Sam Patten was a professional Zelig who kept popping up at the wrong place and the wrong time. Olivianuzzi reports on his wild life as a cooperating witness
Sam and Laura Patten. Photo: Win McNamee This story is being published in partnership with Epic Magazine.
The agents informed Sam that they’d be taking it. “And I said, ‘You’re not taking it until we call the lawyer,’ ” Laura remembered. But the agents produced a warrant, leaving the Pattens with few civil options. “There were people upstage, and it could have gone a very different way,” she said. “The landscapers,” he said, his voice an audible scare quote, as if he’d said “the lizard people.” The Pattens maintain moderate-to-severe levels of understandable paranoia, and in retrospect, they agreed, the alleged construction contractors and landscapers idling in the neighborhood that day might as well have been sitting in a truck that said FLOWERS BY IRENE.
Patten had worked in politics consistently since his 20s, when he got a job with Susan Collins, the U.S. senator from his home state of Maine, but most of his work had been on the fringes, overseas. He became part of a new generation of American lobbyists and consultants for hire, decamping to the Wild West of other nations to impart the good word of democracy and, crucially, make out like bandits.
“There were all these different threads,” Patten said. “I was sort of thinking, at that point, How does this look? That was what I was worried about. I was pretty sure all along that the Russia thing was bullshit … The whole thing was being artificially puffed up. So, in that context, I was self-aware enough to be nervous about where I was. Things were just falling apart right and left, and I was like, What’s gonna blow up next? And cue the government. All went according to plan.
He and Kilimnik didn’t interact much during the race, Patten said. They met once in Kiev to catch up over lunch. Harmless activity, by the standards of U.S. campaign operatives, whose militant loyalties are more often to opportunity than ideology. But politics was more gangland than green room in Ukraine, and the friends had been tailed by state intelligence services, who narked on Patten to his boss. He was banned from further contact with the competition.
More recently, Patten had met with Bannon about Bannon’s 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,” Patten said. “I’m a little bit embarrassed, but I thought about it. It’s the professional vanity thing.
“She would use me as an extra man for dinner parties,” Patten said. “There’d be a Supreme Court justice, an ambassador, a writer, maybe Mrs. [Katharine] Graham — a combination of the Georgetown set and always people to be on your best behavior for. It was not okay to not be interesting. That was the worst thing in the world.”
But then there was the subpoena. “There were looks back and forth,” Patten said. And after that, the felony charge of failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act on August 31. The Pattens decided to begin attending a different service. In an email to the Reverend D. Andrew Olivo on September 4, Patten wrote, “I gather you caught Friday’s news. Frankly I’m still catching my breath. On Sunday we made a point of going to the earlier service for optics, etc.
He went on, “The backpack man looked a little bit like a vampire. I got the sense some of those guys didn’t get a lot of sleep.” From the garage, the elevator would take him to the fourth or fifth floor. “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 window because their cell coverage was shit,” he said.
“I think in his mind, my value to him was I was going to be a ribbon on this case against Paul. That I was somebody who actually understood the universe of Ukrainian politics.” Observing the look on my face, Patten grew more defensive. He pulled out his laptop and asked me if he could explain himself. “I’m not a bigot when it comes to gays. I regret the word that I used in sort of a fit of pique. Here’s my friend Harris on holiday, so — ” He showed me a photo of a man on a beach in a small swimsuit. I expressed confusion. “No, I’m not in this photo,” Patten said, “but you get the gist.” I expressed more confusion.
Patten looked up at the building. “This is where you wanted to go?” I asked. “Well, ‘wanted’ — ” he said, laughing slightly. “This is where I’ve indicated my preference.” It was only a week earlier that he’d been sentenced — no jail time, just some community service and a few years’ probation. But in the months leading up to that day, terrified of another outcome, Patten became delusional. He convinced himself that if he was going to the pen, he’d do it his way. It’s only human, after all, to grasp for something — anything — to control when your world falls apart. And Patten grasped at everything he could.
If pressed, he could eventually summon some regret. When he first began his international career, he said, “I bought into this narrative of good guys and bad guys.” But over time, the world became less and less clear. “Picking up Paul Manafort’s client is a move towards a dark direction,” he said, though at the time it didn’t seem that way. In Iraq, his ex-girlfriend accused him of working for the side with “blood on their hands,” but Patten wouldn’t see it that way.
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