The FBI raid, and the contacts that made him a target

On paper the offense was op-eds. In substance he was convicted for the company he kept, again and again, in Ukraine and Iraq and Georgia while history was moving there. He reads the raid scene aloud during the hour: agents scrolling his contact list and stopping at the B’s when Steve Bannon’s number came up, and on the way out, almost as an afterthought, a grand jury subpoena signed by Robert Mueller.

An insurer had told him what he was years earlier. It refused him a policy because his work in Ukraine kept putting him near plausible assassination targets. Uninsurable. He kept the letter, and he is honest about the thrill in that, which is most of the answer to why a man keeps choosing such company.

What does cooperating with federal investigators actually get you?

He is careful about who he blames. The agents struck him as people doing a job. His problem was the committees. The Senate Intelligence Committee selectively leaked material he had given it in confidence, he told us, and he put Adam Schiff and the House side in the same bracket.

His lawyer was a big firm attorney who had staffed one of those committees and knew a senator on it, which is proximity rather than what a criminal defense trial attorney does. Sam had a guarantee that the foreign agent statute would not come up in his five hour interrogation. It was the first question, and they kept returning to it. They can lie to you, he said, and you cannot lie to them. Tom Hardin described the same shape from the informant’s side.

Then there is the part nobody expects. While cooperating in a federal investigation of a sitting president, Sam was stabbed in broad daylight in Washington and nearly killed. From his hospital bed he asked the detective beside him to call the field office. Months later, back for the grand jury, he asked whether anyone ever had.

And, uh, the stabbing was very straightforward and honest. The guy tried to kill me and he failed. When your government sets you up, it’s a little bit different. It’s harder to get over.

Sam did not go to prison. He was sentenced in 2019 to three years probation, 500 hours of community service and a $5,000 fine, and was never formally on home confinement, though he was tied to Washington all the same, a first taste of what a felony conviction does to international travel. Then COVID confined the whole country, and being shut in like everyone else made his own version lighter. That is his answer to carrying an unfair thing without letting anger harden you, and it sits inside the same sentencing argument that produced the First Step Act.

Bill ran the meeting that night while I was recovering from a tooth extraction. What I told Sam at the end is what I tell almost everyone. Every prosecution is political to some degree, not because our conduct does not matter, but because people up and down the line decide who gets charged and how hard, Karen Kelly among them when she ran the Justice Department’s tax division. They do not dislike us. They do not think about us at all. That is why we come together, and why the collateral consequences of a white collar conviction are easier among people who have already met them.

About Sam Patten

Sam Patten is a member of our White Collar Support Group and a communications strategist who spent years advising political leaders in Iraq, Ukraine, Georgia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His work for a Ukrainian political party is what put him in the crosshairs of United States investigators. He was a senior advisor to the undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs under George W. Bush, country director in Russia and political director in Iraq for the International Republican Institute, and he ran Eurasia programming at Freedom House. This presentation was held on Zoom on Tuesday, July 18, 2023.