Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  ALSO BY JAMES B. STEWART

  Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff

  Disney War: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom

  Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Love, Heroism, and September 11th

  Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away with Murder

  Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries

  Den of Thieves

  The Prosecutors: Inside the Offices of the Government’s Most Powerful Lawyers

  The Partners: Inside America’s Most Powerful Law Firms

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by James B. Stewart

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9780525559108 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525559115 (ebook)

  Cover design by Darren Haggar

  Version_1

  “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

  —MARK TWAIN (Tweeted by Donald J. Trump, January 29, 2014)

  CONTENTS

  Also by James B. Stewart

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE. “NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE”

  TWO. “THE DOORS THAT LED TO HELL”

  THREE. A SIGHTING ON THE TARMAC

  FOUR. “THIS FEELS MOMENTOUS”

  FIVE. “THE BAND IS BACK TOGETHER”

  SIX. “TO SPEAK OR TO CONCEAL”

  SEVEN. “THERE WERE NO PROSTITUTES”

  EIGHT. “WHERE’S MY ROY COHN?”

  NINE. “I KNOW YOU TOLD ME NOT TO”

  TEN. SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

  ELEVEN. “THIS IS THE END OF MY PRESIDENCY”

  TWELVE. “THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE”

  THIRTEEN. DEEP STATE

  CONCLUSION

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Given his towering stature, the six-foot, eight-inch, fifty-six-year-old James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cut a striking figure in the Los Angeles FBI field office’s command center room. At the back, a bank of television monitors kept agents and employees apprised of the latest news developments around the globe that might impact them at any moment, from natural disasters to terrorist attacks.

  Dozens of employees—mostly custodial and communications staff (Comey had already met in person with everyone with a desk or office)—were sitting in rapt attention as he began his talk about the FBI’s new, shorter, simpler mission statement. It was about 2:15 p.m. on May 9, 2017.

  It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of a field visit to the FBI’s rank and file, especially one from Jim (as everyone knew him, though hardly anyone ever called him that, using “Sir” or “Director” instead). When Comey replaced the much-revered and exacting Robert Mueller as director in 2013, four years earlier, he’d aimed to bring greater warmth and a sense of camaraderie to the position and to an organization long dominated by authoritarian directors (all white males) who’d run it like a quasi-military organization.

  The FBI was still disproportionately white and male, and politically conservative, for that matter, a state of affairs that was one of the reasons why Comey was in Los Angeles. That evening he was going to speak to more than seven hundred minority candidates for the bureau as part of a diversity recruiting event. Comey had flown in that morning on one of the Justice Department’s two Gulfstream G550 private jets, a perquisite of the FBI director (the attorney general has the use of the other).

  When he arrived at the Los Angeles office that afternoon, Comey went from floor to floor and desk to desk, doing his best to greet and shake hands with each employee, as he did on every field visit. “Tell me your story” was one of his favorite conversational gambits, one that invariably drew revealing details and he thought helped establish a personal bond with employees. Comey deployed a natural charm, a genuine curiosity about the people who worked for the bureau, and a disarming manner that sometimes belied his keen intellect and demanding standards. Perhaps more than anything, he oozed rectitude, a quality that was both inspiring and, at times, intimidating.

  The resulting loyalty, respect, and devotion from the vast majority of the rank and file had stood him in good stead over the past year, which had been one of the most difficult and controversial since the bureau was founded in 1908. In July 2015, Comey and the FBI had been thrust into a highly public investigation of Hillary Clinton, the future Democratic presidential nominee, on her use of a private email server. Comey’s decision to inform Congress that the investigation had been reopened—three months after announcing that Clinton wouldn’t be charged with a crime, and just days before the election—was seen by many as tilting the election to Donald J. Trump.

  That controversial decision had already been overshadowed by far more serious allegations concerning Trump’s ties to Russia. Unknown to the public, that investigation had begun well before the election, meaning that Comey and the FBI were scrutinizing both parties’ nominees for president at the same time, something without precedent in American history. It was a role Comey neither sought nor relished, later saying the possibility that he’d influenced the outcome of the election made him “nauseous.”

  Unlike the highly public Clinton proceedings, the Trump-Russia affair was shrouded in the bureau’s traditional investigative secrecy. Although there was widespread reporting and discussion of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and it was common knowledge that Vladimir Putin had favored Trump over Clinton, it was only on January 10, 2017, that BuzzFeed News published a controversial “dossier” depicting scandalous ties between Trump and Russia, and it wasn’t until March 20, in an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, that Comey had publicly confirmed the existence of a formal FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even then, he declined to say whether Trump himself was one of the individuals the FBI was examining. Comey’s refusal to clear him had infuriated Trump, because it left open the distinct possibility that he was a subject of the investigation.

  By the time of his trip to Los Angeles, it was no secret, least of all to Comey himself, that his relationship with Trump was tense at best. Many were surprised that Trump had kept him on as FBI director, even though his ten-year term had nearly seven years remaining. Their personalities and characters were pretty much polar opposites. If Comey embodied rectitude, Trump would have to be described as louche, given his crude comments, propensity to exaggerate, indifference to factual accuracy, preening vanity, and friends and associates of dubious character. Comey found it hard to be in the same room with the man.

  That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Comey didn’t want to be Trump’s friend or part of any White House inner circle. While his relationship with President Barack Obama had been cordial, their personal interactions had been infrequent.

  There was much to be said for an FBI director keeping his distance from the president. The FBI director might have been a presidential appointee who reported to the attorney general, but th
e position had a long tradition of independence, solidified by the lengthy ten-year term.

  As Comey began his speech in Los Angeles, he wasn’t the least bit worried about his job. Only one FBI director had ever been fired—William Sessions, by Bill Clinton in 1993, early in his first term, and only after the attorney general at the time, Janet Reno, asked for his resignation in the midst of a scandal involving the director’s alleged misuse of government resources for personal purposes. Sessions (no relation to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general) had hotly denied the charges and refused to resign, forcing Clinton to remove him. In his stead, Clinton named a former FBI agent of unimpeachable integrity, Louis Freeh, who within weeks of his appointment was investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in the Whitewater affair, the first of a series of scandals that culminated with Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. Clinton would surely have liked to fire Freeh—and their relationship was tense—but he was too politically astute to do so.

  For similar reasons, the more Russian interference was in the news, the more secure Comey’s job seemed, because for Trump to fire Comey would look like interference in an independent investigation, perhaps even obstruction of justice. Richard Nixon had famously found a way to rid himself of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, his nemesis in the Watergate affair, in the mistaken belief it would quell the investigation. Instead, it had raised the public’s ire and cost him the presidency. Surely that lesson wasn’t lost on Trump and his advisers.

  Comey was also getting along fine with the new attorney general, the former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who was Comey’s immediate boss at the Department of Justice. Comey had seen Sessions just the day before leaving for his trip to Los Angeles, and the meeting was perfectly cordial.

  Comey was eager to talk about the new mission statement, which he’d personally labored over. It replaced a lengthy paragraph with numerous independent clauses with just twelve easily memorized words: to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” In its brevity, it underscored that the FBI’s mission was to protect the American people, not any one person, not even the president of the United States. It was the essence of government by the people and for the people, subject to the rule of law.

  As he began his talk, he got through the mission statement and said he hoped they’d refer to it often, repeat it, and . . .

  On one of the television screens at the back of the room, he saw a caption, in large capital letters, next to the Fox News logo:

  JAMES COMEY RESIGNS

  As his voice trailed off, others followed his gaze to the screens at the back of the room. “That’s pretty funny,” Comey said, laughing nervously. He figured someone in the office had rigged the announcement as a prank. He wondered how they’d managed to pull it off.

  More people turned in their chairs.

  They saw new captions, on three different channels at the same time, all with the same message. On CNN it was

  Breaking News: TRUMP FIRES FBI DIRECTOR COMEY

  Comey realized it wasn’t a joke.

  * * *

  —

  IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was presiding over the FBI’s daily “wrap” meeting, a summation of the day’s developments, in his seventh-floor conference room in the fortresslike J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, when his secretary interrupted. Attorney General Sessions wanted to see him immediately at his office at the Justice Department.

  McCabe, aged forty-nine, and slightly graying, was lean from years of triathlon competitions. It was highly unusual for an attorney general to request an in-person meeting with an FBI director, let alone the deputy. A few people at the meeting wondered if McCabe was about to be fired. McCabe had weathered a barrage of criticism after the media reported that his wife had waged an unsuccessful race as a Democratic candidate for state senate in Virginia and had taken money from a prominent Clinton supporter (even though McCabe himself, a lifelong Republican, had complied with the bureau’s ethics guidelines).

  McCabe handed the meeting over to David Bowdich, the associate deputy director. McCabe and another agent, acting as his security detail, walked across Pennsylvania Avenue to the sprawling, neoclassical Robert F. Kennedy Building, the Justice Department headquarters named for President John F. Kennedy’s brother Bobby—the kind of “loyal” attorney general, Trump often said, he wished he had.

  In contrast to the large but relatively austere FBI director’s office, the attorney general’s office has an elaborate entrance flanked by murals and portraits of previous attorneys general, elegant swag draperies, and gold-upholstered antique furniture. The office suite has its own bedroom and bathroom and comes with a chef and private dining room across a hallway.

  McCabe waited for about ten minutes and then was ushered into Sessions’s inner office. The seventy-year-old, white-haired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a name redolent of the antebellum South, spoke with a distinct southern accent. He was an early and vocal supporter of candidate Donald Trump at a time when few senators took Trump seriously or wanted to be identified with him. Sessions was an ardent backer of many Trump policies, especially hard-line conservative positions on immigration and border security. Sessions had nonetheless alienated the president early in his tenure by removing himself from any involvement in the Russia investigation, handing oversight and control to his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.

  As McCabe walked in, Sessions stood in front of his desk with his suit jacket on, flanked by Rosenstein and two staff members. They were also standing and wearing their suit jackets, conferring an air of grave formality that made McCabe apprehensive.

  “Thanks for coming over,” Sessions said, unfailingly polite. Then he got to the point: “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve had to fire the director of the FBI.”

  As McCabe’s mind raced, time seemed to stop. Ever the career FBI agent, he was determined to reveal nothing, to show no emotion.

  “No, I hadn’t heard,” McCabe said.

  Sessions said McCabe would need to serve as the bureau’s acting head until another interim director or replacement was named. McCabe readily agreed, saying he’d do anything necessary to ease the transition and assist his replacement. Unknowingly echoing Comey’s remarks a continent away, he grasped for the words of the FBI’s new mission statement, pledging to his Justice Department superiors that he’d do his utmost to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. He felt an awesome responsibility had just been placed on his shoulders at a potentially perilous moment.

  Sessions thanked him and asked if he had any questions.

  Of course he did, starting with “Why?”

  But all he said was he’d need to make some kind of announcement to the bureau’s employees.

  “No,” Rosenstein interjected. They all had to wait for guidance and a statement from the White House.

  “I have to say something internally,” McCabe replied.

  “Don’t do anything until you hear from us,” Rosenstein insisted. “Do not say anything about this to anyone, not even your wife, until we get back to you.”

  The meeting ended, and McCabe walked out. Mobile news crews had already massed outside the building.

  * * *

  —

  BOWDICH WAS STILL speaking in the conference room when someone opened the door: “The director’s been fired.” A TV was tuned to CNN just outside the room. Wolf Blitzer looked grave. Outside the White House, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny read a brief statement from the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer:

  Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office. President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

  “The FBI is one of t
he Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” said President Trump.

  A search for a new permanent FBI Director will begin immediately.

  Spicer himself was nowhere to be seen (as the cameras rolled, he and some of his staff were spotted among some bushes near the White House, trying to avoid the horde of reporters that quickly gathered).

  Michael Kortan, the FBI’s assistant director for public affairs, hurried to his office to draft a statement from the bureau.

  Still at the Justice Department, unaware of the White House statement, McCabe called his special counsel, Lisa Page, despite the gag order. He had to tell someone. As the lawyer whose job was to advise and protect McCabe, Page had become his closest confidante. She managed to juggle an intense workload while raising two young children. McCabe admired her outspokenness and candor.

  “The director has been fired,” McCabe told her.

  Page said they’d already seen the news on television. (So much for the secrecy Rosenstein had seemed so intent on, McCabe thought.) She said Kortan was working on a statement. “You’ve got to stop him,” McCabe said. Any statement had to come from the attorney general. Page thought that was preposterous; they had to say something to the rank and file, all of whom now knew what had happened and were reacting with varying degrees of shock. McCabe said he understood but was adamant: no announcement.

  McCabe got back to his office about 6:00 p.m. The wrap group participants had regrouped in the conference room and were waiting expectantly. McCabe told them what he knew, which wasn’t much. He tried to be calm and reassuring in his first moments as acting director. Together they’d take things one step at a time. They’d get through the next hour, and then the next, and the next day. They’d figure it out.

  Just then Comey’s secretary arrived with a thick manila envelope. It had come from the White House that day, hand delivered and addressed to Comey. No one had opened it.