As the primary crawled along in 2016, Weiner and the teenager continued to talk. The girl asked Weiner what he would do if she was eighteen. Weiner replied with a sexually explicit remark.
By March, contacts between Weiner and the girl had stopped. But evidence of their communications remained stored in the smartphones and other electronic devices they had used to chat with each other. What no one knew at the time was how those text messages would alter Clinton’s fate, Comey’s career, the FBI’s reputation, and the arc of American history.
★ ★ ★
LATE JUNE 2016
SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
THE COMEY HOME, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA—For the first two years of Jim’s tenure as FBI director, he and Patrice Comey lived apart. During the week, Jim stayed in “dad’s bachelor pad”—or “Meadowlands” as the FBI code-named it—a modest, two-story 1950s-era house in McLean, Virginia, with a large kitchen, a small, cozy living room, and four bedrooms upstairs. On the weekends, Jim would fly home to Connecticut, where Patrice had stayed in their hulking seven-bedroom house, with a sprawling backyard, a pool, and a hot tub, as their children finished high school. In 2015, Patrice moved down to live with Jim full-time and they fell into a pattern for spending time together. During the week, they usually had a glass of wine after work (pinot noir in colder weather, sauvignon blanc in the summer). On the weekends, the routine doubled—coffee in the morning (half-and-half and no sugar for both), and then a glass of wine at night. Jim and Patrice usually sat in rocking chairs on the back porch. If the weather was bad, they would sit together and talk in the living room with a flick-on fireplace just inside the front door. The living room had a dull-looking gray rug, but Patrice had moved in a red loveseat and comfy lounge chair with a white and red floral print to brighten the room.
Their conversations typically centered on one of three topics: their kids, their jobs, and their role as foster parents. With Patrice taking the lead, the Comeys specialized in caring for premature babies, who, because of the trauma of being separated from their birth mothers, constantly need to be held to prevent developmental issues. When the Comeys first welcomed a new baby from a local nursery or neonatal unit, Patrice would put her own life on pause and devote herself entirely to holding and caring for the child for weeks or months until the baby was placed with adoptive parents. At night, the babies would sleep on her chest.
When Jim talked about work, he observed the bright line that separated the most sensitive parts of his job from the rest of his life. It’s hard to bifurcate one’s life, and have whole swaths of your experience that are off-limits to those you love most. But that’s the way it is when you have the kind of job that Jim Comey had. And so when he and Patrice would relax and catch up at the end of the long days, Jim almost always focused on the softer sides of his job, not the ins and outs of high-profile investigations or navigating the complicated politics of the bureau, the Department of Justice, and the White House. He loved to tell stories of how each week he would call FBI employees across the country to give them attaboys.
“It’s the director calling,” he would say earnestly to start those calls. Often, the employees on the other end of the line thought they were being pranked and would hang up. Jim would then have to call back and say, “No, really, it’s the director. I want to tell you what a great job you’re doing.”
The calls might have felt a bit faux folksy. But they were among dozens of ways that Jim changed things around when he took over the bureau as director. Despite receiving significant blame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI had largely regained the public’s trust. Yet on the inside, it was in bad shape. Not only was morale low and its relationship with Capitol Hill fraying, but the bureau’s headquarters—the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue—was actually falling apart. Days after Comey was sworn in as director in 2013, an employee brought him a piece of the building’s yellowed concrete exterior that had fallen off and plunged to the sidewalk.
Telling Comey that the building was literally disintegrating, the employee presented him with the concrete piece, on which he had written in blue felt-tip pen “Director.” Jim had noticed a netting that surrounded the top of the FBI building, believing it was some sort of security protection. No, the employee said: The netting was actually there to stop pieces of the building that broke off from braining passersby.
“The net was there to protect the public from us, not the reverse,” Jim later said.
Over those glasses of wine, Jim never brought up the Clinton email investigation, and Patrice knew not to ask, even as she could see in the media that pressure was building on the FBI and her husband. In his three decades working in law enforcement, without mentioning a word to her, Jim had indicted celebrities and gangsters, signed off on controversial government surveillance programs designed to catch terrorists, and deployed FBI agents on clandestine missions. Even when he had a showdown a decade earlier with Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush over a constitutionally dubious eavesdropping tool, and threatened to resign, he said little to his wife. This forced Patrice to go around Jim to his security detail to piece together clues about what her own husband was dealing with as he confronted a crisis in his career.
Despite avoiding the topic of the Clinton investigation, both Jim and Patrice were closely watching it unfold under the same roof but from vastly different vantage points, demonstrating their divergent views of politics. To her, politics was a good thing, a means to promote social progress. A lifelong Democrat, Patrice followed the news of the investigation through the lens of an enthusiastic partisan, rooting for the election of the first woman president. She admired Clinton and hoped that the Democratic candidate would soon be cleared by the investigation and on her way to the White House.
By contrast, to Jim, politics was a danger that could infect anything it touched. He had been paying significant attention to the Clinton probe, receiving briefs on its progress more than any other in his time at the bureau. But unlike his wife, Jim had studiously avoided any personal, political view of any investigation, especially this one. This was in keeping with his almost obsessive efforts since becoming director to put distance between himself and partisan politics. If the bureau’s mission was to follow the facts regardless of politics, then the director needed to take extraordinary steps to embody that ethos. Jim had decided that while he ran the FBI, he would not vote. His concerns about any perception of politics influencing his impartial role atop the bureau ran so deep that Jim—who at six feet eight would have been a strong rebounder—refused to even entertain the idea of playing in Obama’s weekend pickup basketball game, which was often held at the gym in the basement of FBI headquarters. In Jim’s mind, simply shooting hoops with the president could be viewed as a conflict of interest, undercutting the arm’s-length distance between the bureau and the White House that he believed was absolutely crucial to maintain.
Every other week during the investigation, the agents and analysts leading the effort sat down with the director in his conference room and briefed him on the status of their work. By the spring of 2016, this investigative team reported to Comey that unless something changed drastically, it was unlikely the bureau would have enough evidence to charge Clinton with a crime.
Charging a crime is hard enough when facts, motive, and intent are all in alignment and easy to discern, with no vagaries and no controversy. But this investigation came with another complicating factor: It was already highly controversial, because Clinton’s use of a personal email account had become a scandal in the media, and she was going to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. To make a case, the bureau would need to clear an incredibly high bar. Investigators had to answer one main question: Had Clinton been so careless with classified information through her use of a personal email account that she endangered national security?
To do that, they would
have to first prove that she had indeed discussed classified matters on her email account. And then they would need to show that she had done it knowingly, essentially declaring to her aides something outlandish: I know that I should not be discussing these classified matters on my personal email account, but I want to do this anyway.
The FBI had found more than one hundred instances in which Clinton had received or discussed classified information on the account. But the bureau had no evidence that she had done so for any other reason than she simply did not realize she was sending and receiving classified information. The practice might have been malignant, but the intent was benign.
Another major factor stood in the way of making a case. In 2015, the FBI had found that while he was CIA director, David H. Petraeus, a retired four-star general, had taken classified information home with him, provided it to a lover, and then lied to the FBI about it. Despite protests from Comey that Petraeus should plead guilty to a felony, Attorney General Eric Holder had allowed Petraeus to accept a misdemeanor, essentially a glorified slap on the wrist. If Petraeus’s conduct was far worse than Clinton’s—and Petraeus was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor—making a felony case against Clinton, a major-party candidate for president, would be all but impossible.
By that June, a year after the investigation began, it was coming to an end, and Jim faced a critical decision about how to proceed. For a director who had developed the habit of explaining privileged decision making about sensitive investigations to the public, the conclusion of the Clinton email investigation could not have come at a more perilous time.
The way Jim thought about this decision was also linked to his growing sense that something serious was ailing the country. He had been FBI director for three years, after being out of government for nearly a decade. Upon his return to Washington, Jim could see that partisan politics had turned so toxic that the parties were dividing not just into separate camps but into separate realities.
He saw it as a virus spreading in the country that was eating away at the truth and infecting even national security and law enforcement decisions with politics. When he went up to Capitol Hill for hearings, right-wing Republicans asked all sorts of questions about issues based on conspiracy theories that had nothing to do with the major national security threats the country faced. The mainstream media paid little attention to these rantings, but these narratives found a home on Fox News, Breitbart News Network, and elsewhere in the conservative media world, where the lawmakers pushing the conspiracy theories were treated as credible and given the platform to reach millions of people with false information that warped their views and programmed their politics. No matter the topic, there was a single theme that drove this rhetoric: The government was a corrupt institution. Instead of advancing the interests of the people, it was actually out to hurt them.
Jim saw a similar, but less virulent, strain of this phenomenon on the Left: Democrats were also capable of disregarding facts when the evidence contradicted their own preferred narratives. Most strikingly, during the Clinton email investigation Comey was scheduled to meet with members of the news media for an on-the-record question-and-answer session. Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew that he would almost certainly be asked about the Clinton investigation, which had been widely reported on at the time. They agreed that he would have to acknowledge the existence of the investigation. But Lynch insisted that Comey refer to it only as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” When Comey heard Lynch say that, a strange tingling sensation shot up through his neck. The bureau had a full blown criminal investigation underway. But the Clinton campaign had made up a false narrative that the FBI was not actually conducting an investigation but was doing a “routine security review.” He was also troubled by how he believed the Obama administration, hellbent on emptying Guantanamo Bay of enemy combatants, inappropriately pressed the intelligence community to water down the assessments of whether the combatants would pose any threat if released.
“I witnessed brow-beating and shaming of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel for his reluctance to clear people for transfer,” Jim said to me. “To his credit, he stood tall, but they hated him for it and he left as a result.”
In such a toxic atmosphere, in the heart of an election year, how could the FBI bring an end to such a fraught investigation in a way that gave the public confidence that a Justice Department, controlled by a Democratic administration, had made a decision based on the facts and not politics?
Making matters worse in Comey’s mind, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama had said and done things during the investigation that he worried had already created an impression that the fix was in to protect Clinton.
Given this state of affairs, in Comey’s mind it was unlikely that Republicans would accept that Democratic political appointees running the Justice Department would have conducted an investigation into their own party’s presidential nominee fairly and without political bias.
No FBI director had ever been in the position of closing a highly public—and exceedingly politicized—investigation into the nominee of a major party just months before a presidential election. Comey and his deputies began throwing around ideas on how they could bring the investigation to an end. The traditional ways—like saying nothing or putting out a short statement and leaving it at that—likely wouldn’t suffice because of the attention the investigation had received, the strong feelings it had engendered, and the fact that Clinton was highly likely to be the next president.
By the book, the public wasn’t entitled to know the machinations of this particular investigation, any more than they were entitled to know the inner workings of any investigation. But because of the politics involved and the high stakes, there was a strong expectation that the outcome of the investigation would indeed be aired publicly.
Comey’s deputies started discussing with the Department of Justice how they might best proceed, and the department indicated that Comey’s public credibility might be the best tool they had at their disposal for maintaining both the actual independence of the investigation’s findings and the appearance of independence to the public. Through the spring of 2016, as those talks progressed, Comey came up with a radical idea, and in a small meeting in April with his closest aides in his conference room he put it on the table: What if he, alone, went out to the lectern and, without telling his bosses at the Justice Department, told the world about why they were closing the investigation without charges? Trust is the coin of the realm, and if the bureau didn’t get out in front of this issue, control it as much as it could be controlled, half the country would believe that the fix had always been in, and the credibility of the FBI would take yet another hit. The idea was to kill the potential problem with the facts.
That was Comey’s thinking, anyway. His top aides initially disagreed. Sitting to Comey’s right at the meeting was the deputy director, Andrew McCabe.
Oh, my God, McCabe thought. We don’t do that. That is not what we do. He looked at Comey and shook his head. “Ooofff, I don’t know, that seems like really putting us out there,” McCabe said.
McCabe reminded Comey that speaking publicly on the case deviated sharply from the bureau’s past practices, in which it rarely, if ever, discussed the findings of a case that resulted in no charges.
“That’s really abandoning tradition and practice and could set a bad precedent,” McCabe said. “I don’t know that there’s a specific policy about that, but that’s not who we are most of the time.”
But Comey’s idea seemed to take on its own momentum.
In the weeks that followed, he discussed it with a close friend who worked for the Justice Department, to gauge his reaction. Comey told the confidant, Only I have the credibility to do this. Comey said that among his peers in government, he viewed himself as the only one who had the stature, skills, and impartiality to ensure that the results of this investigation w
ould be seen as legitimate to such a balkanized American public.
He could feel it in his body, he said. He knew that this decision would be the most consequential and scrutinized of his life. He would be injecting himself into a presidential election and in the process mortgaging the FBI’s credibility. He was sure of what he wanted to do. But he needed to hear from someone who was willing to tell him that his idea was crazy and could see problems that he had failed to consider.
That person was Patrice.
She’ll just fricking tell me, he told himself. I never have to worry with her that she’s holding something back because I’m important or because I’m whatever. She doesn’t give a rip.
It was over one of their glasses of wine in late June 2016 that Jim for the first time broached the subject of the investigation with her. He laid out how, in the final act of the investigation, agents were scheduled that coming Saturday to interview Clinton at FBI headquarters.
“Basically, if she doesn’t lie and just tells the truth and admits to the things we know, she won’t be charged,” Jim told her.
It was the first Patrice had heard from him about how the investigation was likely to end. In the year since the investigation began, Donald Trump had emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Trump’s rise baffled Patrice, but she did not see him as a serious threat to Clinton. Nevertheless, lifting the cloud of the investigation would ensure an even clearer path for Clinton to defeat Trump.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 5
