Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  By “the other one,” he meant the Clinton email case, which, however politically charged, paled by comparison to the profound implications of the Papadopoulos intelligence.

  Strzok and others at the bureau spent the weekend doing additional research. Who besides Papadopoulos within the Trump campaign might be working with the Russians? It didn’t take long for Strzok and other analysts working in counterintelligence to find additional troubling links: The foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who’d once worked at Merrill Lynch in Moscow and had since assiduously courted high-ranking Russian officials, had already been on the FBI’s radar for three years. Trump adviser Michael Flynn sat next to Putin at a lavish Moscow dinner honoring a state-backed news channel in 2015 and received a $45,000 speaking fee. The campaign manager Paul Manafort had worked for Kremlin-backed officials in Ukraine. Any of them could have been a conduit between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

  And then there were Trump’s seemingly inexplicable affection and admiration for Putin.

  The pattern was too conspicuous to ignore and lent credibility to the Australians’ allegations. Strzok met with McCabe, Jim Baker, and Lisa Page to report on his findings, and the group briefed Comey later the same day. All agreed that a formal investigation needed to be opened, and on Sunday, July 31, the FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane.”*

  In the ensuing weeks, specific files were opened on Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn.

  Having just emerged from the Clinton investigation, which had already thrust the FBI into the perilous position of investigating the Democratic presidential candidate during the campaign, the FBI was now in the unprecedented position of also investigating advisers close to the Republican candidate, an investigation that might well ensnare Trump himself.

  * * *

  —

  STRZOK AND ANOTHER agent flew to London the next day. With the election fast approaching, time pressure was intense. They showered, shaved, and changed into business suits at the U.S. embassy. That evening they met with the Australians Downer and Thompson. Both had clear recollections of their meeting with Papadopoulos and were very specific and precise about what he said, including the Russian offer to help the Trump campaign disseminate the damaging information on Clinton. Strzok and his colleague flew back the next morning.

  Strzok briefed Comey, McCabe, Priestap, Baker, and Page. The reaction, without exception, was grave concern.

  The group faced a dilemma with profound implications: whether to open a case file on Trump himself. What did Trump know about the Russian interference? What, if any, was his role?

  There was no question that the Russians had hacked the DNC, had orchestrated the release through WikiLeaks, and did it to disrupt the election, hurt Clinton, and help Trump. Was that unilateral activity by the Russians, or was there cooperation by the Trump campaign? In the worst-case scenario, Trump might have sanctioned it and actively worked with the Russians. It was not out of the realm of possibility. The threshold for opening a case isn’t that the subject has been proven guilty of anything but whether there’s a basis for finding out. Trump clearly seemed to meet that threshold.

  As a presidential candidate, however, he was not an ordinary subject. And the best-case scenario—equally plausible—was that Trump knew nothing about any of it.

  The group also briefly considered whether the public interest called for some sort of disclosure. But that idea was discarded almost as soon as it was broached. Unlike the Clinton case, there had been no public referral to the FBI. The resulting furor would inevitably tarnish the reputations of those being investigated, as well as Trump, when no wrongdoing had been established. And the wisdom of the bureau’s long-standing aversion to anything that might appear to be interfering in an election had been amply borne out in the Clinton case.

  As Strzok told his colleagues, “God forbid we taint someone and impact a candidate and an election.”

  Given the recent problems with leaks, Comey imposed unusual strictures on Crossfire Hurricane. It went without saying that, like Midyear, it was a SIM, a sensitive investigative matter. The case files were divided among three field offices: Papadopoulos to Chicago, Page to New York, and Manafort and Flynn to D.C. But it would be managed from FBI headquarters. Knowledge of the probe was strictly confined to the top echelon of the FBI and agents working in counterintelligence. No one was allowed to mention the case at morning briefings, where agents would ordinarily give updates on progress in major investigations.

  The FBI had to notify the Justice Department, where relations were still strained over the Midyear announcement. Strzok spoke to Toscas, his counterpart there, and urged him to keep the information within a small circle and, if possible, to withhold details from political appointees who had to be informed, even Yates and Lynch. Strzok feared that the subject of Crossfire Hurricane was “too juicy” not to leak.

  The need for secrecy before the election also cramped the FBI’s ability to get to the bottom of the matter. Operation Crossfire Hurricane had to rely on covert techniques, including the most covert of all—electronic surveillance and undercover agents.

  * * *

  —

  BRUCE OHR, AGED fifty-four, and his wife, Nellie, fifty-three, were punctual for their breakfast meeting with a former British spy at Washington’s venerable Mayflower Hotel on July 30. The pair—both bespectacled and slightly graying—hardly looked like characters out of a John Le Carré spy novel, but both had led surprisingly adventurous lives in and around the undercover world of Russian spies and drug traffickers.

  Both Ohrs had illustrious résumés: after graduating from Harvard College, Bruce went on to Harvard Law, and Nellie received a Ph.D. in Russian history from Stanford. She later taught Russian studies at Vassar College and did research for the CIA. Nellie now focused on Russia as a researcher for Fusion GPS, an intelligence and consulting firm founded by Glenn R. Simpson along with some other former Wall Street Journal reporters.

  Bruce Ohr had risen through the ranks of the Justice Department, focusing on drug trafficking and organized crime, especially Russian organized crime. As an associate deputy attorney general in the criminal division, he reported to Sally Yates.

  Christopher Steele, in his early fifties with graying hair, was in town from London and joined them at their table. Bruce Ohr had known Steele for nearly a decade, since the American embassy in London arranged for the two to meet. Ohr was in London then to discuss Russian organized crime with British officials, and at the time Steele was head of the Russia desk for MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency. Steele had been a British spy in Moscow in the 1990s and now ran his own consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Over the years, he and Ohr talked or had lunch about once a year and often discussed Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin. Steele provided a regular stream of useful information about Deripaska to both the FBI and Ohr, and Ohr considered him a reliable source.

  At their breakfast meeting. Steele reported that an attorney working for Deripaska had information that Trump’s campaign adviser Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Deripaska and Manafort had stolen money from him.

  That wasn’t the only link between a Trump campaign official and Russians of dubious character. Steele said that Carter Page, a name Ohr recognized from news reports as one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, had recently traveled to Russia, where he met with high-ranking Kremlin officials.

  And most troubling to Ohr, Steele said he had information that a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had said “they had Donald Trump over a barrel,” according to notes Ohr made of the conversation—referring to compromising information that might expose Trump to blackmail.

  As Ohr later said, “I was in a little bit of shock at that point.”

  Steele didn’t reveal any of his sources, but Ohr didn’t doubt his sincerity. Steele “was very a
larmed by this information, which I think he believed to be true,” Ohr later said. “And so I definitely got the impression he did not want Donald Trump to win the election.” In his notes, Ohr went even further: Steele was “desperate” that Trump not be elected.

  At the same time, Ohr was wary. “My impression is that Chris Steele believed his sources,” he later said. “What I should say in addition, though, is that whenever you are dealing with information from Russia, you have to be careful, because it is a very complicated place. And so even information from a good source has to be looked at carefully.”

  Later that day Steele sent Ohr an email: “Great to see you and Nellie this morning, Bruce. Let’s keep in touch on the substantive issues. Glenn is happy to speak to you on this if it would help.”

  “Glenn” was a reference to Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion, Nellie Ohr’s employer. Fusion, in turn, had hired Steele and his firm to investigate Trump, first on behalf of Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican hedge fund manager, and then, after Trump won the nomination, on behalf of a law firm working for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

  Steele had produced a series of relatively brief reports on the Trump campaign and its dealings with Russia. But as he indicated at his breakfast with Ohr, the magnitude of what he was hearing—the possibility that Trump campaign officials were working hand in glove with Russians and that Russia had compromising material on Trump—meant this was no ordinary assignment, but one he felt needed to be shared with American and British intelligence and national security concerns.

  So in early July, Steele had met with an FBI agent based in Rome, someone he knew from prior cases, and shared with him the first few memos he’d produced for Fusion. The agent, Mike Gaeta, sent the material to the FBI’s New York office, where no one took any immediate action. No one in New York knew anything about Crossfire Hurricane, and a counterintelligence operation involving a candidate for president wasn’t within New York’s purview.

  After their breakfast, Ohr contacted McCabe, whom Ohr knew from McCabe’s stint running the Russian organized crime task force in New York. As Ohr later put it, “Part of my job, as I saw it, as having been for a long time responsible for organized crime at the Department, was to try to gather as much information or introduce the FBI to possible sources of information.”

  Ohr met with McCabe and Page to pass on what he’d heard from Steele. “I tried to be clear that this is source information,” Ohr later testified. He cautioned McCabe and Page, “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody who’s related to the Clinton campaign.” He also mentioned that his wife worked for Fusion.

  Ohr also followed up with Simpson, who had shared information about Russian organized crime with him for years, much of which he passed on to the FBI. Simpson mentioned his concerns that the Trump campaign was working with the Russians and mentioned several of the same names that Steele had: Paul Manafort and Carter Page, and another name—Michael Cohen.

  Ohr would have preferred that Simpson speak directly to an FBI agent, but Simpson seemed more comfortable using Ohr as a go-between. McCabe and Page told Ohr to pass his information on to Strzok. Ohr, of course, had no way of knowing that the FBI had already launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and had opened case files on several of the names he’d just mentioned.

  Alarmed by these latest developments—all of which came on top of and were consistent with the revelations from the Australian ambassador to London—Page texted Strzok on August 8: Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”

  Strzok replied, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

  FIVE

  “THE BAND IS BACK TOGETHER”

  Just four days later, on August 12, 2016, Matthew Axelrod, who, like other Justice Department officials, was still seething over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear announcement, called McCabe to express his concerns about another sensitive and secret matter—the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

  By then, four separate FBI field offices were looking into the Clinton Foundation’s activities and donors—New York, Little Rock, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. The New York and Little Rock offices, in particular, were viewed by some within the Justice Department as hotbeds of anti-Clinton hostility, and agents there were agitating to ramp up their investigative activity, including issuing subpoenas, even as the presidential campaign was entering its final months. Axelrod warned McCabe that the FBI should ease off any overt investigative steps, like issuing subpoenas, until after the election, consistent with the department’s long-standing aversion to activities that might influence an election.

  With the tarmac incident still fresh in his mind, McCabe was shocked. “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” McCabe replied, in his recollection of the conversation. He couldn’t remember ever getting such a call from a high-level official at Justice.*

  That the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation was a closely guarded secret—like the Trump-Russia case, and nearly all investigations other than the anomalous Clinton email case. In congressional testimony in July defending his decisions in Midyear, Comey explicitly refused to say whether the FBI was examining the Clinton Foundation.

  But there had been rampant speculation ever since the publication of the incendiary book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist with ties to the Trump adviser Steve Bannon and the billionaire Trump financial backers Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. Schweizer had worked on a film about Ronald Reagan with Bannon and was a senior editor at large for Bannon’s Breitbart News. The Mercer Family Foundation helped fund the book with a $1.7 million contribution.

  Clinton Cash suggested that Clinton donors had essentially traded cash for favors and influence at the State Department while Clinton was secretary of state. Clinton had entered into an agreement providing for State Department vetting of any contributions to the foundation from foreign governments, and the Clinton campaign provided a detailed rebuttal when the book was published in the spring of 2015. It said there was “zero evidence to back up its outlandish claims.”

  Still, the book was taken seriously by the mainstream press. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post got advance copies and, with the agreement of the publisher, pursued leads from the book. As Susan Milligan wrote in U.S. News & World Report, “When a source, no matter how agenda-driven, offers up actual, hard information, based on public records, the motivation becomes meaningless. And this is why Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton (along with their loyal team of defenders) must expect news outlets to scour and report out every accusation” in Clinton Cash.

  Like the email controversy, the foundation issues were self-inflicted by the Clintons. Their insistence they could run a foundation accepting major contributions while Hillary was secretary of state and then a candidate for president all but guaranteed controversy. There was no denying the allure to donors of the possibility that a well-timed donation, much like campaign contributions, might yield future benefits. The foundation was staffed with Clinton campaign officials and loyal allies, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, two Hillary aides at the center of the email affair.

  As The Boston Globe’s editorial board observed on August 16, “The foundation should remove a political—and actual—distraction and stop accepting funding. If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down.” While it praised the foundation’s “good causes,” it added, “As long as either of the Clintons are in public office, or actively seeking it, they should not operate a charity, too.”

  Despite McCabe’s reaction to Axelrod, neither he nor anyone else at FBI headquarters was all that impressed by the foundation case. Although a formal investigation had commenced, agents
had uncovered little beyond the highly circumstantial evidence and innuendo in Clinton Cash. It was common knowledge that Clinton had used her tenure as secretary of state to burnish her résumé for a presidential run and knew that her every move would be scrutinized. She was advised by highly competent lawyers. How likely was it that she’d risk yet another scandal, let alone criminal prosecution, by trading favors for contributions to the foundation?

  Given that the election was less than two months away, McCabe and Comey agreed that the FBI would ease off for now, and also that the case should be consolidated in the field office in Little Rock, where the foundation was nominally headquartered. Both moves infuriated agents in New York, where the foundation conducted most of its work; the agents there felt McCabe had told them to “stand down,” as they later put it, and bowed to political pressure.

  * * *

  —

  WITHIN THE FBI, there was also a spirited debate about how aggressively to pursue Crossfire Hurricane, because the more aggressive the investigation, the more likely it was to be discovered and publicized. Not only would that again plunge the FBI into the middle of an election, but it might also jeopardize a confidential source. As Strzok put it, “One of the debates on how to pursue this information was how much risk to put that sensitive source in because, in my experience, the more aggressive an investigation, the greater chance of burning or compromising that source.”

  On the other hand, there was urgency about getting to the bottom of it, because if Trump really was illegally colluding with the Russians, that was a fact of vital importance.

  Page and Strzok tended to fall on opposite sides of the issue: Strzok wanted to be aggressive; Page felt the FBI could take its time, in large part because all the polls suggested it was highly unlikely Trump would win.