Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  There was more applause. “We have a rigged system, folks,” Trump said.

  Referring to Bill Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Loretta Lynch, Trump predicted Clinton would extend Lynch’s tenure as attorney general. “If she wins, she’s going to consider extending the attorney general and you know what, I’m not saying, I’m not knocking the attorney general, what I’m saying is how can you say that? It’s a bribe,” Trump said. “The attorney general sitting there saying, if I get Hillary off the hook I’m going to have four more years or eight more years, but if she loses I’m out of a job, it’s a bribe. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.

  “She’s crooked Hillary!” To continuing cheers, he wound up, “Hillary Clinton can’t keep her emails safe and you know what, folks, she sure as hell can’t keep our country safe.”

  It was everything Comey had feared, and only a taste of what was to come.

  FOUR

  “THIS FEELS MOMENTOUS”

  Hillary Clinton, too, was in North Carolina that evening for a campaign rally with President Obama. Hoping to keep the focus on the president’s long-awaited formal endorsement, she ignored Comey and his press conference. Her campaign had issued a brief statement that day saying it was pleased by the outcome, and “as the secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again. We are glad that this matter is now resolved.”

  That it wasn’t should already have been obvious.

  The Obama endorsement was completely upstaged by the barrage of press coverage for Comey, which led the newscasts, made front-page headlines, and dominated the internet. Politicians predictably divided along party lines, but ominously for Clinton the mainstream press picked up on Comey’s criticisms, much as Justice Department officials had feared.

  CNN ran a feature: “Comey’s 7 Most Damning Lines on Clinton,” starting with “extremely careless.”

  As The Washington Post put it, “Though he recommended no criminal charges, Comey systematically dismantled the public explanations Clinton has offered to reassure the public about her email system for the past 15 months.”

  Patrick Healy, writing in The New York Times, noted that Clinton had spent months labeling Trump reckless, unprepared, and unfit to be president. “In just a few minutes of remarks, Mr. Comey called into question Mrs. Clinton’s claims of superiority more memorably, mightily and effectively than Mr. Trump has over the entire past year. And with potentially lasting consequences.”

  At the FBI, the reaction to the media coverage was nonetheless one of considerable relief. No one had accused the bureau of being soft on Clinton or, as Strzok had worried, “mailing it in” on the investigation. The Washington Post found it “stunning” that Comey provided so much detail and “publicized his guidance before federal prosecutors had reached a final determination.” But no one faulted Comey for taking matters into his own hands.

  Not only had Comey emerged unscathed, but Democrats lavished praise on him. Nancy Pelosi called Comey a “great man,” and the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, praised his “integrity” and “competence.”

  * * *

  —

  AT 4:00 P.M. the next day, July 6, the entire Midyear team gathered in the attorney general’s conference room to formally brief Lynch and Yates on the FBI’s conclusions. Comey, McCabe, Baker, Rybicki, and Strzok attended from the FBI; Axelrod, Toscas, and other officials and prosecutors represented the Justice Department. David Margolis was there, even though he was struggling with advanced heart disease, which lent the gathering a certain gravitas.

  Despite the simmering resentment they felt toward Comey, no one from the Justice Department said a word about the previous day’s press conference.

  Toscas opened with a review of the facts developed in the investigation and applicable law, which was so much more exculpatory toward Clinton than Comey had been that Yates wondered if they were even talking about the same case. The group spent some time discussing the gross negligence standard and the reasons why it had hardly ever been used. Still, the outcome of the meeting was never in doubt.

  Lynch went around the room and asked each person if he or she agreed with the decision not to bring charges. As the senior career official, Margolis’s view carried special weight. Citing the lack of precedent, he argued that to charge Clinton would be nothing more than “celebrity hunting,” concluding, “We at the Department don’t do that.”

  It was Margolis’s last official act. He died six days later.

  After the meeting, Lynch issued a brief statement: “Late this afternoon, I met with the FBI Director James Comey and career prosecutors and agents who conducted the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State. I received and accepted their unanimous recommendation that the thorough, year-long investigation be closed and that no charges be brought against any individuals within the scope of the investigation.”

  Midyear Exam was officially over. Or so it seemed.

  There were still some loose ends to wrap up before the file was formally closed, mostly pro forma. One was the troubling Russian intelligence questioning Lynch’s impartiality, which was still nagging at Comey.

  A few weeks later McCabe met with Lynch for what’s known as a “defensive briefing,” intended to alert officials to intelligence that might personally affect them, even though, as in this case, the FBI didn’t believe the information was credible or likely to become public. McCabe told her that the FBI believed the information had no investigative value and was taking no further action. Nor should she. But she should be aware the intelligence existed.

  Lynch said she didn’t know Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair, and had never spoken to her, but thanked him for bringing it to her attention.

  When McCabe got back, Comey asked him how it went.

  “Boss,” McCabe replied, “it was the strangest thing. I don’t want to read too much into this, but I’d feel a lot better if she’d said it wasn’t true. All she said was, ‘thank you for telling me.’”

  * * *

  —

  REPUBLICANS GATHERED IN Cleveland on July 18 to nominate Donald Trump, and even before the opening speeches there was an undercurrent of seething anger and resentment toward Hillary Clinton and the elites she purportedly represented. “Crooked Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirts sold briskly.

  Speaking at a rally outside the arena, Trump’s campaign adviser Roger Stone called Clinton “a short-tempered, foul-mouthed, greedy, bipolar, mentally-unbalanced criminal.” Someone in the crowd yelled, “She’s a reptile.”

  That night, just after Trump’s formal nomination, the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, took the stage to denounce Clinton. “Let’s do something fun tonight,” he told the crowd. “Tonight, as a former Federal Prosecutor, I welcome the opportunity to hold Hillary Rodham Clinton accountable for her performance and her character.”

  The crowd roared in gleeful anticipation.

  Clinton “set up a private email server in her basement in violation of our national security,” he continued. “Let’s face the facts. Hillary Clinton cared more about protecting her own secrets than she cared about protecting America’s secrets.

  “And then, she lied about it, over, and over, and over again. She said, there was no marked classified information on her server. The FBI Director said, that’s untrue. She said that she did not email any classified information. The FBI Director says, that’s untrue. She said, all work-related emails were sent back to the State Department. The FBI Director said, that’s not true. So, I say, Hillary Clinton, the charge of putting herself ahead of America, guilty or not guilty?”

  “Guilty,” the audience roared.

  Thunderous applause made it hard for Christie to continue, but he pressed forward. “I got another question for you: I say, Hillary Clinton, lying to the America
n people about her selfish, awful judgment in making our secrets vulnerable. What’s your verdict, guilty or not guilty?”

  “Guilty,” roared the crowd, even louder.

  From the guilty cries emerged another refrain, barely discernible at first, but then growing in intensity until it filled the entire arena: “Lock her up!” Over and over the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!”*

  Others at the convention picked up the refrain. “That’s right, lock her up!” proclaimed Michael Flynn, the former three-star general and Trump’s principal foreign policy adviser, after claiming Clinton considered herself “above the law.”

  The chant immediately became the defining image of the Trump campaign, a highlight of every Trump rally.

  * * *

  —

  ON JULY 22, Democrats gathered in Philadelphia, and Clinton announced Virginia’s Tim Kaine as her running mate. That same day, WikiLeaks took to Twitter:

  Today, Friday 22 July 2016 at 10:30am EDT, WikiLeaks releases 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee—part one of our new Hillary Leaks series.

  As Comey and others at the FBI had feared, it was the public release of the Guccifer haul, deliberately timed to wreak maximum havoc within the American political system. There were no bombshells (and, to Comey’s relief, no sign of the troubling comments about Lynch), but some emails made clear the extent to which the supposedly neutral DNC had blatantly favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The revelations led to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as party chair and disillusioned many of Sanders’s idealistic young backers.

  The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, wouldn’t say whether Russia was his source, but news organizations widely reported the suspected link.

  Half a world away, in Australia, the WikiLeaks disclosures set off alarm bells within the Australian intelligence service.

  Months earlier, Erika Thompson, a political counselor at the Australian High Commission in London, had sent a classified cable describing a May 6 meeting she’d attended with Alexander Downer, a former Australian minister of foreign affairs, now high commissioner to the United Kingdom, the equivalent of ambassador, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Trump.

  Downer had initiated the meeting after being prompted by Thompson to learn more about Trump’s worldview, now that it looked as if Trump might well win the nomination. The Australians thought the tanned, dark-haired, twenty-eight-year-old Papadopoulos seemed rather young and inexperienced to be a foreign policy adviser to a major presidential candidate, but Trump had publicly introduced him at a press event in March, describing him as “an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.” Since then, Papadopoulos had been trying to arrange a meeting between Putin and Trump.

  Over drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms, Papadopoulos ranged over a wide array of topics, but something stood out to Downer as particularly “interesting”: that the Russians had “material that could be damaging” to Clinton, as Downer later described the conversation. Papadopoulos “said it would be damaging. He didn’t say what it was,” according to Downer.

  Even more intriguing, Papadopoulos stressed that he had gotten “indications” that the Russian government could assist the Trump campaign by releasing the information anonymously so as to maximize the damage to Clinton.

  Papadopoulos said much the same thing to another Australian he met in London at about the same time, who reported the conversation to the Australian mission. (His identity and what he disclosed remain classified.)

  Downer had Thompson include all of this in the cable she sent a few days later, where it made little impression and might well have been forgotten to history. But after WikiLeaks, the reference suddenly made sense: the damaging “material” Papadopoulos referred to must have been the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee. On July 26, the Australians turned the intelligence over to the CIA, which referred it to the FBI.*

  That Russia might be behind the email release clearly got under Trump’s skin. Three days after WikiLeaks released the emails, he tweeted that “the new joke in town” is that “Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails.” The next day, he tweeted that it was “crazy” to suggest Russia was “dealing with Trump.” Later that day he added, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.”

  That evening Clinton was formally nominated in a well-orchestrated, history-making ceremony marred only by a group of Sanders delegates who walked out to protest the unfairness documented in the leaked emails. Clinton “just has to win now,” Page texted Strzok during the televised proceedings. “I’m not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump. The sandernistas have the potential to make a very big mistake here.”

  “I’m not worried about them,” Strzok replied. “I’m worried about the anarchist Assange who will take fed information and disclose it to disrupt,” referring to the WikiLeaks founder holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

  The next day, at a press conference at his Doral golf resort in Florida, Trump seized on the hacked emails to stoke dissension among Democrats, opening his remarks by saying, “Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she totally rigged” the primary. “Bernie Sanders never had a chance.”

  Asked repeatedly about Russia, Trump said he had “nothing to do with Russia,” had never met Putin, and had no business dealings there. He dismissed reports Russia was trying to interfere in the election. “It’s just a total deflection, this whole thing with Russia,” he said. “If it is Russia, nobody even knows this, it’s probably China, or it could be somebody sitting in his bed.” After sidestepping a question about why he hadn’t disclosed his tax returns, he returned to the subject: “It would be interesting to see—I will tell you this—Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

  * * *

  —

  AT HIS OFFICE in Trump Tower Manhattan, Michael Cohen found Trump’s comments that he had “nothing to do with Russia” to be “interesting,” as he later said, which was likely a considerable understatement. Cohen had been knee-deep in a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

  At forty-nine, Cohen, a lawyer who had dabbled in real estate and politics and owned a collection of taxi medallions, occupied a distinctive place in the Trump orbit. Although he had none of the Ivy League credentials so admired by Trump—he’d graduated from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School at Western Michigan University—he’d ingratiated himself with Trump by quoting passages from The Art of the Deal (he’d read it twice) and by demonstrating what Cohen later described as “blind loyalty,” a trait prized by Trump. He bought an apartment in Trump World Tower across from the United Nations, as did his parents and in-laws. Cohen seemed unfazed that in return “Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” Trump’s campaign adviser Roger Stone told The New York Times. With his dark eyes and sagging lids, Cohen sometimes gave the appearance of a devoted basset hound.

  Trump Tower Moscow was a possible $1 billion deal. Trump had signed a letter of intent to do the project in 2015. In May 2016, Cohen had been negotiating with Russian officials for Trump to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos, in mid-June. Cohen told Trump that Putin or the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, might be there, and Trump agreed to go if Cohen could “lock and load” on a deal.

  The trip was never firmed up, and progress had stalled with the Russian development partner, though Cohen hadn’t yet told Trump that.

  Nonetheless, after hearing during Trump’s press conference that Trump had no business dealings with Russia, Cohen realized that was the “message” and the “party line,” which, it went without saying, Cohen would follow.*

  * * *

  —

  WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of its delivery to the FBI, Strzok was poring
over the Australian intelligence gleaned from Papadopoulos. His three weeks of relative calm following the Clinton announcement were over.

  Strzok was stunned, not so much by the long-rumored revelation that Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee as by the fact that they had communicated a willingness to help Trump at the expense of Clinton to a member of the Trump campaign. Did anyone within the Trump campaign take them up on the offer? If so, who?

  Of course Strzok didn’t simply accept the truth of the information at face value. During his years in counterintelligence, he’d learned to take anything involving the Russians with a big grain of salt. But this was coming from Australia, one of America’s closest and most trusted allies, one of the so-called Five Eyes—the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States—that share sensitive intelligence. Cursory research showed that Papadopoulos, though young and with scant experience, was indeed one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers.

  Strzok had never encountered such a profoundly troubling allegation, and so far as he knew, no one else had either, even at the height of the cold war. Strzok’s years working in counterintelligence had made him deeply distrustful of Russia. It wasn’t just that Putin personally and Russia generally had felt disrespected and humiliated by the Western democracies after the end of the cold war. Strzok considered Russia an autocratic kleptocracy that stood in opposition to everything America represented and the FBI tried to protect, starting with pluralism, tolerance, freedom of expression, and the rule of law. Russian interference in a presidential election was a direct and unprecedented attack on American democracy.

  Strzok conveyed his reaction in a July 31 text to Page: “Damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS. So super glad to be on this voyage with you.”