“We don’t need to go at a total breakneck speed because so long as he doesn’t become president, there isn’t the same threat to national security,” Page argued. “I mean if he is not elected, then, to the extent that the Russians were colluding with members of his team, we’re still going to investigate that even without him being president, because any time the Russians do anything with a U.S. person, we care, and it’s very serious to us.”
“One school of thought, of which Lisa was a member,” Strzok later testified, was “saying the polls, everybody in America is saying Secretary Clinton is the prohibitive favorite to be the next President, and therefore, based on that, these allegations about the Trump campaign, we don’t need to risk that source. We can just take our time. We can run a traditional years-long counterintelligence operation, and we don’t really need to worry because he’s not going to be elected.”
But Strzok argued that the FBI needed to move quickly, no matter what the polls said. “If candidate Trump is elected, we have months, and we may find ourselves in a position where we have these allegations potentially about people who are being nominated for senior national security roles, and then we’re in a really bad spot because we don’t know whether these allegations are true or false; we don’t know the extent of these allegations and the truth and how extensive or not. So my advocacy was we need to pursue these cases in a way that will allow us to be responsible and protecting the national security of the United States.”
Strzok texted Page after a discussion of the issue in McCabe’s office. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected,” Strzok wrote, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
As Strzok explained the text, “The analogy I am drawing is, you know, you’re unlikely to die before you’re 40, but nevertheless, many people buy life insurance. The similarity is that, regardless of what the polls are saying, that Secretary Clinton is the favorite to win, however likely or not it is who’s going to win, just like life insurance, you have to take into account any potential possibility. You need to do your job regardless of whether it’s highly likely or not.”
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COMEY USED THE occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks to remind all FBI employees that “Sunday marks 15 years since 3,000 innocent people were murdered in our country on a single, crystal-clear late summer morning. It somehow seems both yesterday, and a lifetime ago. Much has changed since then, but what matters most has not changed. We have shown the humility and agility to constantly improve, which is essential. But after 15 hard years, we have also stayed the same in the ways that matter most: our fidelity to doing things the right way; our bravery in the face of evil; and our integrity—the determination to always be honest and independent.”
He said nothing about the extraordinary fact that the FBI was simultaneously scrutinizing both candidates for president of the United States.
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ON SEPTEMBER 19, the file Steele had handed over to Agent Gaeta in Rome finally showed up in Strzok’s email in-box. He read with mounting fascination what soon became known as the “Steele dossier,” though at this early stage it consisted of only a few files.
Marked “Confidential/Sensitive Source” and dated June 30, the memo began,
Summary
—Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.
—So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
—Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.
—A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on orders. However it has not as yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.
After this introduction, the dossier went into far more detail, especially regarding the “perverted” activities:
1. Source asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was seen as inimical to Russia’s interests.
2. The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
3. However, there were other aspects to TRUMP’s engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable “kompromat” (compromising material) on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSE control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
The Moscow Ritz-Carlton incident involving TRUMP reported above was confirmed by Source E who said that s/he and several of the Staff were aware of it at the time and subsequently. S/he believed it had happened in 2013. Source E provided an introduction for a company ethnic Russian operative to Source F, a female staffer at the hotel when TRUMP had stayed there, who also confirmed the story. Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer) asserted that unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.
In many ways, Strzok was confounded by what he read, and not because of the salacious details about the visit to the Ritz-Carlton. While he was concerned at the possibility Trump might have exposed himself to blackmail, direct ties between Russia and the Trump campaign intended to influence the election were far more worrisome. Trump had been divorced twice, and he was known to be a womanizer, so it was hardly shocking that he might have engaged in lewd conduct in a foreign capital. It wasn’t illegal or anything the FBI would ordinarily investigate. But it was so detailed and salacious that it seemed tailor-made to smear Trump and wreak havoc with his campaign. That was cause for concern.
So was the lack of what the FBI refers to as “actionable intelligence.” Much of what was in the dossier could have been divined after the fact by any close observer. There was little the FBI could act upon. The dossier did not, for example, give any clues to what Russian intelligence operatives were doing now or planned to do—such as details of upcoming meetings with members of the Trump campaign the FBI could monitor.
Strzok knew something about the origins of the dossier and who was paying for it—not that it had ties to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, but certainly
that it was politically motivated to damage Trump. That didn’t mean its contents weren’t true, but when one assessed its veracity, motive needed to be considered.
More broadly, Strzok was well aware that Russia played a long-term intelligence game. Far more important than whether Trump won or lost was its goal of disrupting the American democratic process. The dossier seemed almost too well suited for that.
At the same time, much of it rang true. The FBI was already familiar with most of the names. The time frame appeared to be accurate. The FBI believed that the Russians were in fact trying to influence and disrupt the election.
And Strzok was convinced that Steele himself hadn’t fabricated the documents. While Strzok didn’t know Steele, others described him as cautious, with a long track record of valuable intelligence, a patriot who believed in the Western democracies.
Much like Ohr, Strzok didn’t really trust anything that came out of Russia. But the FBI had to see what could be proven or disproven while still keeping the entire investigation a secret.
And true or not, if Strzok and Page wanted to “stop” Trump, they had just been handed the perfect weapon.
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TWO DAYS AFTER the FBI received the Steele dossier, on September 21, the London tabloid the Daily Mail ran a front-page “exclusive”:
Anthony Weiner carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl during which she claims he asked her to dress up in “school-girl” outfits for him on a video messaging application and pressed her to engage in “rape fantasies,” DailyMail.com can exclusively report.
The girl, whose name is being withheld by DailyMail.com because she is a minor, said the online relationship began last January while she was a high school sophomore and before Weiner’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, announced she was ending their marriage.
Weiner was aware that the girl was underage, according to DailyMail.com interviews with the girl and her father, as well as a cache of online messages.
In just three paragraphs, the British tabloid had laid out all the elements of a crime defined by New York Penal Law 235: disseminating indecent materials to minors.
Because it involved a minor, this incident was exponentially more threatening to Weiner than his prior much-publicized sexual escapades, which had ended his once-promising career in Congress, shattered his 2013 run for New York City mayor, and—after he sent lurid photos while in bed with his four-year-old son—finally caused Huma Abedin to leave him and file for divorce.
Through it all Clinton had loyally stood by her top aide. They were so close that Clinton referred to Abedin as a “second daughter.” Bill Clinton officiated at her 2010 marriage to Weiner, then an up-and-coming Democratic congressman. Clinton had firmly rebuffed suggestions to distance herself from Abedin as the Weiner scandals mounted and Abedin loyally and painfully stood by her husband. Abedin was vice-chair of Clinton’s campaign and by the candidate’s side at a Hamptons fund-raiser when the Daily Mail story broke.
As The New York Times noted, Weiner’s behavior “threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.”
In what would prove to be a spectacular miscalculation, the Times reported that Clinton’s advisers “were confident Mr. Weiner’s actions would not hurt Mrs. Clinton.”
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FOLLOWING THE Daily Mail article, the New York field office and the Manhattan U.S. attorney, Preet Bharara, took the lead in the Weiner investigation. On September 26, the government asked for and was granted a search warrant and seized Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer the same day. One of the FBI’s digital extraction technicians noticed within hours that there were about 340,000 emails on the laptop. Among the domain addresses were yahoo.com, state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, clintonemail.com, and hillaryclinton.com. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” the technician wondered.
At the technician’s request, the computer was looked at by another agent, who described it as an “oh shit” moment and agreed they needed to report the discovery “up the chain” immediately. They also drafted an email that began, “Just putting this on the record because of the optics of the case.”
Two days later, on September 28, the New York FBI office’s assistant director, Bill Sweeney, relayed news of the discovery during a weekly teleconference with FBI headquarters in Washington. Ordinarily, Comey would have been presiding, but he was testifying that afternoon on Capitol Hill, so McCabe handled it. One participant said that Sweeney’s revelation was like “dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting” and stated that “everybody realized the significance of this, like, potential trove of information.” He said Sweeney “very much emphasized the significance of what he thought they had there.”
But McCabe later had only a hazy memory of Sweeney’s remarks. Later that day, he told Comey, in passing, “Hey, Boss, I just want you to know that the criminal squad in New York has got Anthony Weiner’s laptop and I think it may have some connect to Midyear,” or something to that effect, and he might have mentioned Abedin. But McCabe’s comments didn’t sink in. Comey didn’t make the connection that Weiner was married to Abedin or that Clinton’s emails had been found on his laptop.
Strzok texted Page that evening: “Got called up to Andy’s earlier . . . hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny, includes a ton of material from spouse. Sending team up tomorrow to review . . . this will never end.” Strzok even considered going himself: “So I kinda want to go up to NY tomorrow, coordinate this.”
A team was dispatched but didn’t get very far. The search warrant used to seize Weiner’s laptop covered only child pornography and disseminating indecent materials—not Hillary Clinton’s emails. The U.S. attorney’s office had told the agents they couldn’t open and read the Clinton-Abedin emails without another search warrant, though it was okay to read the headers.
At this juncture, the New York agents thought the Midyear team in Washington was going to ask for guidance about getting a search warrant and get back to them. Strzok and others on the Midyear team were under the impression that agents in the New York office would continue processing the laptop and get back to them with more information about what was on it, a task that could easily take months—in “January, February 2017, whenever it gets done,” according to Strzok. Others, too, thought the legal and technical issues involved in gaining access to the emails would take months to resolve, well after the upcoming election.
Any sense of urgency drained away. While sporadic discussions of the Weiner laptop continued within lower ranks at FBI headquarters, it wasn’t even on Comey’s radar. Strzok got back to the all-consuming task of the Russia investigation.
McCabe alerted the Justice Department about the Weiner laptop the first week in October and told a Justice Department lawyer he was sending an agent to review the emails. But both thought they would mostly be duplicates of what they’d already seen, given how thorough the investigation had been.
That was as far as it got. A few days later, on October 7, The Washington Post published a video showing Trump on his way to tape a 2005 episode of Access Hollywood in which Trump boasted to the host Billy Bush, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” In the midst of the resulting furor, WikiLeaks released another batch of thousands of emails hacked from a Gmail account belonging to John Podesta, chair of the Clinton campaign. The Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence issued a joint
statement blaming the hack on Russia, noting that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Two days later, FBI agents contacted Podesta, who told reporters on Clinton’s campaign plane that he’d spoken to the FBI that weekend. “Russian interference in this election and apparently on behalf of Trump is, I think, of the utmost concern to all Americans, whether you’re a Democrat or independent or Republican,” Podesta said. And he suggested the Trump campaign might have been in on the leaks, noting that Trump’s campaign adviser Roger Stone had boasted about his ties to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “So I think it’s a reasonable assumption to—or at least a reasonable conclusion—that Mr. Stone had advance warning and the Trump campaign had advance warning about what Assange was going to do,” Podesta said. He also cited Trump’s perplexing “bromance” with Vladimir Putin and added that Trump’s foreign policy positions “are more consistent with Russian foreign policy than with U.S. foreign policy.”
Podesta had just publicly revealed, perhaps inadvertently, the closely guarded secret that the FBI was indeed investigating Russian election interference and ties to the Trump campaign.
* * *
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TOP OFFICIALS AT FBI headquarters were close to being overwhelmed by Russia—which is likely the main reason the Weiner laptop discovery fell through the cracks. For just as the new trove of Clinton emails was discovered, Strzok was helping put together a top secret application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a court order authorizing electronic surveillance of Carter Page, the Trump campaign adviser with many suspicious ties to Russian officials. The application had to be reviewed and approved by Comey, and top FBI officials—McCabe, Priestap, and Baker among them—were all involved. Such FISA applications are also reviewed within the top ranks of the Justice Department.
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