The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  Comey’s draft went to a few more people. Some readers noticed that the draft called Clinton “grossly negligent.” That was statutory language—the language you’d use to indict someone for mishandling classified information—and the statutory meaning did not match Comey’s intended meaning, which was simply to use the words the way ordinary people would to characterize an action in a nonlegal way. In a meeting involving five people, a lawyer on the Midyear team said “extremely careless” would more accurately describe the behavior Comey’s first draft had called “grossly negligent.” The lawyer’s argument was, If we’re saying we shouldn’t charge her, then you shouldn’t describe her using those charged words.

  That change, like the rest of the group’s edits to the draft at that meeting, was entered on Peter Strzok’s computer. More than a year later, I would learn—and six months after that, it would be widely reported—that during and after the investigation, Strzok had had an affair with another member of the Midyear team, Lisa Page, who, as the deputy director’s chief counsel, was my lawyer. The two conducted their relationship in secret, sending thousands of text messages to each other on their work phones. Some of their text messages expressed dread, shock, fear, and disgust concerning Donald Trump’s behavior during the presidential campaign. Although their personal views did not affect the investigation—I know that, because I was their boss—and this assessment has been corroborated by the inspector general’s Midyear investigation—the mere fact that the change from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” was typed on Strzok’s machine was used to eviscerate Strzok, Midyear, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. The suggestion was that Strzok tampered with Jim’s statement, that Strzok wanted to save Hillary Clinton from a felony charge and therefore took out the language consistent with a felony charge. As if this proved the fix was in.

  The truth is, it was Comey’s statement. The statement he delivered personally on July 5 at that podium in the William H. Webster Conference Room of the Hoover building was one he pored over a million times. There’s not a letter, not a comma, not a change of any kind to that document that Comey did not read, reread, ponder, weigh, and approve. Comey agreed with and approved the suggestion to change “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” He accepted the suggestion because it clarified his statement. Comey had drafted the statement to explain that no prosecutor would seek a charge based on the evidence we had. We knew that because we had looked at every single case that had ever been charged. Clinton’s conduct did not demand that a charge be sought. That was not an empty statement or a dramatic statement. It was a statement of fact. Meanwhile, the Midyear team still had one more interview to do, with Hillary Clinton herself.

  A month passed. Five days before the final interview, at the end of June, on a hundred-degree afternoon, two small planes were parked on the tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona. A man got off one of those planes, walked over to the other, and climbed the steps into the cabin. He met for half an hour with the woman inside. The man was Bill Clinton, the woman Loretta Lynch. The two had never met before. The conversation may have been completely innocent. Lynch and Clinton would both recall that they mostly talked about their grandchildren. Even granting that, the tarmac meeting was a horrible lapse in judgment by Loretta Lynch. She should have recused herself from Midyear at that point. She did not—she made things worse. Three days into the furor over the meeting, which had quickly become public, Lynch announced that she would accept the FBI’s recommendations in the Midyear case. On the same day, Lynch’s spokeswoman reasserted the attorney general’s authority over the final decision. Half-in, half-out, and all confused. That was the last straw for Comey.

  In the end, the Hillary Clinton interview revealed nothing new. It did not change the way we saw the strengths and weaknesses of the case. The Midyear team concluded formally that no charges should be pursued. Justice could not credibly announce that conclusion because its credibility had been compromised. On the morning of July 5, we invited the media to come in at eleven. We placed some courtesy calls to Justice and said we were making an announcement about the case but did not reveal the conclusion. Justice watched the statement on TV like everybody else. We did it that way for this reason: Comey wanted to stand up there and say, I have not coordinated this with the Department of Justice in any way. What I am giving you is the raw, pure FBI perspective—what we did, what we found, what we thought about this case.

  The Department of Justice was not happy. No one said thank you until the next day, when they came to appreciate what the FBI had done. We took all the risk and all the criticism for delivering the result we thought was fair and just. To do this, we leveraged the Bureau’s credibility, because by this point Justice had none. If we had it to do over again, would I want it done the same way? We do not have it to do over again. In the moment, we made the best decision we could with the facts and analysis and circumstances we had.

  We gambled heavily on Comey’s status as a great communicator. We had, and he had, considerable confidence in his ability to lay out the situation in a way that was convincing. We hoped people would listen with an open mind and that the general reaction would be one of understanding. Of course, that makes total sense: We believed in our own good intentions. We believed that the American people believed in us. The FBI is not political. The FBI did not pursue this investigation with any sort of political intention in mind. Our confidence in Comey’s ability to convince people that we had done the right thing turned out to be excessive. No question about that.

  Leading up to the speech, Comey and I had also talked about people in the Bureau who were not going to be happy about the approach he was taking—and how to communicate internally about the decision and help people understand. Afterward, there were a few people who talked to reporters. Or talked to other people who then talked to reporters. Or passed information to third parties such as Rudy Giuliani, if he can be believed; people who then spun rumors into full-blown conspiracy theories.

  I look back now and see how far the FBI was stretching, how completely we were leveraging our own credibility. Had I imagined how polarized and vicious the reaction to Comey’s statement would be—had I foreseen how his statement would erode the credibility of the FBI, and specifically that of the FBI director, in a way that could do long-term damage to the institution—I want to believe I would have assessed our chances for success very differently. Made different arguments. Listened differently. Had I thought this whole thing through more skeptically, had I been more resistant to Comey’s idea that he could make this statement in a way that connected with people both inside and outside the organization, had I made a more realistic appraisal of how many of those people would not have accepted anything short of seeing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs being dragged off to the Metropolitan Detention Center, then perhaps I would have said to Comey, Don’t do it. Let’s be the normal Bob Mueller, say-nothing FBI of old. Let’s stand there on the dais with them and say nothing, and let DOJ step into the spotlight and take the hit. I think that was an option—but I’m aware that I think this only in retrospect.

  After working the Benghazi cases, I of all people should have seen this coming. The Benghazi investigation—the seed that gave rise to the Clinton investigation in the first place—revealed the surreal extremes to which craven political posturing had gone. I should have thought more about that. Should not have seen it as an anomaly. Should have realized it was a microcosm of the new reality. Should have understood that whatever we concluded about Midyear was not going to be thoughtfully considered but rather ground to powder for political warfare.

  Or should I have known that? When is the right time to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with? When do you declare that the political process, or the press, no longer has the power to facilitate comprehension? When is the right time to act from skepticism and cynicism, rather than from faith in a society you have always believed in?

&
nbsp; The Other Shoe Drops

  Midyear ended. Midyear’s afterlife began. For the rest of our lifetimes, everyone involved will be asked questions about Midyear, the zombie apocalypse of counterintelligence cases. After Comey’s July 5 announcement, the Bureau was pounded by FOIAs and requests from Congress for more information—everyone wanted to know everything. Satisfying those requests, in addition to completing normal end-of-case housekeeping tasks, such as preparing a comprehensive letterhead memo describing everything we did on the case, took up the rest of the summer. At the same time, unfolding events called for our attention, too.

  In July, three days after the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its candidate and three days before the Democratic Party nominated Clinton as its candidate, WikiLeaks released more than nineteen thousand emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee, in a hack for which twelve intelligence officers of the Russian government would later be indicted. On the last day of that month, the FBI began investigating a variety of links between the Russian government (or people close to it) and Trump’s campaign. Also during this period, the FBI’s New York field office was pursuing an ongoing investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which in August provoked a confrontation with the Justice Department. In a phone call, the principal associate deputy attorney general expressed concern about FBI agents working on this investigation during the presidential election. The tone sounded a lot like pressure. I asked straight out, Are you telling me I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation? The answer was no. We all went back to work.

  September threw a wrench. The New York field office and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York opened a criminal investigation of a disgraced former congressman, Anthony Weiner, for transmitting obscene material to a minor, sexual exploitation of children, and activities related to child pornography. When the case agent obtained Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer and began searching for evidence on the devices, he realized that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime senior aide to Hillary Clinton, had also used the laptop, and that the laptop contained emails that might be relevant to the Clinton email investigation. New York’s assistant director in charge told me about the emails in late September. I spoke with counterintelligence about it the same day, and I understood that someone would go up to New York right away to put eyes on the situation—to figure out what we had, and what, if anything, we should do about it.

  The laptop was a find, but finding the laptop was not self-evidently a six-alarm situation. During Midyear, each of the many, many times we got a new tranche of emails, a first order of business was having them “de-duplicated”—that is, compared with the ones we already had to see what might be new. This time, we would do the same thing. I tasked the job of looking into this to the counterintelligence division, and I expected to receive reports as things developed. I mentioned it to Comey—maybe in person, maybe by phone, I don’t remember which—and I mentioned it to Justice; and the world turned. I hit the road for a couple of weeks of work trips. When I came back to the Hoover building, much was afoot. I’d been home for two days when the Bureau applied for and received a FISA warrant to surveil a subject in connection with the Russia investigation. This investigation into possible collusion between Russia and people associated with the Trump campaign had begun during the summer and was continually expanding. On the same day, FBI public affairs mentioned that The Wall Street Journal planned to run an article about Jill’s state senate campaign a year earlier and my involvement with Midyear. In an email, I mentioned it to Comey. The story was published on the Journal’s website on October 23 and in the print edition the next morning. It focused on large donations, totaling approximately six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars, that Jill received from the state Democratic Party and a political action committee controlled by Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe—donations that, the story insinuated, created a conflict of interest for me in Midyear because McAuliffe was a longtime friend and ally of, and fund-raiser for, the Clintons. The headline innuendo was not subtle: CLINTON ALLY AIDED CAMPAIGN OF FBI OFFICIAL’S WIFE.

  As noted, I had nothing to do with Jill’s campaign. And Jill’s campaign had nothing to do with the Clinton email investigation. The Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits certain kinds of political activity by federal employees. When Jill ran for state senate, as I’ve explained, I sought ethics advice and followed it, observed all of these prohibitions and more, avoiding even activities that might have been permitted. I was not aware of the donation reported by the Journal until I read about it in the newspaper. The donations were entirely lawful, reported as required, and consistent with similar donations to other candidates. And even if McAuliffe had wanted to curry favor with me on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, he would have had to be clairvoyant. Jill’s campaign was over—and she lost—in November 2015, months before I had any knowledge of, or involvement in, the Clinton case.

  Donald Trump immediately picked up on the story. First he tweeted it. Then, in a Florida campaign rally that same day, he built the innuendo into a full-blown conspiracy theory. Yelling and waving his arms, he touted “shocking new revelations which you’ve seen—front page of The Wall Street Journal—about how the Clinton campaign has corrupted our government.” He said that Hillary Clinton knew about the money—which the article did not assert, and which no evidence suggests. Trump’s speech was not a misinterpretation of the article. It was a fabrication. His hatred was palpable. The crowd’s angry response was chilling.

  But a lot was happening that day. George Toscas, in the National Security Division, told me that the Weiner laptop had still not been searched, because the legal authority to read the emails had not been arranged. The search warrant in the Weiner case allowed searches for images of child pornography, but opinion was divided as to whether that warrant also gave us the right to look at the Clinton emails. The New York field office and prosecutors briefed most of the Midyear team on what limited information concerning those messages they could legally view—the number of messages and the range of dates that might potentially be covered. The day after that, October 26, when the team briefed me on this, it seemed clear that we had to get a warrant. Obtaining a warrant would change the status of the Midyear case. It would mean that Midyear wasn’t closed—it was still open. It would mean the FBI was still investigating Hillary Clinton. Before sunrise the next day, as I got ready to leave town to visit family, I emailed Comey to say the Midyear team had to brief him on an important issue.

  When they did, Comey decided to seek the warrant and ultimately to notify Congress. I was not present for that meeting. When Comey and I spoke by phone after the meeting was finished, he said, I don’t need you to weigh in on this decision. I already know what I’m going to do. It’s going to be easier to keep you out of it, because it avoids putting you in the position of having to answer any questions about it. I later learned that Comey was uncomfortable with the insinuations of impropriety that had been stirred up by the Journal article.

  He was about to steer the FBI into the boiling rapids of one of the most acrimonious presidential campaigns in American history. The next day, in his October 28 letter to FBI employees explaining his decision, Comey wrote, “Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”

  Responsibility and Risk

  I think it was a mistake to send that letter. I did not believe we knew enough about what we had to make any kind of statement to anyone about it. I believed that we should get the warrant and review the material to see whether there was anything new in there. Or at least figure out how long it would take to review, or even just de-duplicate, these hundreds of thousands of emails. Taking that level of action, in my view, would not have violated the assurance the FBI had given
the Hill that the investigation was finished and that we would let them know if anything changed.

  I know Jim saw it differently. Later, he publicly stated that it would have been more dangerous to keep silent, but I disagree. My way would have taken on a fair degree of risk to the organization. Taking the aerial view: Sometimes the riskier choice is the more responsible one.

  Had I been in his shoes, I think I would have taken that chance. People have criticized him by saying that he was more concerned with his own reputation than the reputation of the organization. I do not know that to be the case. But I do believe it weighed heavily on him that he thought he might be perceived as taking action that was inconsistent with what he told the Hill and the American people—that the investigation was concluded. He has said he felt he had a choice between going through a door marked “Terrible” and a door marked “Even Worse” to explain why he chose Terrible. That makes sense to me. I understand how he viewed the situation at the time and how he made his decision.

  That weekend The Wall Street Journal prepared to publish another article about the FBI. This one alleged an intersection between the Clinton Foundation case and Midyear. As with the previous story, I kept Comey and his chief of staff in the loop as this story developed. Published under the headline FBI IN INTERNAL FEUD OVER HILLARY CLINTON PROBE, this article, like the previous week’s, strongly implied that the FBI gave Hillary Clinton preferential treatment and also implied that I was responsible for this. No facts supported that hypothesis. And my attempts, with help from colleagues in my office, to provide the Journal reporter with facts for the story had not succeeded in changing its tone. We had even told the Journal about my telephone confrontation with the official at Justice the previous August, but the reporter supplemented that, perhaps for reasons of “balance,” with false information—about an episode in which I supposedly told agents on the Clinton Foundation case to stand down. That incident never occurred.