He is a senior civil servant who is accustomed to taking part in Parliamentary hearings. On this occasion he had just given evidence behind closed doors to the Parliamentary committee of inquiry looking into potential foreign interference in French public life. Mediapart was trying to get him to reveal what he had said – perhaps revealed – during the hearing when he abruptly dashed our hopes. “It was uninteresting!” he declared. “Between you and me, I was very surprised by the level of questions that were put to me. They were pretty crass.”
This confidential aside was backed by the bitter comments made by some committee members themselves during the hearings. “I still haven't understood what we're investigating, what we're looking for, and I don't know what we've found out so far either,” stated the socialist Member of Parliament Philippe Brun at one point.
And when addressing former ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert at a hearing, the green MP Julien Bayou remarked: “You've mentioned the Front National or Rassemblement National, which is no small matter in a committee of inquiry chaired by one of its members. One might for that matter wonder about the objective of this committee....”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The whole saga began last year. On September 19th 2022, Jean-Maurice Ripert, the former French ambassador in Moscow, stated on the LCI television channel that “everyone was aware that a certain number of male and female French politicians on a certain side of the fence came [editor's note, to Moscow] and did not leave empty handed”. His comments were aimed at the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), though he did not name them. This led to MPs from Emmanuel Macron's ruling party Renaissance calling for the opening of a Parliamentary committee of inquiry into possible “Russian financing” of French political parties.
But Rassemblement National pre-empted them by laying down a resolution to create a committee of inquiry into the political and financial meddling of “foreign powers”. In other words, the RN itself was going to lead the committee that was in charge of investigating how the RN had potentially been compromised.
The man earmarked to chair this committee, far-right MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy, did not conceal his objective: to “clear” the name of his party, which had been accused of being agents for the Kremlin, in return for Russian loans in 2014 (nine million euros for the Front National as the party was then called, two million euros for its co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen). “With no basis for it, Rassemblement National has been accused of representing the interests of foreign powers,” he said. This was both a “disgrace” and a “manipulation” of democracy, he added.
For five months Mediapart followed the 46 hearings held by this committee, whose report was adopted on Thursday June 1st by 11 votes to 5, with one abstention. It is being published this week. What follows is a journey into the heart of an exercise aimed at trying to whitewash the far-right RN's reputation.
The way in which the far-right party intended to “clear its name” was evident on March 23rd during the hearing of Guillaume Hézard, the director of the police's fraud and corruption unit the Office Central de Lutte Contre la Corruption et les Infractions Financières et Fiscales (OCLCIFF). The committee's rapporteur, Constance Le Grip from the ruling Renaissance Party, had asked the senior detective about a case involving Parliamentary assistants who were suspected of having worked for the Front National while being paid by the European Parliament.
Guillaume Hézard replied that his unit could also investigate what are known as micro-parties as well as standard political parties. At this point the committee chair, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, hurriedly changed the subject by asking the head of OCLCIFF if setting up a unit with similar competencies to his own unit could represent a problem. The fact that close allies of Marine Le Pen had been convicted for their actions linked to her own micro party, Jeanne, during the 2012 elections was doubtless coincidental to this sudden change of subject.
There was an even more blatant example when Guillaume Valette-Valla, the director of the state financial monitoring body TRACFIN, said he knew of “infiltration carried out by an entourage, an entourage generally quite close” to political figures. At which point Jean-Philippe Tanguy thanked Guillaume Valette-Valla and immediate ended the hearing. This meant no more questions could be posed – or answers given.
A former French minister interviewed from Moscow
According to Nicolas Lerner, the director of the French domestic intelligence agency DGSI, interference can be defined as a “concealed policy of influence” which in the case of a state means actions seeking to make the “policies of one country structural favourable to one's own, without it being known where the people and organisations who have resorted to it are from”. The counter-espionage chief gave the example of the way the murder of teacher Samuel Paty and the 'yellow vest' protest movement were both exploited to undermine the French model of society to promote the narrative of other states, such as Russia.
Vladimir Putin's Russia was indeed the main target of the various participants giving evidence to the committee. TRACFIN's Guillaume Valette-Valla spoke of senior Russian figures “carrying out highly-planned, very organised, very penetrative actions”. Having spoken of the many “spies from that country” detected in France, Bernard Émié, the director of the external intelligence agency the DGSE, deplored the fact that this “power” - he also mentioned China - “profited from a form of naivety and denial … among our elites, which grieves me”.
The far-right committee chair Jean-Philippe Tanguy took offence and noted that French television channels invited on as a guest the spokesperson at the Russian embassy in Paris who “spouts nonsense and is provocative”. He skilfully gave the appearance of asking difficult questions on Russian interference in French public life. But like his fellow RN MPs who sat on the committee, all his energies were deployed to minimise the reality of it.
When senior official Stéphane Bouillon, the secretary-general of the inter-ministerial Defence and National Security body, spoke about 'Macron Leaks' – the attack by Russian hackers on Emmanuel Macron's communications networks which led to the distortion and broadcast of information on the eve of the second round of the presidential election in 2017 – Jean-Philippe Tanguy played down the number of “proven attacks” that took place. “Weren't they ultimately quite low in number for a presidential election?” he asked. He then noted that several members of his party at the following election had experienced a “malfunction” in their Twitter accounts, suggesting this was in some way equally serious.
If we find nothing, perhaps it's because France is well-protected against interference?
On April 12th the committee heard evidence from former government minister Maurice Leroy, which provided a golden opportunity for the RN. Leroy, who supported Macron in the 2022 election, is now employed by a state-run Russian company that works on projects for Greater Moscow. “Have you sometimes had suspicions about or noticed behaviour that could amount to strong influence or interference..? What's your analysis of relations between influential French political figures, the Russian authorities and large Russian companies?” he was asked.
How could Maurice Leroy – a resident of Russia and an employee of a state enterprise there - answer these questions? “I've never come across a problem as far as I can recall,” he said during his video appearance from Moscow, where two years ago he acquired Russian nationality (he says this was against his will but that he found it “tricky to refuse”).
In the same way, the former prime minister François Fillon, who was forced to step down from the boards of two Russian multinationals following the invasion of Ukraine, explained that he had not been “directly affected by Russian interference”. In any case, such meddling was “quite crude” and thus “not very effective” in his view. RN members on the committee did not contradict him.
When a political opponent such as socialist MP Philippe Brun voiced concern that the committee's work was serving the RN's interests in “clearing it of all accusations of colluding with interference”, and cited one hearing in which he said it had not been possible to ask “any difficult questions”, the RN's Kévin Pfeffer quickly waded in. “Our hearings have been very interesting. If we find nothing, perhaps it's because France is well-protected against interference?” suggested the far-right MP.
Nothing was left to chance. On the eve of the first scheduled hearing for former ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, Jean-Philippe Tanguy was hit by “sudden and virulent flu”. There was no question of letting another party take charge of questioning the RN's main potential accuser, and the hearing was cancelled at the last minute.
When the ambassador finally appeared some weeks later, the committee chair apologised for not having “had the time to pass over the reins to a vice-chair”. Yet a text message seen by Mediapart that was sent to committee members to inform them of the earlier hearing's cancellation explicitly stated that Jean-Philippe Tanguy had “not wanted to be replaced” by a vice-chair.
During that hearing involving Jean-Maurice Ripert, the RN chair asked him on several occasions about the only aspect that interested his party: were the ex-ambassador's comments on LCI based on “specific information” other than what had appeared in the press? The former ambassador responded that his “impressions” had “not just come from the fact that the Front National made many trips” without visiting the French Embassy in Moscow, but also from his discussions with senior Russian figures.
The far-right party's line during the hearings was crystal clear: there was no Russian interference. And that was what the committee should conclude. On January 26th Jean-Philippe Tanguy spoke of “polls carried out at European level on the image of heads of state” which showed that public opinion “still had a very negative view of Russian and Chinese leaders”. From this the committee chair “therefore” deduced the fact that “attempts at interference are not bearing fruit”.
On February 2nd he also concluded from the testimony of Didier Migaud, president of the public body on transparency in public life, the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), that conflicts of interest in the political sphere and the upper echelons of the civil service were “relatively rare and that those in charge are quite upstanding and honest”. His reasoning appeared to be that if there is little or no interference in France, then the RN could not be under suspicion.
In the same way, the RN MP said after François Fillon's contribution that, given that political funding rules had been toughened, he did “not see how a foreign power could finance a presidential campaign”. Jean-Philippe Tanguy was to re-use this quote during Marine Le Pen's hearing, which allowed the latter to minimise the accusations of meddling against her own party. “Despite that, we were still criticised for having obtained a loan from a European bank. When, as I am, you're an opposition politician, you can never win in the eyes of some,” she said.
The DGSI's subliminal message
Alternatively, everyone ends up getting tarred with the same brush. For example, Jean-Philippe Tanguy said that “several parties or political figures have been accused of being the mouthpiece of agents of foreign powers or services”. He cited the founder of the radical-left La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as someone accused of being an “agent of Venezuela or Cuba”, the former minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, Pierre Lellouche, of being accused of having been a CIA agent, and himself and Marine Le Pen of being – according to current finance minister Bruno Le Maire – “Russian mouthpieces”. He asked Nicolas Lerner of the DGSI: “Are you monitoring these phenomena or are they electioneering rows that don't need to concern the French public or our committee?”
The head of the domestic intelligence service replied that “when elected representatives go to the Donbass to monitor electoral operations” then this represents a “different level of commitment or support for a political ideology” which amounts to “an important step in terms of allegiance towards the country concerned”. Nicolas Lerner pointed out that “several Parliamentarians and former European Parliamentarians” and “several elected representatives” had “in recent times” engaged in “relationships of a clandestine nature” with foreign intelligence services. One analyst of the French secret services believes that in making this declaration, Nicolas Lerner was sending a message to MPs beyond the committee and to other elected representatives in the process of compromising themselves. “He's telling them, 'We see you. We know. Be careful',” said the analyst.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
But the committee chair Jean-Philippe Tanguy preferred to focus his questions on the meddling carried out by other powers. This was apparent from the first hearing on January 19th. Thomas Gomart, directer of the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI), had just described Russia's strategies aimed at gaining influence. But Jean-Philippe Tanguy said he saw in them an allusion to “influence exercised by the United States”. And he asked Thomas Gomart, the author of a thesis on Franco-Soviet relations, a series of questions about American interference. The tone had been set from the start. All the experts and senior civil servants who appeared before the committee were subjected to precise and detailed questioning- and sometimes re-questioning - on American interference, as well as meddling by China and Qatar.
During François Fillon's hearing the committee chair returned several times to the meddling that, according to the former prime minister, came from “countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Algeria who, via religious leaders, give direct instructions on voting …. for parties who seem more favourable to the Muslim religion”. Jean-Philippe Tanguy declared: “This information worries me. As prime minister how did you quantify this influence? Is it the case that some parts of the Republic could have moved in one direction or the other because voting instructions from abroad were given?”
This is not to underestimate the affairs that have shaken various institutions (for example Qatargate at the European Parliament), nor the reality of espionage carried out by allies in France, with the United States chief among them. But the line of questioning and comments from the committee's chair showed a persistent pattern during the hearings.
Thus when the head of the DGSE said clearly that the two countries that spy on France the most are Russia and China, how does one explain the fact that the chair's first question was on Qatar, followed by one on the United States? When Jean-Philippe Tanguy insisted on talking about the Gulf state the DGSE's Bernard Émié replied curtly: “That does not come under my area of expertise. Qatar isn't spying on France when it's seeking to promote its interests. The interference that worries me is that which is targeting looting, aggression, destabilisation. The fact that Qatar has a particular interest in [editor's note, leading French football club] PSG is not an issue for the DGSE.”
Hearings on demand for the RN
Some senior figures in Rassemblement National themselves asked to be granted a hearing in front of the committee. The European MP Thierry Mariani said in his opening remarks that he had asked his colleague Jean-Philippe Ganguy if he could appear “particularly in my capacity as president of [the association] Dialogue Franco-Russe”. He said he had wanted to set the record straight in view of the “fantasies” and the “stories” that were circulating about him. It was a similar situation with Marine Le Pen, who was not initially on the list of participants. “I'd seen that the committee had finished its work without me having a chance to express myself and I was very aggrieved about that,” she said at the start of her hearing.
Each time someone from the RN appeared in front of the committee, Jean-Philippe Tanguy stood aside as chair and his place was taken by Laurent Esquenet-Goxes, an MP from the centrist MoDem party. But this simply allowed him and his fellow RN MPs on the committee a chance to asked easy or leading questions from the floor. During no fewer than six questions to Marine Le Pen, Tanguy tried to highlight the double standards the RN feels it suffers from when there are suspicions of Russian interference.
And when addressing Thierry Marani – who denied he was an agent of Russian influence while simultaneously using the kinds of argument employed by the Kremlin – Tanguy asked whether France's links with Russia were in reality the “economic” and “old” ties that went back to “[President Jacques] Chirac's terms of office”. He suggested: “I get the impression that we reinterpret events looking backwards, in the light of the invasion of Ukraine and the Crimea?”
Jean-Philippe Tanguy also tried hard to downplay the two crimnal investigations opened in relation to potential corruption and influence-peddling linked with Dialogue Franco-Russe. He asked his party colleague Thierry Mariani to confirm that he had “received no summons from magistrates” over the two cases and that a search carried out at the association had concerned a “third party”.
But the committee chair was rather more assertive when it came to the case of Buon Tan, the former Macron-supporting MP suspected of having overly close links with the People's Republic of China. Jean-Philippe Tanguy asked the head of the DGSI a question about “this specific case”. But he neglected to pose the same question to the counter-espionage chief in relation to Thierry Mariani, someone who claims to know the head of the Russian spy service. Mariani himself said of the Russian spy chief: “But I knew him when he was president of the Dumas [editor's note, Russian Parliament] and as a Francophile and French-speaker. I don't know him in his capacity as head of the Russian secret services.”
Jean-Philippe Tanguy also tried to keep his distance from Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, the middleman for the RN's Russian loans who has since become something of a troublesome figure for the party. He stated that this former European MP, a member of the Catholic group Opus Dei and someone close to the Kremlin, had never been a card-carrying member of the RN. The committee chair also said that Schaffhauser had always demanded “very great freedom” of action in his dealings, and had been involved in many projects that were “very far from the Front National's political, secular and nationalist line”.
Tanguy then urged the former European MP several times to “acknowledge” that his “opinions” did not follow the line “presented by Marine Le Pen to the Front National in 2010”. Fully aware of what was going on, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser said that question had “very little to do with Russia” and more to do with an “internal problem” in the RN. He also noted that Marine Le Pen knew his personal convictions well and that in five years she had “never once got involved in any of my operations”.
Russian news agency TASS quotes Marine Le Pen
In a paradoxical balancing act, the far-right party has been seeking to clear itself of any suspicion of being involved with foreign interference while at the same time trying not to offend those who are suspected of having corrupted them. So while Marine Le Pen has condemned the invasion of Ukraine, during her hearing before the committee she continued to deny that the Crimea had been annexed. Instead she spoke of the “reintegration” of a territory that had been “Russian for two centuries” following a legal and legitimate referendum in which the inhabitants had “freely” expressed themselves.
As for the “admiration” for Putin that she had noisily expressed for a decade before the war, Le Pen repeated that she considered it “quite admirable to have seen a country that was under communist control for 70 years, plus ten years under the yoke of Mr [Boris] Yeltsin's apparatchiks, managing to return in some manner to the concert of nations”.
Two months earlier an astonished Nathalie Loiseau, chair of the security and defence sub-committee at the European Parliament, had declared: “Anyone is free to see Vladimir Putin as a role model but everyone is also free to question such a choice. Before the war in Ukraine there was Georgia, Syria, the Donbass, murders and poisonings...”
In any case, the former RN presidential candidate's comments to the committee did not go unnoticed in Moscow. After the hearing the Russian news service TASS, as well as the Russian Ministry of Defence's newspaper and Tsargrad, the Russian television channel owned by oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, applauded the fact that “Marine Le Pen considers the Crimea to be a legitimate part of Russia”.
Meanwhile Jean-Philippe Tanguy did not wait for the end of the committee's work to share his views and his own conclusions with the media. On May 3rd he insisted on news channel BFMTV that “the only thing that we're going to learn from this committee is that Rassemblement National was discriminated against in relation to other political parties.”
And in a bid to have control of the narrative from start to finish, last Thursday afternoon Jean-Philippe Tanguy held a press conference, which other committee members only learnt about late the previous evening. On Thursday Mediapart sent him a list of 17 questions and he informed us that he would not have the time to respond to them before this Monday.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter