Crossfire Hurricane
‘Damn this feels momentous. Because this matters.”
It was July 31, 2016, and FBI special agent Peter Strzok was feeling downright giddy.
Strzok was one of the FBI’s top national security agents: Chief of the Counterespionage Section. He was feeling his oats on July 31 because the Bureau had just opened a counterintelligence investigation of Russian cyberespionage—the hacking attacks by which the Kremlin sought to disrupt the 2016 election. And not disrupt in some random, scattershot way. The FBI’s operating theory was that the Russians were targeting the Democratic party, for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency. Strzok would be heading up one of the most significant probes in his legendary Bureau’s history.
It was frisson intensified by relief and professional accomplishment. The Bureau had finally put to bed “Mid Year Exam,” codename for the Hillary Clinton emails investigation. Strzok and other FBI vets dreaded that go-through-the-motions exercise: Everyone working on the case knew that no one was going to be charged with a crime. Mrs. Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States. The FBI’s goal had been to avoid being tarnished in the process of “investigating” her—to demonstrate that the Bureau had done a thorough job, without calling attention to the suffocating constraints imposed on investigators by the Obama Justice Department.
That mission had been accomplished, Strzok and his colleagues believed, by Director James Comey’s July 5 press conference, outlining the evidence and recommending against charges that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring. Now, having run the just-for-show interview of Hillary Clinton on July 2—perfunctory questioning that took place long after Comey’s press statement, announcing that there would be no charges, was scripted and ready for prime time—Strzok was on the verge of a big promotion, to Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division—second in command of the FBI component that protects the United States from foreign threats.
But best of all: now, he was working a real case, the Trump–Russia investigation. He was about to fly to London to meet with intelligence contacts and conduct secret interviews.
‘We’ll Stop It’
True to form, Strzok couldn’t contain himself.
As was his wont, he was texting his paramour, Lisa Page, several times a day, thousands of times through the years from before the Clinton emails caper through Russia-gate. Page, a former Justice Department attorney, had moved to the FBI and was now assigned to the heady role of counsel to the Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe. That made her one of the relative handful of Bureau officials who were in on the Trump–Russia probe—the preliminary work done by Strzok’s direct boss, Bill Priestap; and now, Strzok’s trip to London. Late Sunday night, as he readied for his morning flight, Strzok wrote to Page, comparing the investigations of Clinton and Trump.
And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure that we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS. [Emphasis in original.]
This MATTERS. The Trump case was vital in a way the Clinton case was not. The Clinton case was a foregone conclusion. No matter how high the evidence piled, the Bureau, taking its cues from the White House and its directives from the Justice Department, would simply wave Clinton’s actions off on the nonsensical ground that she lacked criminal intent. The only way the FBI could damage its zealously guarded reputation was to make an obvious mistake, one that could be spun as the Bureau having blown the case—as opposed to the well-planned spin that Clinton was exonerated at the conclusion of a diligent, professional investigation. In stark contrast, the Trump investigation mattered because the restraints were off: if FBI agents could nail Trump, they would be permitted to nail him. Indeed, they were being encouraged to nail him because he was seen—by the hierarchy of the Bureau and the Justice Department, by the top echelon of the intelligence community, by the Obama White House—as unfit for office and potentially a threat to their institutions.
Understand that Strzok and Page were not outliers. They were upper echelon actors who accurately reflected the top-down ethos of their agency. Months later, when President Trump finally fired Comey, it emerged that the director had made careful notes of all his communications with Trump, even though he had never done so regarding discussions with President Obama. It was because of Trump’s “nature,” the former director later explained. He judged that an accurate aide-memoire was essential because of “the person I was interacting with” and the likelihood that Trump would lie about their conversations.1
These days, it seems as if the former FBI director is in a competition with the former CIA director over whose public commentary about the sitting president is most bracing. Comey publicly rebukes Trump as “morally unfit to be president,” even penning a New York Times op-ed to explain how “Trump eats your soul in small bites.”2 I have known, worked with, liked, and admired Jim Comey for thirty years. I’d also note, however, that unlike the Trump appointees he has recently taken to stinging in political commentary, he actually familiarized himself closely with Trump through several months of investigation before deciding he could work for the president. And through all the awful things he says Trump did and said, the director stayed on. He didn’t quit, he was fired.
The point here is not whether Comey’s insights about the president are right or wrong. Even Trump supporters realize the president often says things that are not true.
I support the president when I think he is right, and though I think that is most of the time on policy, I am often put off by the president’s manner. But on the subject of dishonesty, like most tepid Trump supporters, I note that Mrs. Clinton, the only viable alternative candidate on the ballot, is at least as infamous in that regard.
To my mind, the lowest moment of the Trump presidency thus far has been the day after terminating Comey, during which he insulted the former director for the consumption of Russian diplomats whom, for baffling reasons, Trump picked that moment to host at the White House. I said so at the time.3 Within days came the lowest moment of Comey’s distinguished career, his leaking to The New York Times of a government memo describing a confidential meeting he’d had with the president. Suffice it to say: these two guys loathe each other—and, predictably, they bring out the worst in each other.4
For present purposes, however, the point is that, while the Strzok and Page texts may shock us, they should not surprise us. The texts are startling because they reveal the usually exemplary FBI run amok with partisanship. By now, though, we are well aware that these messages—thousands of them, in real time, between very pluggedin officials—exhibit the culture of the Bureau’s upper echelon in the last years of an administration that was tirelessly political and that abhorred Donald Trump. There is nothing in their communications that suggests Strzok and Page felt a need to shield their attitudes from colleagues, and were using private texts to blow off steam. To the contrary, their messages portray a commonality of assumptions and emotions: frustration with the futility of MYE (the Clinton emails investigation); a sense of purpose in Crossfire Hurricane (the monitoring of Trump’s campaign).
By 2017, when the FBI’s behavior in the MYE case was being examined by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Page risibly told investigators that chats with “Pete” were an outlet for her from the oh-so-apolitical Bureau: “Because I was on the Clinton investigation, I actually felt extremely constrained from talking to anyone about politics at all,” she recalled, so texting her “good friend” was “like a safe place to sort of have a conversation about what was … the normal sort of news of the day because … we both knew that we weren’t, it wasn’t impacting anything that we were doing.”
That wasn’t quite how it went, though. To take just one notorious example, as Strzok prepared to interview Mrs. Clinton in early July 2016, Page explicitly warned him not to go into the session “loaded for bear” with a phalanx of agents and prosecutors who might convey the mis
impression that the FBI was anxious to make the case on her. “She might be our next president,” Page admonished, “You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi?” Page thought the advice was so urgent, and was so comfortable about its reflection of Bureau thinking, that immediately after texting Strzok, she texted another colleague who was advising Deputy Director McCabe, their boss:
Hey, if you have one opportunity to discuss further with andy, please convey the following: She might be our next president. The last thing we need is us going in there loaded for bear, when it is not operationally necessary. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more doj than fbi? This is as much about reputational protection as anything.
Was Page rebuked for infecting the FBI’s investigative preparations with political calculations? Perish the thought: “I’ll catch him [Mc-Cabe] before the morning briefing to give him this nugget,” her colleague assured.5
A month later, as the FBI formally commenced its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe, Page plaintively asked her paramour, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right?” “No. No he won’t,” Strzok replied, “We’ll stop it.” We’ll stop it—the “we” Strzok was talking about was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
This was all about political calculations. Most readers are understandably stunned by the blatantly political substance of exchanges between top Bureau officials. As someone who worked closely with the FBI, including its top hierarchy, for nearly twenty years, what strikes me is their nonchalance—how offhanded Bureau officials are about political considerations and preferences … at the same time that—any objective person would notice—they were both bending over backwards not to make a case on Hillary Clinton and scorching the earth—on two continents—to try to make a case against Donald Trump. And now, naturally, they’d like you to believe that their politics had nothing to do with their professional judgments.
The record is what it is.
Strzok and Page recount meetings about Trump in which colleagues shared their contempt for him and were unabashed about the imperative of stopping him—or at least containing the damage they were sure he would do if elected. Here are Strzok and Page on March 3, 2016—right as Donald Trump was emerging as the near certain nominee, right as these two officials were deeply enmeshed in a criminal investigation of Clinton in which she was proved to have willfully flouted her duty to safeguard national defense secrets and to have destroyed government records:
PAGE:
God trump is a loathsome human
STRZOK:
Omg an idiot.
PAGE:
He’s awful.
STRZOK:
God Hillary should win 100,000,000 - 0.
Again, bear in mind the level of this exchange. Page was the legal adviser to the deputy director who ran all FBI operations and was deeply enmeshed in the simultaneous Clinton and Trump probes. Strzok ran the probes hands-on, and was the Bureau’s top counterespionage investigator. “Trump is a disaster,” he warned on July 21. “I have no idea how destabilizing his Presidency would be.” Strzok found Trump supporters equally repulsive: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart,” he told Page on August 26. “I could SMELL the Trump support.” As they watched the final presidential debate on October 19, Strzok boiled: “I am riled up. Trump is a fucking idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.” As the polls tightened in the election run-up, Page wrote in anguish, “I’m scared for our organization,” while Strzok groused that third-party candidates were “F’ing everything up” by drawing support away from Clinton. On the eve of Election Day, reading a press report entitled, “A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible,” Strzok wrote, “OMG THIS IS F*CKING TERRIFYING.” After Trump won, Page’s thoughts turned straightaway to impeachment—she had just bought All the President’s Men, the famous Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein account of taking down Richard Nixon: “Figure I need to brush up on watergate.”
It is important to put this in perspective. Like every American, FBI agents are entitled to their political opinions. In fact, I’d say their opinions frequently deserve more respectful attention than the average person’s because they tend to be better informed and more community-minded—patriotism, fidelity to the Constitution, and service to their fellow citizens being ingrained in the FBI’s DNA. But FBI agents—and Justice Department lawyers, and intelligence agents—are not entitled to allow their political opinions to affect their work.
Many well-meaning people are willing to cut the FBI slack because they share the views the agents expressed about Trump. He ran against not only establishment Washington but the system’s norms. And while many of these need changing, most are prudential, particularly in the law-enforcement realm. But the problem is: one can be both right and wrong. One can be right on the merits about Donald Trump’s flaws, yet wrong about one’s place to address them. FBI agents are entitled to their opinions, like everyone else. Then they get to vote, like everyone else. And they must accept the nation’s verdict, like everyone else. They don’t get to use their awesome power and their agency’s hard-earned prestige to nudge the outcome in a particular direction, or to hem in the victor so that he is less than fully president, so that his hold on power won fair and square is partial, suspect, and short-lived.
Laying the Groundwork
Peter Strzok’s trip to London was months in the making.
As we’ve seen, from the time Donald Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, CIA Director Brennan was gathering information about Trump and his associates from foreign intelligence services. From the beginning of 2016, the Justice Department and the FBI were resuscitating investigations of Paul Manafort (involving his political consultancy for a pro-Putin Ukrainian party) and Carter Page (involving a prior effort by Russian intelligence operatives to recruit him as an asset).
At the start of February, the FBI gave Christopher Steele the admonishments (or instructions) routinely given to a confidential informant who will be doing work for the Bureau. Why? The government is not saying. We can surmise, though, that it had something to do with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate, Putin confidant, and Steele client.6 A few days after receiving FBI informant instructions, Steele emailed Bruce Ohr, his friend at the Justice Department, to note the “good news” that Deripaska had been granted an “official visa” to come to the United States—Steele’s emphasis on the word “official” suggesting satisfaction that the purpose of Deripaska’s travel was to meet with U.S. officials later that month. Steele implored Ohr to monitor the situation and keep him apprised if there were “complications.” A few days later, he again contacted Ohr, noting that there was soon to be a U.S. government interagency meeting about Deripaska. Steele hoped that Ohr would be in the loop, and vowed to circulate “some recent sensitive Orbis reporting” suggesting that the oligarch was not a “tool” of the Kremlin. Steele concluded that he and his company “reckon therefore that the forthcoming OVD [i.e., Oleg V. Deripaska] contact represents a good opportunity for the USG.”7
That’s the world according to Chris Steele: the real “tool” of the Kremlin is Donald Trump, while Oleg Deripaska—a.k.a Putin’s oligarch—is a potentially invaluable Western asset.
The New York Times has reported that Steele and Ohr were both involved in a 2016 effort to turn Deripaska into a government informant—an effort that appears to have foundered when the oligarch (who had apparently been keeping Putin informed of the U.S. government’s entreaties) told the FBI that their theories on organized crime and Trump–Russia collusion were off base.8 For present purposes, though, we can glean that Steele was already an official Bureau informant throughout the time he compiled his dossier (i.e., even before providing the Bureau with his first dossier reporting in early July). We can also surmise that, at the very same time Steele was writing his allegations of a traitorous Trump–Russia conspiracy, he was zealously encouraging the intelligence community to recruit as a source a Kremlin operative who was fai
thful to Putin and believed Steele’s collusion theory was absurd. Little wonder, as we’ll see, that State Department Russia analysts familiar with Steele’s private-eye work dismissed him as a shill.
In March, the FBI interviewed Carter Page. One ABC News report claims, based on “a government document” not further described, that the interview was “about contacts with Russian intelligence.” The implication is that the questioning was relevant to ongoing concerns about Trump campaign connections to the Kremlin, a theme that congressional Democrats echoed in the Schiff memo.9 Page himself maintains, however, that the contacts with Russian intelligence discussed in the meeting involved the contacts he’d had in 2013—in the case in which he cooperated with the FBI and federal prosecutors.10
The evidence points in Page’s favor. At the time of the interview, it appears that the Justice Department was getting ready for trial in the case of one of the Russian spies, Evgeny Buryakov. In the end, the trial did not happen because Buryakov pled guilty on March 11.11 Had there been a trial, though, Page was a likely witness, so a pretrial preparation session would have been routine. Moreover, contrary to the ABC report, which claims that “the FBI paid him a visit in New York,” Page says his interview took place at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and included not only FBI agents but the prosecutors on the Buryakov case. That would be standard procedure for a trial prep session. By contrast, the Trump–Russia investigation, even in its infancy, was highly classified—recall that the FBI would not even brief the congressional Gang of Eight on it because Director Comey and his advisers considered the matter “too sensitive.” Thus, it is inconceivable that Page would have been interviewed on the classified matter in a prosecutor’s office; the FBI would have held it in a facility secured for discussing top secret intelligence. In addition, there is no indication that Page believed he was under FBI suspicion in March 2016, or that anyone in the Trump campaign had an inkling—Page was named a Trump foreign policy adviser a couple of weeks after Buryakov’s guilty plea.
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