Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  “Stein and moron are F’ing everything up, too,” Strzok replied, referring to the Green candidate, Jill Stein, and the Libertarian Gary Johnson.

  Four days later, the Times gave Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning, but added, “A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible.”

  “OMG this is F*CKING TERRIFYING,” Strzok texted.

  For the first time since he was old enough, McCabe decided not to cast a vote.

  * * *

  —

  AT 2:35 ON the morning of November 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede the election. The New York Times put aside the front-page headline it had mocked up, “Madam President.”

  “Trump Triumphs” was the headline that morning in both the Times and The Washington Post. Both USA Today and the Los Angeles Times referred to Trump’s victory as a “stunning” upset.

  Remarkably, nothing about the Russia investigation—including its very existence—had leaked. For those at the FBI privy to Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the result meant that in the worst-case scenario they were investigating, the Russian plot to undermine American democracy had succeeded beyond Putin’s wildest dreams.

  Comey was stunned by the election result. He felt numb. His wife was in tears. Comey desperately hoped he’d had nothing to do with the outcome. He consoled himself with the hope that the gravitas of the office would make Trump more presidential, and he’d shift toward governing from the center rather than cater to his base.

  McCabe, too, was shocked. But he thought Clinton might have been more hostile toward the FBI, given the email investigation and Comey’s letter reopening the case. Comey would surely have been replaced, and a new director would replace McCabe. But he also thought Trump and his campaign staff knew little about the role of the FBI and its tradition of independence. It would be a steep learning curve, especially with Crossfire Hurricane in progress.

  Page and Strzok thought less about the consequences for the FBI.

  “OMG I am so depressed,” Page texted Strzok. “And honestly, I don’t know if I can eat. I am very nauseous. I’m extremely depressed. Though today it’s mostly not about work.”

  Two days later she wasn’t feeling any better: “God, I’m really f-ing depressed. Bill [Priestap] just called to talk about the sentiment of everyone he was talking to.”

  “Sentiment about what?” Strzok asked.

  “Thinks we had something to do with the outcome. I bought All the President’s Men. Figure I needed to brush up on Watergate.”*

  * * *

  —

  COMEY WAS FEELING at a low point in late November, when he was in the Oval Office again with Obama, now a lame-duck president, and other national security leaders. After the meeting, Obama asked Comey to stay behind.

  Once they were alone, Obama told him he didn’t want to discuss any particular investigation but wanted to tell him something. “I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability. I want you to know that nothing—nothing—has happened in the last year to change my view.”

  Comey felt tears welling up.

  “That means a lot to me, Mr. President,” Comey said. “I have hated the last year. The last thing we want is to be involved in an election. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

  “I know,” Obama reassured him.

  SEVEN

  “THERE WERE NO PROSTITUTES”

  In the wake of victory, a more magnanimous Trump seemed to emerge, at least toward the vanquished foe he had so often branded a criminal. Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway declared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump didn’t want to see Clinton prosecuted, despite the campaign chants to “lock her up.” “If Donald Trump can help her heal then, perhaps, that’s a good thing,” Conway said.

  Later that day, Trump elaborated during a visit to The New York Times. Asked about prosecuting Clinton, he said, “Look, I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back. And I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious. They say it was the most vicious primary and the most vicious campaign. I guess, added together, it was definitely the most vicious.” He reiterated, “I’m not looking to hurt them. I think they’ve been through a lot. They’ve gone through a lot. I think we have to get the focus of the country into looking forward.”

  In the following days, Trump began to put his stamp on the incoming administration as he announced top cabinet and national security appointments. For the pivotal post of attorney general, he chose Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. That Sessions would get a high-level appointment came as no surprise; he’d been the first (and for some time the only) senator to endorse Trump, turning his back on his fellow Republican senator and frequent ally Ted Cruz. Sessions was a hard-line immigration opponent, fiercely opposed to any kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants, and a supporter of Trump’s proposed border wall.

  He was also a controversial choice for a post like that of attorney general. His nomination to the federal bench had foundered thirty years earlier after a slew of racially tinged comments came to light, many made while he was the U.S. attorney in Mobile, Alabama. And the post of attorney general wasn’t Sessions’s first choice; he’d asked for secretary of defense or state, both rebuffed by Trump. Trump had never developed much personal chemistry with Sessions and had to be prodded to give him any cabinet-level job.

  Comey didn’t know what to make of the appointment. The only interaction he’d had with Sessions came after a speech in which Comey had said it was hard for the FBI to hire cyber experts. “We may find people of great technical talent who want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey had said. At a subsequent Judiciary Committee hearing, Sessions chastised Comey, saying smoking marijuana was no laughing matter.

  The following week, Trump made his first major foreign policy appointment, naming as his national security adviser Michael Flynn, the former army general who had led “lock her up” chants during the campaign. Flynn is “one of the country’s foremost experts on military and intelligence matters and he will be an invaluable asset to me and my administration,” Trump said, and the choice was warmly praised by Republicans. But Flynn’s hard-line anti-Muslim views and an affinity for Russia that mirrored the president’s worried some. “Some of the policy positions he’s advocated, a kind of a newfound affinity for the Russians and Kremlin, concern me a great deal,” said the California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff.

  And Trump himself had ignored a warning from Obama that Flynn, whom Obama had fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was temperamentally unsuited for the job.

  Press reports about Russian interference had only intensified since the election. In an interview on Fox News, Trump dismissed them as another attempt by Democrats to undermine his legitimacy. “I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “I think it’s just another excuse.” As for the hacked DNC emails, no one knew “if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace.”

  The incoming White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said on Fox News, “This whole thing is a spin job,” and asked why Democrats “are doing everything they can to delegitimize the outcome of the election.”

  In this, Priebus was only echoing Trump, who saw the entire issue of Russian interference through a single lens, which was not what it meant for American democracy but what it meant to him personally. Whether true or not, people would think Russia had tipped the scale for him, thereby rendering his historic victory illegitimate. As the press coverage continued, this theme became something of an obsession with Trump, who talked about it incessantly not only to Priebus but to almost anyone who would listen. To the White House communications director, Hope Hicks, he said Russia was going to be his “Achilles heel.”

  * * *

  —

 
; IN EARLY DECEMBER, Comey got a call from John McCain asking if they could meet in person. McCain, the venerable Republican senator from Arizona and former presidential nominee, was in open conflict with Trump, who’d denigrated McCain’s status as a war hero on the campaign trail. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump had asserted. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” McCain, in turn, withdrew his support for Trump’s campaign after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, saying Trump’s “demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.”

  McCain had gotten a version of the Steele dossier in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November. Partly because of his ongoing feud with Trump, he would have preferred to stay uninvolved and hand over the material as part of a congressional investigation. But his fellow Republicans had blocked that idea. So when McCain arrived at Comey’s office on December 9, he handed over the folder. “You should have this,” he said. Comey already had it, but didn’t say so.

  Later in December, yet another copy arrived via Bruce Ohr, who’d been given a memory stick by Glenn Simpson. Ohr didn’t look at the contents of the flash drive, but assumed it contained the dossier. He didn’t know, either, that the FBI already had multiple copies.

  Comey felt tremendous pressure to resolve the issue of whether Trump or anyone in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia before Trump was inaugurated, in part because Comey had already been accused of tipping the election. Despite their strenuous efforts, the FBI hadn’t found much evidence of collusion, and nothing to connect Russia’s election efforts to Trump himself. At this juncture, Comey felt it possible, even likely, that the FBI could close the Russia-Trump campaign investigation by the end of the year, and Trump could begin his presidency unencumbered by an ongoing investigation that might leak or otherwise become public at any time.

  That all changed on December 29, when President Obama announced sanctions on Russia as “a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests.”

  The Steele dossier aside, the Obama administration had overwhelming evidence that Russia had tried to influence the election, but the president had been reluctant to publicize it before the election out of the same fears that the FBI had wrestled with: that he’d be accused of using classified government intelligence to favor Clinton. But now, with elections safely in the past, Obama felt comfortable taking action.

  Trump shrugged off the need for any punitive measures. “I think we ought to get on with our lives,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago retreat, and later added, “It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.”

  Russia promised to retaliate in kind; expulsions of Russian diplomats were invariably met with a tit-for-tat expulsion of American diplomats from Russia.

  So it struck Comey as exceedingly curious that the next day Putin said he wouldn’t retaliate and would adopt a wait-and-see approach instead—a clear olive branch to the incoming Trump administration. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!” Trump tweeted. Suspicions within the FBI that Putin and Trump might be in league with each other immediately ratcheted up.

  The next day, the White House asked the intelligence services for anything they had that might explain Putin’s curious reaction. Comey had FBI agents review the secret intercept transcripts from the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., from the week of the sanction announcement. (The Russian embassy was the subject of an ongoing FISA court order that authorized wiretaps on the embassy phones.)

  Poring over the transcripts, agents discovered two startling phone calls between the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and Michael Flynn, who knew each other and had met with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at Trump Tower early in December. The first call, from Flynn to Kislyak, was on December 29, the day the sanctions were announced. Flynn asked Kislyak not to “escalate” the situation in response to the sanctions. Then, on New Year’s Eve, Kislyak called Flynn to report that his request had been heard at “the highest levels” of the Russian government, obviously referring to Putin, and assured Flynn that it was his call that had precipitated the decision not to retaliate.

  After Comey was briefed, he conveyed the information to the White House and top national security officials. Strzok and McCabe briefed their counterparts at the Department of Justice. The immediate mystery of Russia’s benign reaction to the sanctions was solved: someone in the incoming Trump administration—Flynn—had intervened and helped bring about the result.

  But it only deepened the question of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. So far the Flynn investigation had yielded nothing of consequence, but here was a direct link between Flynn and the Russian government. The intercepted conversations might themselves be crimes; the Logan Act bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and Flynn was still a private citizen, albeit one who was advising an incoming president. The moribund Flynn investigation was suddenly alive again.

  * * *

  —

  COMEY, OF COURSE, could say nothing about any of this when the time came for his annual New Year’s letter to FBI personnel. But he did finally address lingering concerns about the Clinton investigation and its impact on him personally:

  2016 was, to put it mildly, a challenging year, in which the FBI was the focus of a great deal of public attention for our work. As it always is, our work was subject to a fair amount of second-guessing. We try to stare hard at our own work, take feedback that is thoughtful, and always seek to be better.

  As for the Clinton email controversy,

  I am uncomfortable spending time talking about me, but I am very grateful for the support so many of you have expressed in recent months. I would be lying if I said the external criticism doesn’t bother me at all, but the truth is it doesn’t bother me much because of the way we made decisions. At every turn last year, we were faced with choosing among bad options and making decisions we knew would bring a torrent of criticism. But at each turn, we asked ourselves only: Which option is most consistent with our values? Which option would honest, competent, and independent people choose? When you know you have made decisions thoughtfully and consistent with your values, it is freeing, in a way.

  Comey and other national security officials met with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on January 5, when they gathered in the Oval Office for an intelligence briefing on Russian interference. They’d already decided that they had little choice but to brief Trump about the contents of the dossier and that Comey was the man to do it. The FBI handled counterintelligence investigations, and Brennan and Clapper were both Obama appointees who would soon be leaving. Comey agreed he should handle it, though he wished it were otherwise.

  There was little chance the dossier would remain a secret for long. Senator McCain had a version, as did the Democratic senator Harry Reid, and it was known to be circulating in Washington, D.C., intelligence and media circles. CNN had already called the FBI press office to say it had the dossier and was preparing to release it.

  The point of such a “defensive” briefing was to prepare Trump for potentially adverse publicity. But Comey’s primary motive was somewhat more complex. He didn’t really care whether Trump had consorted with prostitutes. Even if it were true, Trump was a private citizen traveling in Moscow, and what he did at the Ritz-Carlton was neither illegal nor any of the FBI’s business. But by briefing Trump, the FBI would achieve its primary objective: the Russians couldn’t blackmail the incoming president—because Trump now knew that the FBI was already aware of it.

  However compelling the logic, that didn’t mean Comey was comfortable at the prospect of discussing salacious allegations about Trump with the man himself, someone he’d never met. Given what he considered Trump’s worldview, in which all relationships were measured in terms of who had the upper hand and
could use it to extract the best deal, he worried that Trump would see the disclosure simply as a matter of leverage—that the FBI had something on him.

  The legendary reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, the seemingly untouchable founding FBI director, had been tarnished by disclosures he kept secret files on presidents, information he deftly wielded to remain in power for nearly five decades until he died of a heart attack. That was anathema to Comey.

  Comey thought he could defuse the idea that the FBI might use the information against him by telling Trump that he personally wasn’t under investigation. Jim Baker had argued against that, noting that while it was technically true, it was “Jesuitical”; Trump’s activities certainly fell within the scope of the investigation, and he might well become the subject. Some at the FBI thought Trump already should be. But at this juncture, Comey was determined to work with Trump. He feared that if Trump thought he was a target, he’d be at war with the FBI the moment he was inaugurated.

  Toward the end of the meeting with Obama, Director of National Intelligence Clapper brought up the salacious material in the Steele dossier. Obama betrayed no reaction. “What’s the plan for that briefing?” Obama asked, referring to the forthcoming session with Trump.

  Clapper said Comey would be briefing Trump alone the next day, after the incoming president’s regular national security briefing.

  Obama said nothing but looked at Comey and raised both his eyebrows.

  * * *

  —

  ON JANUARY 6, a motorcade of black SUVs carried Comey and other national security leaders from the airport to Trump Tower in Manhattan for Trump’s final intelligence briefing before his inauguration, now just two weeks away. The focus would be Russian interference in the election, because President Obama was preparing to release a heavily edited version of the intelligence to the public before Trump’s inauguration.