by Luke Harding
Previously, the FBI’s 35,000-odd employees tended to avoid politics. They packed their sandwiches each day and went to work—field agents, intelligence analysts, support staff. A large majority were Republicans. (Indeed, the FBI’s New York field office hated Clinton with a “white-hot passion,” I was told.) Trump’s apparent connections with Moscow meant that politics was now unavoidable.
The situation in which the agents found themselves was confounding and unprecedented.
The question being asked inside the FBI was a troubling one: Was the president of the United States a patriot? Increasingly, the answer was no. “Trump’s priority is to take care of his personal interests. These may not align with the interests of the country,” the source said, adding: “Russia is a point of great sensitivity.”
The source continued: “Most [intelligence community] people haven’t seen a president like that. They frequently have ones they disagree with on policy. They don’t fundamentally question whether they are patriots.”
The man who had to steer the agency through this period of turmoil was James B. Comey, FBI chief since September 2013. Comey was, by inclination, a Republican. He had donated to the presidential campaigns of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Comey was also an accomplished lawyer, a former terrorism prosecutor, and a former deputy attorney general.
It was in this last role that Comey had faced down George W. Bush, in one of the most extraordinary moments of Bush’s presidency. Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, had sought the Department of Justice’s approval for their top-secret program of domestic surveillance: spying on Americans. They had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to renew it. He had refused. Ashcroft was in the hospital and dangerously ill.
A delegation from the White House went to Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to persuade him to change his mind. Comey got there first. Ashcroft held firm. The White House was furious. When Bush reauthorized the program anyway, Comey wrote a letter of resignation. He quoted what he’d said at his confirmation hearing, when asked what he would do if faced with an “apocalyptic situation.” (That meant a course of action Comey believed to be “fundamentally wrong.”)
Comey told Bush: “I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about expediency. I don’t care about friendship. I care about doing the right thing.”
Next Comey met Bush in the Oval Office and informed him that then FBI director Bob Mueller was quitting, too. Bush was taken aback. He called in Mueller. Comey and Mueller left the White House together, sitting for a while and chatting in the backseat of their bulletproof vehicle. Bush climbed down. He amended some aspects of the surveillance program.
This 2004 drama made Comey’s reputation. It established him as someone willing to stand up to the executive branch—ready to defy even the president, if necessary. It showed that Comey could play the Washington game at the highest level. And that his loyalty was to the Justice Department and what he called “this great group behind me,” rather than to any individual politician. The episode turned him into a household name.
Comey’s method was interesting, too. His daily routines, as The New Yorker noted, were those of a clerk. Immediately after his meeting with Bush, Comey switched on his BlackBerry and sent an email of what had happened to six Justice Department colleagues. He left a contemporaneous trail. He understood the importance of creating a record. This made it harder for others to lie in future about contentious past events. It was done, too, one suspects, with an eye to history.
Now Comey was facing another apocalyptic situation. This was, if anything, trickier than the bedside dash of 2004. As a candidate, Trump had praised Comey’s decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. In October 2016 Trump told supporters at a campaign stop in Michigan it had taken “a lot of guts.” “I really disagreed with him [Comey]. I was not his fan. I tell you what, what he did, he brought back his reputation,” Trump said.
Two days after he took office, Trump saw Comey at a White House law enforcement reception. “Oh, there’s James! He’s become even more famous than me,” Trump said, as Comey advanced sheepishly across the Blue Room toward the president. Trump then attempted a man-hug. And whispered in Comey’s ear: “I really look forward to working with you.”
It was an awkward encounter: at six-foot-eight, the FBI director towered over his executive boss. (Comey later revealed that he’d tried to avoid Trump by blending into the curtains.)
In the meantime, the House Intelligence Committee summoned Comey and NSA chief Mike Rogers to give evidence. It was March 20, 2017. The two were star witnesses. Their testimony was keenly awaited. The committee was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Inevitably, though, the hearing would want to examine this: had Trump or his entourage colluded with the Russians?
In his opening remarks, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, summarized what was known and what wasn’t. Moscow, he said, had “blatantly interfered in our affairs.” It had done so “upon the direct instructions of its autocratic ruler Vladimir Putin.” Putin’s goal was to help Trump. Schiff said: “We will never know whether the Russian intervention was determinative in such a close election.”
He continued:
We do not yet know whether the Russians had the help of U.S. citizens, including people associated with the Trump campaign. Many of Trump’s campaign personnel, including the president himself, have ties to Russia and Russian interests. This is of course no crime. On the other hand, if the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it aided and abetted the Russians, it would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history.
Schiff cited the Steele dossier. He said that Steele “is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence.” There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence, he said—Page and his trips to Moscow; Manafort and the junking of armed support for Ukraine; Flynn’s multiple conversations with Ambassador Kislyak. It was possible, Schiff said, that all these events were unconnected.
It was equally possible that they were “not coincidental.” And: “that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere.” “We owe it to the country to find out,” Schiff said.
Up to this point, there had been no official confirmation of an FBI collusion investigation. Typically, the FBI would say nothing about an ongoing operation, especially if it involved classified and sensitive intelligence.
Now, though, Comey took the unusual step of making a public statement:
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.
As with any counterintelligence investigation, it would include “an assessment of whether any crimes were committed,” Comey said.
It had been assumed that this was the case. And yet confirmation made the FBI’s counterespionage probe an empirical fact, an un-fake event. The news—now flashing on TV screens, and punched out via text alerts—was a stunning rebuke of Trump, who had previously dismissed collusion claims as a ludicrous plot-cum-excuse by bad loser Democrats.
There were fresh details. The investigation, Comey said, began back in late July 2016, after the first DNC leak. It had been going for eight months. This was “a fairly short period of time.” The FBI’s work was “very complex.” There was no timetable for when it might conclude, Comey said.
The FBI director then delivered further unwelcome news to the White House. Trump had asserted that he was the victim of wiretapping—ordered by President Obama at Trump Tower in Manhattan and conducted by Britain’s GCHQ.
This claim had originated in…Moscow. A discredited former CIA analyst, Larry John
son, floated the conspiracy theory on RT. Johnson was a source for Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’s legal analyst. Napolitano went on the Fox & Friends show, saying that Obama had used the British to circumvent U.S. intelligence. From here, the zombie claim reached Trump. Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, cited the Fox report to back up the president’s claim.
The story, of course, was rubbish. It was an example of how a propaganda trope dreamed up by state TV in Moscow entered the global media echo chamber, where pro-Trump media and the alt-right seized on it. The lie then reached its ultimate destination: the president’s brain. It had become, by a process of RT-Fox alchemy, an alternative “fact.”
GCHQ was appalled. The eavesdropping agency was known for its silence. It normally refused to comment on intelligence matters. On this occasion GCHQ responded with a rare fuck-off. It called Napolitano’s claims “nonsense.” A spokesperson said of them: “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”
In the hearing, Schiff read aloud one of Trump’s tweets on the matter:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
Schiff asked Comey if this was true. The FBI director gave a deadpan reply: the bureau had no information that supported those tweets. The Justice Department shared this assessment, he said.
Then:
SCHIFF: Were you engaged in McCarthyism, Director Comey?
COMEY: I try very hard not to engage in any isms of any kind, including—including McCarthyism.
It was a smart reply, and one that brought laughter to the committee room. Trump, however, watching the proceedings on TV, may have seen this as a semi-humiliation. And an act of disloyalty. Sensing the exchange was going well, Schiff read out another Trump tweet:
How low has president Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon-Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
Comey admitted he was a kid during Watergate and had studied it quite a bit at school. Asked if Trump’s wild and inaccurate claims damaged relations with British intelligence, the United States’ closest partner, Rogers admitted: “I think it clearly frustrates a key ally of ours.”
What was at stake here was enormously serious—a break-in not by domestic burglars but by a foreign power using cyber means. The committee was bipartisan. Its leading Republicans, however, seemed less interested in examining collusion. Their focus, at this and other hearings, was on leaks. Who was leaking? How were reporters getting their information? What was the FBI doing about identifying the leakers and chucking them in jail?
This strategy—led here by Republicans Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy—was diversionary. The aim was to deflect attention from the president’s links with Russia and focus on the process instead. Gowdy was incensed by the sheer number of current and former U.S. officials talking to journalists—nine in one Washington Post article!
Back in the 1970s, Nixon and his allies were similarly incensed by leaks emerging in the first stages of the Watergate investigation. The leaker—the FBI’s Mark Felt—had disclosed information because he feared that attempts were being made to shut down the FBI’s inquiries and to maintain a cover-up. Was this happening again?
Comey and Rogers agreed that leaking was a “serious crime.” Both said under oath that they had never leaked restricted material. Leaks weren’t exactly new, though, Comey pointed out: “I read over the weekend something from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln complaining about them. But I do think in the last six weeks, couple of months, there’s been at least—apparently a lot of conversation about classified matters that’s ending up in the media.”
The two agency chiefs gave an accomplished performance. Comey was fluent, good-natured, likable. Nothing floored him. His answers amounted to: I am a man of integrity. Comey and Rogers, it seemed, enjoyed a healthy rapport. The FBI director was equally at ease in two worlds—the one of his own hermetic institution and the high-stakes public interrogation taking place before Congress.
It was left to Democrat Joe Heck to offer the big picture. He described the evidence as “terribly disturbing”—“that this was, in part, an inside job from U.S. persons.” There were “willing American accomplices or terribly naïve ones, or probably both—who helped the Russians attack our country and our democracy.”
Heck asked Comey why we should care if Russia used U.S. persons to destabilize “our democracy.”
Comey replied: “Well, like Admiral Rogers, I truly believe we are a shining city on a hill, to quote a great American. And one of the things we radiate to the world is the importance of our wonderful, often messy, but free and fair democratic system and the elections that undergird it.”
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Trump continued to brood on the FBI’s probe. That the matter continued to vex him was evident from his bitter public commentary. In April he told the Washington Examiner that the Russia story was a “faux story,” a hoax. Trump told Fox the same thing. The story was “phony,” he said, put about by his “embarrassed” political foes.
According to Politico, quoting two advisers, Trump was deeply frustrated about his inability to shut down the Russia story. He repeatedly demanded of aides why the investigation wouldn’t go away. He told them to speak out for him. Trump would even sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, an adviser said.
Phony wasn’t how Hillary Clinton saw it. In one of her first post-defeat appearances, speaking in New York, Clinton said she took “absolute personal responsibility” for her failure. Even so there were several factors that had made a difference, she said, including misogyny and “false equivalency” in the news media.
Two things above all had cost her the presidency, she said—the release of John Podesta’s hacked correspondence “an hour or two after the Access Hollywood tape was made public” and Comey’s October 28 letter saying he’d reopened the investigation into her private email server. Putin is not “a member of my fan club,” she said, calling Russian interference “unprecedented.” “There was a lot of funny business going on,” she added. This was undoubtedly true.
Meanwhile, Comey was preparing to testify again, this time before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was May 3 and an annual oversight hearing—and one that would inevitably be dominated by further questions about Russia.
Comey’s replies were those of a person enjoying his work. And of someone keen to continue. He began by quoting what John Adams, the country’s second president and a founding father, had written to Thomas Jefferson: power always thinks it has a great soul. The way to guard against abuse was accountability—“having people ask hard questions,” he told the committee.
“I know you look at me like I’m crazy for saying this about this job. I love this work. I love this job. And I love it because of the mission and the people I get to work with,” he said.
The hearing moved along now-familiar lines—with Republicans keen to chase down who was leaking. Comey was relaxed and authoritative. He batted away some questions by saying he couldn’t give an answer in an unclassified setting; he affirmed others with “sure.” A memorable exchange came when Comey was asked, by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others, why he had publicized his Clinton investigation.
Comey was forthcoming—if not entirely convincing. He claimed he’d faced an invidious choice between keeping silent (and facing accusations of cover-up) or telling Congress. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision,” he said. He insisted he’d treated the Clinton and Trump investigations the same way. He had revealed both only months after they’d begun.
On Trump-Russia, “we follow the evidence wherever it takes us,” Comey promised. But what if it led to the president? Comey said he had briefed the chair and ranking members of the committee as to which individuals were currently in the spotlight. “That’s as far as we’re going to go,” he told Democra
t Richard Blumenthal.
BLUMENTHAL: So, potentially, the president of the United States could be a target of your ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russian interference in our election, correct?
COMEY: I just worry—I don’t want to answer that—that—that seems to be unfair speculation. We will follow the evidence. We’ll try to find as much as we can and we’ll follow the evidence wherever it leads.
The Republican chair, Chuck Grassley, tossed in a couple of hostile questions on Steele: Did the FBI interact with him or pay him? Comey said he couldn’t answer “in this forum.”
Steele watched the hearing on TV from his home in Surrey. He had been back at work for some weeks. By arrangement, the Press Association had photographed and videoed Steele, now minus the beard, on the front steps of Orbis. Steele had given a quote of Politburo-like blandness: “I’d like to say a warm thank-you to everyone who sent me kind messages and support over the last few weeks.” He was now focusing on the “broader interests” of his company, he said.
Comey’s newest Senate hearing was a moment of worry for Steele: What might the director say? “The best-case scenario would have been for Comey to confirm the dossier. The worst for him to say something disobliging,” one friend told me. In the end, the outcome was “acceptably neutral,” the friend added.
The week beginning Monday, May 8, was the end of spring. Summer was coming. The days were getting lighter, brighter, and warmer. The mood in Washington was febrile. The city was spinning—the pace and sheer destructive tempo of the Trump presidency was exhausting for everyone. It was as if a thundercloud was about to burst.
The FBI’s investigation was gathering pace. In Alexandria, Virginia, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was busy. The first subpoenas were sent out to associates of Michael Flynn, according to CNN. A grand jury had been convened. A second federal grand jury, I was told, had been secretly assembled in the Southern District of New York in connection with Paul Manafort.
