McCabe did. Inside were a memo from Rosenstein and a cover letter to Trump from Sessions. And there was the actual letter from Trump firing the director. Saying he’d received the attached letters from Rosenstein and Sessions, “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby removed from office, effective immediately,” the letter read.
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.
That was odd, McCabe thought. Why would Trump publicly link the firing to whether he was or was not under investigation?
It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement function.
The letter was signed in Trump’s unmistakable, bold, vertical handwriting.
McCabe’s secretary interrupted again. The White House was calling, asking that he be at the Oval Office at 6:30 p.m.
* * *
—
STILL AT THE FBI field office in Los Angeles, Comey had managed to finish his brief remarks and then shook hands with scores of shocked and bewildered employees as he moved through the audience.
Once outside, he fielded calls on his cell phone as the news spread. In his first call, he told his wife he still wasn’t sure if it were true. He was trying to learn more. It seemed so bizarre that he’d found out from news reports and had still received no official word.
He took a call from John F. Kelly, the former U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and now the director of Homeland Security. Kelly told Comey he hadn’t been consulted. He said he felt sickened by Trump’s decision to fire him and wanted to quit in protest. He didn’t want to work for someone so dishonorable. Comey urged Kelly to stay. The country needed people like him, Comey insisted, perhaps now more than ever.
Comey’s secretary in Washington was finally able to scan and email the contents of the White House envelope, and he saw the president’s language firing him. It made him feel “sick to my stomach and slightly dazed,” as he later put it.
As he left the office, he tried to reassure employees waiting outside, some in tears. It broke his heart to leave them, he said, but the FBI was bigger and stronger than any one person.
Part of him wanted to attend that evening’s diversity recruiting event, even as a private citizen. But he realized his appearance would likely cause a media frenzy and prove a distraction.
He suddenly had no job and no professional obligations. The notion was oddly liberating. He’d always wanted to rent a convertible and drive across the country, and now perhaps he could. He quickly dismissed the notion, but wondered, how was he going to get home?
He called McCabe as McCabe was about to leave for the White House. McCabe was surprised at how unruffled Comey sounded. “What did you do now?” McCabe asked.
Comey laughed. “I must have really hosed something up.”
McCabe said he didn’t see why Comey shouldn’t fly back on the FBI plane, given that the crew would be returning anyway. He said he’d check with the bureau’s lawyers.
* * *
—
JAMES BAKER, the FBI’s general counsel, had just landed at Washington’s Reagan National Airport that evening on a flight from Miami. As he and his fellow passengers turned on their cell phones after the three-hour flight, a chorus of buzzing news alerts filled the plane. Then he overheard people saying, “Oh, my God, Trump fired James Comey.”
Unanswered emails had piled up on his phone. “Where the hell are you?” “Please come to the office ASAP.” Baker went straight to FBI headquarters, still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Everyone had gathered in the chief of staff’s office to watch CNN, which was providing nonstop coverage of Comey’s drive to the airport. News helicopters were following his SUV, as if Comey were O. J. Simpson. McCabe already had a pressing legal issue for Baker: As a former government employee, could Comey return on the FBI plane? After some fast research, Baker ruled he could.
Although it was getting late, many lights on the seventh floor were still lit. By contrast, the director’s office and adjoining suite—normally the bustling center of activity, especially in emergencies—were dark and empty. To Baker, it felt as if someone had died.
* * *
—
IF MCCABE’S CONFIDANTE was Lisa Page, hers was Peter Strzok. The two communicated constantly, most often by text message, which over the period from August 2015 until the messages abruptly stopped in June 2017, numbered in the tens of thousands.
Few outside the FBI knew anything about Strzok, which was how he preferred it. But at the moment Comey was fired, Strzok was arguably the single most important agent in the bureau: he was the lead or co-lead investigator for both the Clinton email investigation and the Russian interference in the presidential election, a testament to the extraordinary confidence his superiors placed in him.
Since joining the FBI in 1996 after serving as an army field artillery officer, Strzok had emerged as one of the bureau’s top espionage and counterintelligence officers, someone who could be trusted with the most sensitive cases. It was Strzok who had located a rental car used by three of the September 11 terrorists. He embodied the clean-cut, fit ethos of the bureau, coupled with a keen intelligence and soft-spoken manner that belied a tough investigator.
No one was more steeped in the details of the Russia investigation than Strzok. Deeply suspicious of Russian intentions, Strzok considered Russia the greatest global threat to American security, implacably hostile to the democracy and freedom America stood for. Even the possibility that Russia had penetrated an American presidential campaign was a threat of the gravest magnitude.
Over the previous months, even as Comey reassured Trump that he wasn’t personally the subject of the investigation, Strzok had wavered over whether Trump should be. He knew that to open an official case file on the president of the United States should only be undertaken in extraordinary circumstances. Not that it was his decision to make. All the top FBI officials had discussed it, and ultimately it had been Comey’s decision not to do it.
But Trump’s decision to fire Comey had now put him over the edge. At 8:40 p.m., he texted Page: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting.”
He meant while McCabe was acting director—a state of affairs that might not last long. The whole thing was so sensitive that, even using secure FBI-issued cell phones, he didn’t mention any names—just “the case we’ve been waiting on.”
Page, of course, knew what case he meant—the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
* * *
—
THUS WERE JOINED in unprecedented and potentially mortal combat two vital institutions of American democracy: the presidency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the investigative arm of the Department of Justice.
On the president’s side were not just the vast powers of his office, which include the right to name and dismiss the attorney general, his top deputies, and the FBI director, but also his ability to communicate, to shape opinion, to attack, and to defend, especially through direct social media like Twitter—an art Trump had embraced with an abandon and virtuosity never before seen in American politics.
Far from ending Trump’s travails with law enforcement, as Trump had hoped and expected, his decision to fire Comey led directly to the appointment of Robert Mueller as an independent special counsel and caused the FBI to open a formal investigation into the president himself. Two years later, by mid-2019, seven people had pleaded guilty and twenty-seven had been indicted as a result of Mueller’s investigation, including Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer; Paul Manafort, his campaign chair; and Roger Stone, a campaign adviser.
What began as a Russia probe had expanded into many facet
s of Trump’s personal and business empires, with Trump himself squarely at the center. The investigation—with the attendant possibility that a combative and controversial president might be impeached, eventually indicted, and, if convicted, serve time in jail—became a national obsession further dividing an already bitterly polarized electorate.
Trump found himself beset on all sides by what he branded the “Deep State”—career bureaucrats and law enforcement officials concerned only with protecting their own power, even at the cost of undermining the democratic process, by bringing down a president who, however distasteful and threatening they might find him, had been duly elected by voters and the Electoral College pursuant to the Constitution. At the center of this supposedly dark conspiracy were Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok, whom Trump reviled obsessively in a stream of tweets.
With a near-constant flow of Twitter messages repeatedly decrying “Fake News” and the “Witch Hunt” of the Russia investigation, cheered on by his base of political supporters and a chorus of like-minded media figures, Trump and his allies set about exposing, attacking, and ultimately destroying this purported Deep State. In doing so, they provided a coherent and powerful narrative that they hoped would undermine any conclusions by Mueller or other investigators and reduced the contest to one of raw power. Richard Nixon, the last president to meddle in a federal investigation of himself, had never managed such a feat.
This intensely combative strategy came naturally to Trump, because he’d been locked in some kind of combat for virtually his entire career. Early on, advised by lawyers who urged him to cooperate rather than attack Mueller and his team, an uncharacteristically subdued Trump was on public display. That changed when he replaced them with the far more aggressive and outspoken Rudolph Giuliani, the former U.S. attorney and New York City mayor, who from the start described the investigation as “illegitimate” and spent as much time on cable news outlets attacking law enforcement as he did proclaiming Trump’s innocence.
On March 22, 2019, Mueller delivered his hotly anticipated and voluminous report to William Barr, Trump’s choice to succeed the battered Jeff Sessions as attorney general, whom Trump had forced out the previous year. Barr, who’d already been attorney general for two years under President George H. W. Bush, had sent a letter to Trump the prior year criticizing Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation of Trump as “fatally misconceived.”
Two days later, in a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing Mueller’s report, Barr wrote that the “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” which seemed to exonerate Trump. But on the separate question of whether Trump’s dealings with the FBI, Justice Department, and Mueller team—including his firing of Comey—amounted to obstruction of justice, Barr reported that Mueller reached no conclusion on those “difficult issues” of law and fact. “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
Nonetheless, Barr informed Congress that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” and hence no charges would be brought.
Trump was quick to declare total victory, telling reporters that Sunday as he boarded Air Force One for Mar-a-Lago that the report was “complete and total exoneration.”
And even though he’d just been vindicated, he took another jab at law enforcement: “This was an illegal takedown that failed.”
Other presidents might well have declared victory and called it a day. Not Trump. In the ensuing weeks, his thirst for vengeance against those who had investigated him seemed only to grow. “It was an illegal investigation,” Trump reiterated two weeks later, stressing that it might even have been criminal. “Everything about it was crooked—every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.”
On April 10, Barr told Congress that he’d be scrutinizing the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe, and specifically whether anyone there had spied on the Trump campaign. “I think spying did occur,” Barr told legislators. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.”
With Barr at the helm, the Trump investigation had come full circle, with the vast resources of the Department of Justice now poised to be turned against the FBI that had so vexed Trump, and specifically Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Page—now branded by Trump as the “dirty cops.”
With Trump fanning the flames, and his loyal and passionate base egging him on, the battle will no doubt rage through the next presidential campaign and beyond.
At the same time, in their quest for total victory Trump and his allies risk undermining America’s long tradition of independent law enforcement and, at the broadest level, the very notion that the United States has a government of laws, not men—that no man is above the law. That concept is the foundation of the American Constitution and dates at least to the Magna Carta of 1215, when King John was forced to acknowledge the primacy of English law over royal writ.
In this epic battle, there can only be winners and losers, to invoke a distinctly Trumpian view of the world. There is no room for compromise. But there is plenty of room for collateral damage. The reputations of both sides have already been harmed, perhaps irrevocably, and at potentially great cost to American democracy and its institutions.
Trump and the people and institutions he views as his enemies inspire great passion. Perceptions and judgments have hardened on both sides of the political divide, often based on suspicion, assumptions, and inferences.
How have we reached this juncture? Does Trump’s insistence on an antidemocratic Deep State have merit? Or is it a cynical and destructive effort to mask his own potentially illegal conduct by casting aspersions on the character and motives of those investigating him? Do his attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department and his attempts to undermine their investigation of him amount to legitimate criticism, or are they obstruction of justice—the very question that Mueller failed to answer?
ONE
“NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE”
The Caucus Room restaurant on Ninth Street N.W. in Washington, D.C., has always billed itself as a “nonpartisan” restaurant, if such a thing is possible in the nation’s capital. Perhaps bipartisan would be a better description: it was partly owned by a prominent Democrat (the power lobbyist Tommy Boggs) and a Republican (the Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour).
Its somewhat clubby atmosphere, wood-paneled walls, and steak-and-American fare made it the ideal venue for the studiously nonpartisan FBI director, Robert Mueller, and the former deputy attorney general James Comey when the two met there for lunch in the spring of 2011.
It had been nearly ten years since the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center had transformed the FBI from a sometimes overly methodical organization focused on crimes that had already occurred into a potent antiterrorist and counterintelligence organization that tried to anticipate and prevent them. Mueller had taken up his post just a week before 9/11, and he and Comey, who was then at the Justice Department, had met twice daily for the so-called threat briefing, a rundown on every conceivable terrorist threat, until Comey left the Justice Department in 2005.
Mueller’s office had recently called Comey to suggest a lunch with the director the next time Comey was in D.C. Comey was now living in Connecticut, working for one of the world’s most prominent and successful hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates. After years of almost uninterrupted government service, he was finally making some money (his annual salary at Bridgewater was $6.6 million in 2012, according to his financial disclosures), more than enough to put his five children through college.
Before joining the Justice Department, Comey had been the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and before that had worked as a federal prosecutor. Rudolph
Giuliani had hired him as a young assistant in 1987, when the future New York City mayor was seizing headlines and magazine covers and cracking down on Ivan Boesky and other Wall Street criminals.
Comey and Mueller hadn’t seen each other for several years, and Mueller was now nearing the end of the FBI director’s ten-year tenure. “Who’s going to replace you?” Comey asked, mostly out of idle curiosity. (Mueller couldn’t be renominated; Congress had restricted the FBI director’s term to ten years.)
“You know, maybe you should,” Mueller replied.
Comey wasn’t sure he was serious. “Why would I want to do that, when I was already your supervisor?”
“When was that?”
“When I was deputy attorney general, you reported to me,” Comey reminded him.
“Noooo . . . ,” Mueller answered, drawing out the one syllable.
“Yes, you did,” Comey said. He drew an organization chart on the paper table cover, with a dotted line connecting the FBI to its superiors at the Department of Justice.
“Well, maybe on paper, but this is a much better job,” Mueller said, smiling. “You should consider it.”
Comey was flattered, but firmly declined. He wasn’t about to move his family again after disrupting their lives and moving them to Connecticut.
That didn’t stop the press from speculating that Comey might succeed Mueller (also mentioned were Comey’s good friend Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, and Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner).
Attorney General Eric Holder told The New York Times that President Obama basically wanted a clone of Mueller, whom the president described as “the gold standard.” In May, Obama said he’d seek Congress’s approval to extend Mueller’s tenure by two years, through the 2012 presidential election.
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