Resistance (At All Costs)

by Kimberley Strassel

  Even the haters know this. In his “America Is Slouching Toward Autocracy” piece, the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne warned voters not to trust that “checks, balances and other circuit-breakers” would stop Trump from “subverting basic freedoms.” Yet in the entirety of a piece devoted to Trump’s budding “autocracy,” here was the totality of Dionne’s complaint: Trump is too mean to the press and his opponents while too nice to foreign despots; Trump failed to release his taxes; Trump tells falsehoods; Trump fired Jim Comey. Dionne offers not one example of how any of this had destroyed democracy or government institutions. A lot of Americans (including, secretly, Democrats), in fact, agree that the canning of Jim Comey was the best thing that ever happened to the FBI.

  Trump’s efforts to rein in corrosive government is, if anything, a huge reason why so many former Never Trumpers have become more open to his presidency. In a March 2018 column in Politico titled “The Never Trump Delusion,” Rich Lowry—editor of the same National Review that had two years earlier run an issue against Trump—lightly scolded his “friends” on the Never Trump right who remain in “denial.” “A realistic attitude to Trump involves acknowledging both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia. By all means, criticize when he’s wrong, but don’t pretend he’s just going away, or that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP,” he wrote.

  Some former Never Trumpers have, in fact, become enormous defenders of the 45th president. Why? Partly because of Trump’s conservative achievements. More important, because they have become alarmed by the damage they do see happening to U.S. institutions and democracy: the damage inflicted by Trump haters in their zeal to bring down the president.

  While the Resistance traffics in false equivalence and meritless accusations against Trump, the evidence of their own wreckage is on full display. The Justice Department, the FBI, the federal judiciary, the bureaucracy, the Senate—all are littered with the debris of their scorched-earth campaigns against the president. And it could be a long time—if ever—before the country recovers.

  Chapter 3

  J. Edgar Comey

  How do you wreck an FBI? In the course of eighteen months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation went from one of the more trusted law enforcement institutions on the planet to a hollowed-out shell, its morale and reputation in shambles.

  Director Jim Comey: fired for insubordination. Deputy Director Andy McCabe: terminated for lying to investigators. Senior Counterintelligence Agent Peter Strzok: dismissed for partisan bias. General Counsel James Baker: reassigned and then out on resignation—part of a federal criminal leak investigation. These were just the highlights among a dozen senior FBI leaders who were fired or faded away. They included chief of staff James Rybicki; lawyer Lisa Page; the assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap; the head of the National Security Division, Michael Steinbach; the FBI’s top congressional liaison, Greg Brower; and the assistant director for public affairs (and 33-year FBI veteran), Michael Kortan.

  Support for the FBI meanwhile cratered—at least among the half of the country that leans right. These are the voters who most traditionally support law enforcement, but now view this vital American institution with skepticism or disdain. A May 2018 Rasmussen poll found that a full 72% of likely Republican voters thought it likely that senior federal law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to prevent Trump from winning the presidency.

  The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State in February 2018 asked Americans: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the FBI to do what is right?” A dismal 39% of Republicans felt the FBI could be trusted “most of the time” or “just about always,” and only 45% of independents. A full 54% of Republicans felt FBI agents were “biased against President Trump and his agenda.” Among Republicans aged forty-five or older—which McCourtney noted is “a generation…socialized to see the FBI as the epitome of American law enforcement”—the fear of FBI bias soared to 60%. The Institute noted that these findings of mass disillusionment were of “concern,” given that “in the past, the Justice Department and FBI have generally been recognized as the most independent of the cabinet agencies.”

  Trump opponents (including the McCourtney Institute) try to lay all this off on Trump himself. His relentless attacks on the FBI and former Special Counsel Bob Mueller, they say, have inspired Americans to view law enforcement in partisan terms. In fact, politicians who unfairly attack venerable American institutions usually get nothing but blowback. The only times their complaints find traction are when Americans understand that the institution deserves the criticism.

  And “wrong” doesn’t even adequately summarize the FBI’s behavior in 2016–17. Its leaders broke every rule, and also a sacred public trust.

  * * *

  Was it “partisanship” that drove Comey and his band of rogues to try to take down a presidency? There isn’t much evidence of that—at least not in the technical sense of that word. To be a “partisan” is to be a fervent supporter of a party or a person. It seems unlikely that Comey and Co.—many of whom were, in fact, Republicans—were moved to act because they disagreed with GOP tax and health care policies or were enamored with Hillary Clinton.

  Given what we know now, it’s far more likely that Jim Comey came down with one of the first—if at-that-time-undiagnosed—cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In hindsight, it’s clear the degree to which the FBI director from the start treated President Trump as a threat to law enforcement and the country. He helped engineer the public exposure of scandalous oppo-research on the campaign. He memorialized his conversations with the new commander in chief, with an eye to later leaking his one-sided judgments. He worked to entrap members of the new administration like former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. These aren’t the actions of a professional FBI director who is neutral as to the country’s choice of a president.

  After he was fired, Comey also made clear publicly the depth of his loathing for Trump—which surely existed from the start. In his book, A Higher Loyalty, he compares Trump to a Mafia boss, likens his presidency to a “forest fire,” accuses him of being “untethered to truth.” He has slammed Trump for lying about the Bureau “constantly,” and called on all Americans to mobilize to vote him out in 2020. He uses every press appearance, every tweet, to deride the president of the United States. It’s something nearing an obsession. The Obama CIA director, John Brennan, also unloaded on Trump after leaving office, accusing him of everything from “venality” to “moral turpitude” to “political corruption.” These Comey and Brennan statements reflect remarkably visceral levels of hate—ones that could not have come about overnight. Text messages between Strzok and Page more likely reflect the general sentiment about Trump within the DOJ and CIA leadership in the run-up to the election. They refer to him as an “idiot,” a “loathsome human,” “pathetic,” and a “do*che.” At one point Page asks for reassurance that Trump is “not ever going to become president, right?” Strzok responds: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

  Lots of Americans hated Trump. But Comey had two advantages over his fellow haters. The first: his own infamous self-regard. Over his decades in Washington, Comey had carefully cultivated a persona—that of the last guy in D.C. who believed in truth, justice, and the American way; the last guy willing to do the right thing. He’d dined out for years on his telling (and retelling and retelling) of the story of how as deputy attorney general he’d stood up to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney over one of their surveillance programs—threatening to quit (along with then–FBI Director Bob Mueller) if it did not end. As his book title—A Higher Loyalty—makes clear, at some point Comey began to believe his own baloney. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would astutely note that Comey’s problem was that he got in the business of judging “character” and “soul.” But “speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors,” said Rosenstein. “Generally, we base our opin
ions on eyewitness testimony.”

  This arrogance fueled a second Comey quality: a disregard for the rules. His prosecutorial record shows that when Comey couldn’t bring down his targets for the crimes of which they were accused, he’d twist the law or use abusive tactics to get them on a technicality. When Comey couldn’t nail Martha Stewart for insider trading, he jailed her for “lying.” When Comey couldn’t indict banker Frank Quattrone on financial crimes, he concocted a farcical “obstruction of justice” charge—later tossed out by a court. And Comey and Mueller would waste millions of dollars and pervert investigative techniques as part of their botched (and incorrect) investigation of Steven Hatfill on anthrax charges. On June 23, 2013, as Obama was receiving accolades for his decision to name Comey the new FBI director, we at the WSJ ran an editorial reprising these lowlights of his career and offering a warning: “America already had an FBI director who thought he was accountable to no political master and ruined many lives. There’s a building named after him in Washington, D.C., but one such director is more than enough.”

  It took only three years on that all-powerful FBI job for Comey to move beyond restraint. It was July 2016, when the FBI director jumped the Justice Department chain of command, and took it upon himself to decide and announce that there would be no charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The Justice Department inspector general would later describe Comey’s decision to place himself above his bosses as rank “insubordination.”

  Enter Candidate Trump in the spring of 2016. He didn’t know it, but he faced an FBI director who despised him and who believed himself above the rules that govern mere mortals. And just how many of those rules did the FBI break in the 2016 campaign year? Countless.

  * * *

  Let’s start with a basic rule: The Department of Justice has strict guidelines about engaging in political activities. A 2012 memo issued by no less than Obama Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated these long-standing principles. Titled “Election Year Sensitivities,” Mr. Holder reminded employees that while the department has a “strong interest” in the prosecution of crimes, it must be “particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship. Simply put, politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges.” While the memo did not mention it specifically, it also served as a reminder of the Justice Department’s informal policy of avoiding DOJ action in the sixty days preceding an election.

  By any standard, the Comey probes into Clinton and Trump blew these rules all to hell. The FBI arguably couldn’t avoid looking into the Clinton server mess, given the inspector general of the intelligence community referred it to the Bureau in 2015, citing concerns that Clinton had mishandled classified information. Comey’s team in fairness also sought to complete that investigation before the Democratic nomination convention in 2016. But Comey’s decision to publicly chastise Clinton—putting the FBI in the position of morally judging a putative nominee for the presidency—and his subsequent decision to publicly reopen that Clinton investigation just before Election Day, broke all DOJ rules.

  As for its handling of the Trump-Russia collusion case, the FBI’s actions were “political” from Day One. And Day One—contrary to the FBI’s telling—looks to be very early in 2016. It was late March 2016 when the Trump campaign announced its foreign policy advisory team. Trump was under fire for not having a brain trust, and the list included names few had ever heard before—among them a former investment banker named Carter Page and an energy consultant named George Papadopoulos. Days later, the Trump campaign announced it had brought on board veteran GOP strategist and lobbyist Paul Manafort, to help corral delegates.

  The FBI’s ears perked up. Both Page and Manafort had been on the Bureau’s radar before. Page had worked for Merrill Lynch in Russia and in 2013 had been targeted by Russian intelligence for possible recruitment. But the FBI never accused Page of wrongdoing, and Page assisted with the FBI’s efforts to take down the Russian agents. The FBI reportedly had also been looking at Manafort, who at one point worked on behalf of the Ukrainian ruling party.

  This is the point at which the FBI first stepped off its rails. When the Bureau fears a political leader or campaign has a security risk, it has a standard protocol: It offers a defensive briefing. That’s exactly what it did, for instance, in 2013, when it became alarmed that a staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s California office had been targeted by Chinese intelligence. Feinstein immediately got rid of the staffer and would later insist he never had access to any “sensitive information.”

  The FBI had even better reasons to offer a defensive briefing in Trump’s case. Page and Manafort had only just joined the campaign and had no real ties to the candidate. Page in particular was serving on an unpaid basis and in a role far removed from central decision making. The Trump campaign, while somewhat disorganized, also had two obvious advisers to whom the FBI could have taken its concerns. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani were former U.S. attorneys in the Department of Justice. Finally, the FBI—in light of those Justice Department guidelines to be “sensitive” to political matters—had good cause to handle the situation straightforwardly, to avoid any whiff that an incumbent administration was snooping on a political rival. Had it taken the simple briefing step, the nation might have been spared years of turmoil.

  But not briefing Trump was just half of the bad decision. The other half was the Bureau’s decision to instead brief Trump’s political rivals—Democrats. According to congressional investigators, sometime in “late spring” FBI Director Comey told the principal members of the Obama White House National Security Council that the Bureau had eyes on Trump and Russia. We don’t know the exact date, and we don’t know exactly who attended. But the Obama principals would have included Obama himself, Susan Rice (national security advisor), James Clapper (director of national intelligence), John Brennan (CIA director), Loretta Lynch (attorney general), and a number of cabinet secretaries. Comey’s decision to alert the nation’s most senior Democratic political team to the FBI’s interest in Trump-Russia ties was at best reckless, at worst calculated. Because one obvious question is whether Team Obama in turn whispered to the Clinton campaign—especially in light of the giant “coincidence” that came next.

  * * *

  Nobody should ever want the FBI working at the behest of, or on behalf of, a political campaign. Imagine if the Trump White House in early 2020 ordered the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the leading Democratic contender for the White House. The press and the public would go bananas. And yet this is essentially what happened in 2016, albeit with a bit more sophistication. The FBI became an active or unwitting tool of the Clinton cabal.

  It so happens that around the same time of this Comey briefing—also in “late spring”—the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm, to investigate…Trump-Russia ties. The contract was officially signed by Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Clinton and the DNC. This allowed Democrats to hide from public view that they were retaining an oppo shop. Fusion was the creation of former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, and in just a few years had developed a reputation for dumpster diving—mostly on behalf of Democrats.

  Trump haters—including Comey—to this day spin the falsehood that it was Republicans who hired Fusion to look into Trump’s Russia interactions. They do so because they know the truth—that the FBI aided Clinton against her political opponent—sounds as terrible as it is.

  Here’s what actually happened: The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet funded by major Republican donor Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to do broad opposition research on Trump. But as Trump neared the nomination in spring, the Free Beacon called off the dogs. Fusion then offered its services to Perkins Coie. Simpson acknowledged in 2017 Senate testimony that Fusi
on was not “totally focused on Russia at that time.” But in “late spring” it suddenly was—around the same time the Obama White House learned about the FBI’s interest in the Trump campaign.

  Fusion then turned to one of the few men capable of pulling off what now ranks as the dirtiest political trick in modern U.S. history. Christopher Steele had spent some twenty years at Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, including on the Russia desk. In 2009, he, like Simpson, found an easier way to cash in on “research.” He set out his shingle as a private “intelligence” operator for hire. Steele in that capacity did work for England’s Football Association that put him in touch with the FBI. That meant he had an “in” with the Bureau; Fusion used it.

  Steele from June to December authored seventeen reports on the Trump campaign and Russia—the now infamous “dossier.” It was an absurd collection of surreal allegations, many conveniently centered on Page and Manafort—the very men the FBI just happened to have in its sights. Several claimed that Page on a July 2016 trip to Moscow had secretly met with a Kremlin power player, who had offered the Trump campaign compromising Clinton material. He’d also, the dossier said, clandestinely met with the head of a Russian oil company, Rosneft, who offered Page the brokerage on 19 percent of that company in return for Trump lifting Russia sanctions. One report put Manafort at the center of a “well developed conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia, in which Page served as an intermediary. Another said Page had “conceived and promoted” the idea of leaking stolen Democratic e-mails to WikiLeaks. South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy would later quip that the entire dossier read like the National Enquirer.