I told him I had not seen that. I did not tell him what I in fact had seen: the Hoover building as a site of dejection. I said, Well, sir, I don’t know, I guess it’s possible, as I told you before, but most people seem shocked and surprised by what happened. They will rebound. We will move on. Right now people are just trying to figure things out.
Later, when I reviewed this exchange and this whole conversation in my memory, I would ask myself, Should I have been more confrontational? As absurd as this unfolding situation was, it’s hard to overstate the significance, for a career government employee, of having conversations with the president of the United States. Even when it’s Donald Trump, it is still President Trump. So the reflex, the automatic response I felt from the deepest part of myself, was to be respectful and responsive. At what point is it appropriate to answer the president with a flat no? At what point is it appropriate to say to the president, Your perception is disconnected from reality?
At the time, I felt—because he was pressing me aggressively to capitulate to the force of his opinion—that I was holding my ground simply by not waving a white flag and agreeing. Maybe I should have said outright: No, no, no—everything you want to believe is wrong. But I said what I said.
Among all his odd claims, one stood out as being especially dubious. He said, as he had said during our phone conversation earlier that day, We’ve had so many FBI people calling us, sending us messages to say they’re so glad the director is gone.
Who would do that? Who in the Bureau would send a message to the White House about something of this nature? It was not beyond the realm of the possible—there had been so many leaks in the months building up to this point. But for anyone in the Bureau to make or maintain contact with people in the White House would be unambiguously inappropriate—an absolute violation of the White House contacts policy. But the president kept saying it was happening.
Almost as a leading question, he said again that there was great dislike for Director Comey in the FBI, and he asked if I thought people were glad he was gone.
I said, Some people were frustrated with last summer’s outcome on the Clinton case—it’s possible that some of those people are glad. Other than that, I’ve seen no evidence that people are happy about the director being fired.
The president changed the subject. He said that he wanted to come to FBI headquarters to see people and excite them and show them how much he loves the FBI. He asked if I thought he should come. I said, Sir, you should come to the FBI whenever you want, you are always welcome. I was trying to think of a way to take some of the immediacy out of his proposal—to emphasize that we were just down the street, no need to hurry. He pressed me to answer whether I thought it was a good idea for him to come, and I said it was always a good idea to visit his people at the FBI. I was trying to communicate that the door was always open, so that he wouldn’t feel that he had to crash through it right away, because I knew what a disaster it could turn out to be if he wanted to come to the Hoover building in the near future. He pressed even further, asking specifically, Do you think it would be a good idea for me to come down now? I said, Sure.
He looked at Don McGahn, and I realized what was happening. They were trying to paint me into a corner. The president said, Don, what do you think? Do you think I should go down to the FBI and speak to the people?
McGahn was sitting in one of the wooden chairs to my right. Making eye contact with Trump, he said, in a very pat and very prepared way, If the acting director of the FBI is telling you he thinks it is a good idea for you to come visit the FBI, then you should do it. Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you’re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?
It was a bizarre performance.
In this moment, I felt something like I’d felt in 1998 when I sent Big Felix in to meet with Dimitri Gufield. The same kind of thing was happening again now, here, in the Oval Office. Dimitri needed Felix to endorse his protection scheme. This is a dangerous business, and it’s a bad neighborhood, and you know, if you want, I can protect you from that. If you want my protection. I can protect you. Do you want my protection? The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate. I’ll be your krysha. The president wanted to be able to come out of this meeting and say, The acting director of the FBI invited me to speak at headquarters. The president and those around him wanted me to endorse the story they planned to tell about Comey’s firing—even more, wanted me to tell their story for them.
The president and Don McGahn were both looking at me, the president’s question hanging in the air: Did I think it was a good idea for him to visit the FBI?
I said it would be fine. I had no real choice. This was not worth the ultimate sacrifice.
Moving on, the president doubled down on a favorite theme—how much the FBI people loved him and supported him. He again quantified his voting tally among the FBI workforce. He said, again, At least 80 percent of the FBI voted for me.
How could I, or anyone, possibly know that? The FBI does not take candidate preference polls. That would be prohibited. For almost all federal employees, it is also prohibited to ask subordinates whom they voted for. Then the president asked me, Who did you vote for?
No superior had posed such a question during my time in public life. Not sure how to answer, I dodged—gave a total nonanswer. An idiotic answer: told him I always played it right down the middle. I heard myself saying this, and I kicked myself—kicked hard—and I continue to kick myself about it.
He gave me a sideways look, a little nod, like, What was that?
The president went on to talk about logistics and timing, and whether it would be better to come and speak to the FBI on Thursday or Friday. Today was Wednesday. I pointed out that a speech in the outdoor courtyard of the building would hold the largest crowd. I also knew it was supposed to rain on Friday, which could cause logistical problems for an outdoor event and probably force it to be canceled. I did not mention those problems. We agreed the visit would take place on Friday. We decided that his staff would talk to our staff about coordinating a joint message. He said he wanted me to promote the visit internally as much as I could—he wanted a big crowd. Make sure that courtyard is full, he told me. Praying for rain, I shook his hand, and I was dismissed.
Back at the Hoover building, I told my assistant to reach out to the White House about the possible event, and I said that if it couldn’t work, that was fine with me. We conveyed to the White House all the things that needed to happen to arrange an immediate presidential speech at the FBI, and I think everybody involved decided it was more than anyone could do that week. The president soon had other things on his mind. North Korea conducted a missile test. There was fallout from his private Oval Office meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, in which he had disclosed classified information. And the president was still preoccupied with Jim Comey, warning in a tweet that Comey had better hope that “there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press”—probably an empty threat. For whatever reason, the visit to the FBI never happened.
Worldwide Threat
When I left the Oval Office, I went straight to a prep session at the Bureau. Jim Comey had been preparing for two weeks to testify at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Worldwide Threats Hearing—an annual event where the director of national intelligence and the heads of the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency share their assessments of the most urgent threats to U.S. national security and answer questions from senators about those threats. Preparation for the hearing typically involves a number of lengthy background sessions with staff and a review of hundreds of pages of briefing material; it also requires drafting an official statement for the record. This year the FBI’s investigation of interference by Russia into the conduct of American elections, both recent and future, would be foremost on many people’s minds. Even at this early stage, before th
e appointment of a special counsel, the evidence for Russian interference—widespread hacking of people and organizations; widespread manipulation of social media—was voluminous. And that’s just the evidence already known to the public. Even before the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security had jointly stated that they were “confident” that attempts to “interfere with the US election process” were being “directed” by the Russian government.
Ever since becoming acting director—in other words, for less than forty-eight hours—I had wondered whether I should cancel my participation in the Worldwide Threats Hearing or go ahead with it. In the end I decided that it was important to go. I believed I had to live up to every responsibility Comey had shouldered, every commitment he had made, in order, first, to send the right signal to the men and women of the Bureau, and, second, to send the right signal to everybody else. The message was that the FBI would miss nothing in this transition. There would be no dropped balls. We remained open for business.
So when I left the Oval Office, I went straight back to a prep session that night. I had been to a lot of these meetings for Comey and Mueller—when I was involved in the prepping. Usually I had been the guy sitting at the right hand of the director, listening to everyone else’s contributions and trying to distill it all into better formulations.
Chiming in when you have a shapely little idea, I quickly discovered, is very different from sitting at the head of the table while a dozen people to your right and left argue the pros and cons of issue after issue, firing ideas and comments at you nonstop—all of which you have to take in while also assessing how those answers will be interpreted and processed by members of Congress, the president, and the media. I had never fully appreciated the complexity of that task. After two and a half hours of this, my tank was full. I had to get some sleep.
Thursday morning I came in early. I did not go to the morning briefs. I sat alone in my office and tried to figure out what to say. I knew the senators would ask about morale at the FBI: some version of the questions the president had asked me three times now—questions about what was happening inside the Bureau, how the workforce had responded to Comey’s firing—and I had to have a ready answer. But I still did not know how to do that in a way that was both honest and deft. While considering how to navigate the obvious tensions, I decided that now was a moment when being direct was far more important than being deft. I called Jill, told her what I planned, and warned her to get ready for the reaction. I checked the decision with two other trusted associates, and then I got in the car to go to the Capitol.
Reporters yelled questions as I arrived at the hearing, and with the other intelligence heads I was herded into an anteroom. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, thanked me for coming. I sensed relief among the group that I had shown up, since there would likely be a lot of FBI-related questions. A staff member gave us the order of march. We filed through a darkened passage behind the dais where the senators sit, rounded the right corner, and arrived at the long table where all of us would sit, facing the committee members. The space between our table and the dais was packed with photographers, the low whirr of camera shutters clicking, and when we sat down and pulled our papers out of our bags, the cameras were right there, on the other side of the table, less than a foot from our faces. I had no idea where I was supposed to look, whether I was supposed to acknowledge the camera somehow—smiling would be wrong, that I knew—or to ignore everything and try to do what I would do if I were by myself, just sitting at a table. A small thing, but a notable moment of lack of preparation. Somebody should tell anybody who testifies at a committee meeting like this: Be ready for dozens of cameras right up in your face.
It was Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, who asked the question I had been expecting. He mentioned news reports that Director Comey had “lost the confidence of rank-and-file FBI employees.” He asked if, in my opinion, that was accurate. I said, “No, sir, that is not accurate. I can tell you, sir, that I worked very, very closely with Director Comey,” and I went on to answer the question—this time—without hesitation. I said, “I can tell you that I hold Director Comey in the absolute highest regard. I have the highest respect for his considerable abilities and his integrity, and it has been the greatest privilege and honor in my professional life to work with him. I can tell you also that Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does until this day. We are a large organization; we are 36,500 people across this country, across this globe. We have a diversity of opinions about many things, but I can confidently tell you that the majority—the vast majority of FBI employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”
It Wasn’t His Idea
One of the regularly scheduled meetings with the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and some of their staff fell on the next day, a Friday. In these meetings—to review the President’s Daily Brief materials—when the most senior participants had especially sensitive things to discuss among a smaller group, one of us would say, Can you stick around afterward? This routine briefing on May 12 was my first as acting director. After the meeting, I asked Rod Rosenstein if he could stay behind, so he did. It was just him and me.
I wanted to talk with him about the budding conflict between the FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Russia case. I was concerned that the committee’s requests to interview personnel and review materials were going to cause problems for our own investigation and future prospects for prosecution. I wanted to lay down some procedural ground rules. Among other things, I wanted the committee to agree that they wouldn’t talk to witnesses until after the FBI had interviewed them. I also wanted them to agree that they wouldn’t make recordings or recorded statements of witness testimony—too many people going over the same ground with witnesses can result in discrepancies and can often have the effect of muddying the facts rather than clarifying them. The FBI, the Justice Department, and congressional committees can work well together when the rules are understood and all parties act in good faith; the whole enterprise can fall apart in confusion if any element is out of whack. Because the terms I sought were prosecutorial equities, I felt the deputy should negotiate them on the Bureau’s behalf.
Immediately, Rod saw the need that I was pointing out, and he said, Yes, absolutely, you should refer all those questions to us. But I had come to this conversation wanting more than a specific answer to this one specific request. I wanted a broader affirmation that the Department of Justice would be more actively involved. My basic message was, I need you to protect the process here.
After speaking to those points, Rod shifted his gaze. As he leaned back in his chair, I could see that he was not looking directly at me. His eyes were focused on a point in space a few yards beyond and behind, toward the door. He was a little glassy-eyed. He started talking about the firing of Jim Comey. There was emotion in his voice. He was obviously upset.
He said he could not believe what had happened. He said he was shocked that the White House was making it look as if Jim’s firing had been his idea. He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing. Judging from later press accounts, Rod said much the same thing to others.
The jolt of this news, even in a week of constant jolts, was extreme. I could not believe what I was hearing. I did not know why he was telling me this. He seemed to be in such distress. I thought he simply did not know quite what to do. There was a long quiet moment. Then I said, Are you sleeping at night? No, he said, he was not getting much sleep. Is your family okay? I asked. He said there were news trucks in front of his house.
He was grasping for a way to describe the nature of his situation. The conversation involved a fair amount of silence. One remark stands out in my memory. He said, There’s no one that I can talk to about this. There’s no one here that I can trust.
He said that he had been thinking abou
t appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation. He asked for my thoughts about whether we needed a special counsel. I said I thought it would help the credibility of the investigation. He told me he thought of Jim Comey as not just a friend but also a mentor, someone he looked up to. This was hard for me to hear from the guy who had just fired my boss. And, incredibly, he then said, The one person I would like to talk to about this situation is Jim Comey.
I went back to my office in a state of—I am starting to wish that there were more synonyms for shock. I didn’t know how to think about what had just happened. I felt as if he had been asking me for advice, and I had not really given him advice. No substantive counsel. I thought about his isolation and the difficulties of his situation. I made an appointment to go back and see him that afternoon.
I returned to see Rosenstein by myself. I thanked him for seeing me. I told him that the decision to designate a special counsel was entirely his, and I said I didn’t think I’d given him the benefit of my best thoughts on the issue, and I would like to do that now, for whatever it was worth. This is the gist of what I said to him: I feel strongly that the investigation would be best served by having a special counsel. I’ve been thinking about the Clinton email case and how we got twisted in knots over how to announce a result that did not include bringing charges against anyone. Because the same thing might happen with the Russia case, it raises the question of how the FBI could possibly announce such a result to a world that has become so intensely focused on the question of collusion. Had we appointed a special counsel in the Clinton case to begin with, we might not be in the present situation. Director Comey would not have had to make the decisions he felt he had to make, which ultimately—according to your memo, Rod—led to his termination. I see a high likelihood of history repeating itself as we move forward. Unless or until you make the decision to appoint a special counsel, the FBI will be subjected to withering criticism from the Hill. The mere act of enduring that criticism could destroy the credibility of both the Justice Department and the FBI.
The Threat Page 24
