Though his manners were more informal than Mueller’s, Comey shared the previous director’s larger-than-life sense of rectitude. In their own times and their own ways, each had shown true courage in protecting the rule of law against the encroachment of politics. We all knew the story from 2004, during Comey’s time as deputy attorney general, when the White House tried to force Justice to sign off on a surveillance program despite the department’s concerns about legality and oversight. It was Comey who refused and held the line. He did so during a dramatic showdown in the hospital room where John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, was recovering from surgery.
In September 2013, when Comey took the helm at the Hoover building, many of us believed his uprightness and open mind could serve as antidotes to the poisonous atmosphere that had engulfed Capitol Hill in particular. We needed antidotes urgently. The town, and maybe soon the country, seemed to have gone halfway berserk. In Congress, almost no one seemed capable of hearing any story, or accepting any shred of information, that in any way departed from preexisting notions of what the truth was or of how things ought to be.
For law enforcement, a sufficiently fractured public conversation can pose a mortal threat. When a population loses any sense of a shared story—when each segment of a population believes that only its own perceptions are valid—then that population can become ungovernable.
“Part of the Solution”
I was the head of the Washington field office now, responsible for FBI operations not only in D.C. and northern Virginia but also in Central Asia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Through that spring and summer, ISIS occupied a lot of my energy. And we had a big spike in counterterrorism arrests: more in 2015 than in any year since 9/11.
In the beginning, the Clinton email case had nothing to do with my job. The case started for me the way it did for everyone else. I was just a guy reading the news. The New York Times, Tuesday, March 3, 2015: CLINTON USED PERSONAL EMAIL AT STATE DEPT., POSSIBLY BREAKING RULES. Next day, same newspaper: USING PRIVATE EMAIL, CLINTON THWARTED RECORDS REQUESTS.
Day by day, the story emerged in pieces. Hillary Clinton, during her four years as secretary of state, had never used a government email account, relying exclusively on her own private email account. This became public knowledge when the House Benghazi Committee contacted the State Department to ask for some of Clinton’s emails, and State found that it had no Clinton emails at all. That was a head-scratcher. The idea that Clinton would use a personal email account to do government business for any reason—she herself cited convenience—didn’t seem plausible.
But I did not spend much time thinking about Hillary Clinton that week. I spent a lot of time thinking about my wife and our future. I did not anticipate that anyone would ever think the first topic was related to the second.
On March 5, a giant snowstorm walloped Washington, unseasonably late, as Jill and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. We were in a hotel in Washington, watching the snow fly and talking about what we imagined our life might look like in another twenty years. Out of the blue, about ten days earlier, Jill had been asked if she would consider entering the race for one of Virginia’s forty state senate seats. At a stage of life when circumstances can seem very settled, the call was a reminder that life is full of possibilities.
The year before, in February 2014, Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, had paid a very public visit to the hospital where Jill worked. The next day, The Washington Post published a story about the visit. IN VA, FIGHT OVER MEDICAID EXPANSION CONTINUES, was the headline. The piece described McAuliffe’s push to expand access to medical care in our state. The Affordable Care Act had expanded Medicaid, the partnership between state and federal governments that provides health insurance to poor people, the elderly, and the disabled—and then the Supreme Court ruled that each state had to choose whether to participate in that Medicaid expansion. In Virginia, Medicaid expansion would have extended health-insurance coverage to four hundred thousand people who had none, but the Virginia General Assembly’s Republican majority blocked it. McAuliffe fought back. His visit to the hospital where Jill worked was part of a road trip of press events intended to persuade the public. As head of the hospital’s pediatric emergency room—where the impact of Medicaid expansion would be especially dramatic—Jill helped to show the governor around. A Post reporter covering the event asked for Jill’s professional opinion about Medicaid expansion, and her answer was so good—clear, precise, nonpartisan, persuasive—that it showed up as the story’s closer in the paper the next day. Jill’s main point was that regardless of the complicated politics of health-care reform—these are her words—“I think expanding care for the folks who need it has to be part of the solution.… I’m faced with patients every day who are struggling because they don’t have that access.” If Medicaid were expanded, she added, more patients could seek primary care, the emergency room would not be so crowded, and children would be healthier. “They’d be on medication to manage their asthma. They would have good preventative care. They would get their immunizations.… They would address their obesity. All of the epidemics that are coming along, primary care wants to try to address that.… But if they don’t have access, how are they going to get that taken care of?”
In the kitchen the next day, we read the story out loud as a family. It was the first time Jill had been quoted in a big-city newspaper. She blushed. The kids cheered: So cool! And that was that—or so we thought.
Twelve months later, in early February 2015, Governor McAuliffe, Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, and the Virginia Democratic Party were still working to expand Medicaid in our state. This was their number-one legislative goal, and to realize it they were developing a strategy to flip the state senate—focusing their efforts on a handful of districts, including the one where we lived. In the thirteenth district, our state senator was Dick Black. A staunch McAuliffe enemy, Black led the Republican effort to block Medicaid expansion in our state. Black is also known for his stances on many other issues, including abortion, which he has described as “a greater evil than segregation or slavery.” When Virginia’s General Assembly voted on bills relating to abortion, Dick Black handed out plastic fetuses to his colleagues. McAuliffe and the Democrats decided that their dream candidate for this district in the 2015 election would be the diametric opposite of Dick Black: a woman, preferably a medical professional. Their brainstorming process led them back to Jill’s quote in the 2014 Post story about the governor’s hospital visit.
When the lieutenant governor’s chief of staff asked Jill to consider running for the state senate in order to help expand Medicaid in Virginia, she was intrigued. I was in a work meeting when she emailed to say that she’d been invited to run. I thought she was joking, but I played along. Then came the next message: I said Yes.
She had not yet said yes, but she was interested, so she investigated the prospect. The first week of March, Jill met with a couple of state senators. She learned that, if elected, she would not have to give up her medical practice, since Virginia’s General Assembly is in session for no more than a month and a half per year. The next step, as Jill weighed her options—and the Democrats weighed whether they wanted her to run—would be for her to meet the governor. She wanted me to go with her.
If Jill wanted to run for office, my support for her would be as solid as hers had always been for me, since the day that I told her I wanted to join the FBI. If Jill wanted to run for office, I would also respect absolutely all legal and ethical limits that her service might place on my own. I called Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond field office, to tell him that Jill was considering running for office and to let him know that I would accompany Jill on her trip to Richmond to meet McAuliffe on Saturday, March 7.
Concerning any politician with the history and connections that McAuliffe has, I am always cautious. I certainly knew about his long and sometimes controversial career. But I had absolute faith in Jill. Sh
e would never compromise herself or do anything inappropriate. When we met with him at the governor’s mansion, McAuliffe told Jill he saw her as the best person to run against Dick Black and a potential leader of the fight to expand Medicaid. She acknowledged their agreement on that issue, and she asked how he might handle disagreements that might come up on other issues. McAuliffe said he would always expect her to vote her conscience. Jill’s interest was rising.
I was excited for her, but I could not help worrying about her, too. On the way home from Richmond, I remember saying, This is politics—you have to be prepared for people saying horrible things about you. How are you going to feel, to wake up in the morning and see despicable things in the newspapers or online? She said, I’m not going to be afraid of name-calling.
From the beginning, Jill had been clear that she would run only if the FBI leadership was satisfied that her campaign would create no problem for the Bureau or for my work there. Now that she was seriously interested in running, I made every effort to learn about the full range of implications her campaign might have. Over the next few days, I spoke with many people who provided guidance and encouragement, and who advised me on the requirements of laws and regulations that would allow me to avoid conflicts of interest. I spoke with, among others, Patrick Kelley, the assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance—the chief ethics officer; with my direct supervisor Mark Giuliano, deputy director of the FBI; with James Baker, general counsel of the FBI; and with Director Comey’s chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg, who spoke with Comey on my behalf and reported back to say the director had no concerns. No one said the campaign would be a bad idea. The day I talked to Rosenberg, I told Jill the FBI had no objections. Jill decided to run.
Delete, Delete, Delete
I removed myself from any involvement in cases that had anything to do with Virginia politicians. Jill’s campaign went into high gear when the summer began. To avoid any potential issues, I decided not to be involved in the campaign in any way. Instead, I spent practically all of my spare time working toward a big personal goal of my own: I trained for an Ironman triathlon. “Patience,” I wrote with a Sharpie on one of my forearms. “Discipline,” I wrote on the other. Leaning forward on my bike, in the aero position, with my forearms together, I looked down and saw those words, day after day.
During the summer and fall of 2015, in Washington, patience and discipline were countercultural values. The Benghazi investigations were spinning their wheels. The Clinton email story was gaining traction. Congress was riled. The intelligence community inspector general became concerned—had classified material spilled into Clinton’s private email server?—and referred the matter to the FBI for investigation. In July, the FBI opened a case to see if such a spill had occurred, and, if so, whether it occurred accidentally or on purpose.
Then, in September, I took a new job and headed back to headquarters as associate deputy director—the Bureau’s version of chief operating officer and chief financial officer combined—overseeing beans, bullets, buildings, computers, and people. The next month I finished the triathlon in a respectable time, and the month after that Jill lost the election for state senate. With both our races run, life at home started returning to normal—until three months later, when I switched jobs again, to the Bureau’s number-two position—deputy director. Among the many duties that were a part of my new job, I assumed oversight of the Clinton email investigation. Only then—three full months after Jill lost her election—did I gain substantive knowledge about that case. It was a headquarters “special”—I had learned that fact before it hit the news. Sometimes, for a particularly sensitive case, for reasons of discretion, the FBI runs its investigation out of headquarters instead of the relevant field office, to limit the numbers of eyes and ears and mouths involved. A case like that is called a special. The Bureau has run specials since the 1930s. Calling a case a special does not give the subject special treatment. It just means the case is handled in the one distinctive way I have described: from headquarters, not from a field office.
“Midyear Exam” was the code name of the case. I don’t know how the name was chosen, and it was an occasional source of confusion because the regular assessments of the fifty-six field offices were marked on my calendar as “Midyear Reviews.” The only worse code name would have been “Lunch.” The Midyear team took over a small room down in the center of SIOC. We called that room the Bubble, and the team worked there seven days a week for months and months. Midyear was a classic FBI muscling effort. The team muscled through mountains of data, including even mountains that had crumbled into the void.
The setup for Midyear was simple. As noted, the Benghazi committee had asked the State Department for Clinton’s emails. State quickly discovered that Clinton’s emails were kept on a private server. In order to comply with the committee’s request, Clinton’s staff downloaded her emails—some sixty thousand of them—onto a couple of laptops. Then the staff members performed the Sisyphean task that, in due course, drove America bonkers. The Midyear team called this task “the sort.”
The sort divided Clinton’s emails into two batches: personal emails here, work emails there. The two batches were roughly equal in size, about thirty thousand each. Personal emails were kept back. Work emails were sent to State to send on to the committee. Then the thirty thousand emails Clinton’s staff deemed personal were deleted—destroyed.
Those thirty thousand emails, by their absence, became an inescapable presence in American life. A mystery of mysteries, a terra incognita. The missing emails were a blank space on which many people projected dark fantasies about government secrets and illegal activity. From the week the missing emails became publicly known, those fantasies dominated all other news about Hillary Clinton. They still do.
Leaving fantasies aside, there were two basic aspects to the Midyear investigation: technological and human. On the technology side, the Midyear team had to review every work email that was saved and to recover or reconstruct as many of the deleted personal emails as possible, in order to find out which emails contained classified information. In the course of that search, the team had to reconstruct Clinton’s private computer network. The team did both of these things, in spectacularly meticulous feats of computer forensics and data recovery.
On the human side, the team had to assess the motives of scores of Clinton’s associates and correspondents—to evaluate the intentions behind their actions and determine whether these people meant to do anything illegal. The legal standard for a criminal charge involving the compromise of highly sensitive classified information is intent. If there is no criminal intent, there is no crime.
The tech side of the case revolved around Clinton’s private email server. That makes it sound like a little plastic box. But to call Clinton’s computer network a private server is an oversimplification. The network started as an old Apple computer in the basement of the Clintons’ house in Chappaqua, New York. The family’s computing needs quickly outstripped what that machine could provide. They replaced it, but before long found themselves again needing more capacity. The Clintons eventually outsourced responsibility for their computing situation to a server farm in Secaucus, New Jersey.
None of this was known at the beginning of the Midyear investigation. Painstakingly, the Midyear team pieced together the whole timeline of what constituted Clinton’s “private email server” at every moment from 2008 through March 2015. It seemed as if every time the investigators turned over another rock, they found yet another laptop that was used to fix or process or transfer Hillary Clinton’s data and yet another place where some of Clinton’s emails, which could have contained classified information, might have been.
And because there were persistent questions about the missing thirty thousand emails, the team had to shed light on every dark corner of that network—had to find every machine and thumb drive and phone, and do whatever it took to reconstruct every piece of gear that had ever been a part of that networ
k.
That was hard. But it was easy compared to other things the Midyear team did. When you press Send, the email that goes out no longer belongs only to you. It also belongs to the person you’ve sent it to. So if I come to you and say, I want to see all the emails in your account, and you say, I already deleted half of them, I can still retrieve those emails if I know which other accounts you were corresponding with. Clinton’s surviving emails provided a target list of her correspondents. So the team pulled email records from the time in question for every person on that list, searching for additional emails that had been thrown out—emails from the missing thirty thousand—and trying to slowly chip away at that number of the missing and amass a collection that would come close to the total number.
The most extreme feats of data recovery were barely distinguishable from magic. Clinton used one machine that was subsequently taken out of service and reformatted. But wiping emails from a machine does not make them go away. It just sweeps them into the so-called slack space of the server. The content of the emails is not lost. What is lost is the structure that organizes the emails into content that you can read. Imagine pulling the frame and the foundation out of a house, and everything inside that house falling into the pit where the basement used to be. Computer servers have a pit like that—the slack space. The team spent weeks and months analyzing the slack space of one particular server in an effort to piece together, word by word and letter by letter, emails that had been jumbled into this cyber pit full of other, unrelated code. I half wondered if we’d find an email from the California Brothers in there somewhere.
The Threat Page 18
