Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  The application for Page was submitted in October, sometime after October 7 (the most recent date mentioned in the application; the precise date the application was filed hasn’t been disclosed).

  “This application targets Carter Page,” the application began. “The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government.”

  The fifty-seven-page document reviewed in considerable detail the background of Operation Crossfire Hurricane and its origins. This included disclosures by Papadopoulos, as well as extensive material that remains classified. But Steele appears as a prominent source. “In July 2016, Page traveled to Russia and delivered the commencement address at the New Economic School,” the application stated. “In addition to giving this address, the FBI has learned that Page met with at least two Russian officials during this trip. First, according to information provided by an FBI confidential human source (Source #1)”—a reference to Steele—“Page had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, who is the President of Rosneft [a Russian energy company] and a close associate to Russian President Putin.”

  The application went into extensive detail about “Source #1” and his potential motivations. After describing the FBI’s previous dealings with Steele and his reliability, the application stated that Steele was approached by an “identified U.S. person”—Glenn Simpson—“with whom Source #1 [had had] a long-standing business relationship.” Simpson “never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” (Throughout the application, Trump is described only as “Candidate #1.”) “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”

  The application continued, “Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #l’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible.”

  The application made no specific mention that the Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee was paying Fusion for the research, because neither Steele nor anyone at the FBI knew the identity of Simpson’s clients, which was confidential information. But the FBI did “speculate” that the motive was to harm Trump—and made that clear to the court.

  The application was granted by the five-judge FISA court.

  As Crossfire Hurricane entered a new, more intense phase, the Clinton emails faded in importance. “We were consumed by these ever-increasing allegations” about Russian interference, Strzok later testified. By comparison, the discovery of a new trove of Clinton emails was “another thing to worry about. And it’s important, and we need to do it,” Strzok said. But at the same time, he faced a much more urgent question: “Is the government of Russia trying to get somebody elected here in the United States?”

  As Strzok’s boss, Bill Priestap, said, “My focus wasn’t on Midyear anymore.” He conceded, “Yes, we’ve got to review it. Yes, it may contain evidence we didn’t know, but I’d be shocked if it’s evidence that’s going to change the outcome of the case because, again, aside from this, did we see enough information previously in which I felt confident that we had gotten to the bottom of the issue? I did.” He continued, “As important as this was, in some ways it was water under the bridge. The issue of the day was what’s going to be done to possibly interfere with the election.”

  For Comey himself, “it was Russia, Russia, Russia all the time.”

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  CLINTON’S EMAILS MIGHT have been supplanted as the primary focus at FBI headquarters, but hardly anywhere else. Quick to sense a political opening after Christie’s incendiary speech and the raucous chants of “lock her up” at the Republican convention, Trump rarely missed an opportunity to keep the issue alive. He brought it up repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the televised presidential debates.

  “I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it,” Trump told Hillary Clinton at the second televised debate, held in St. Louis on October 9. “But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

  Trump continued, “In my opinion, the people that are the long-term workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this, where emails, and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 emails.” He continued, “You acid wash or bleach them, as you would say, a very expensive process.”

  Clinton tried to deflect the charge onstage, admitting again that she’d made a mistake by using a private server. She also pointed out that most of what Trump said was “absolutely false.” (She was correct: she did not delete any emails after receiving a subpoena, nor did she or anyone else “acid wash” or “bleach” them.) “But I’m not surprised.” She added, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.”

  “Because you’d be in jail,” Trump shot back.

  One line in particular leaped out at FBI headquarters: “The people that are the long-term workers at the FBI are furious.” Where had that come from? There had been no sign of widespread dissension within the FBI’s rank and file. Still, there was mounting concern among some in Comey’s inner circle that there was a germ of truth to Trump’s claim. Some of the most vocal critics of the case’s resolution and Comey’s announcement appeared to be within the extended FBI community, perhaps not so surprising given the FBI’s conservative leanings and some of the anti-Clinton remarks Page and Strzok had heard during the investigation. Retired agents, in particular—reflecting a generation that was even more white, male, and Republican than the current force—were stirring up dissent.

  On October 7, the president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI sent an email to headquarters, “Controversy over the Director/Clinton Email Situation,” saying, “I continue to hear negative comments about the Bureau’s handling of the Clinton email controversy from former agents. This is after a period where things seemed to quiet and comments mellowed.”

  As Lisa Page put it, the FBI had gotten “a ton of criticism from the formers about why we let her off the hook, and why she should have been prosecuted, and why if she had, if they had done this, they would have prosecuted, all those sorts of criticism.”

  Addressing the FBI’s annual convention of special agents in charge in San Diego that month, Comey acknowledged, “I have gotten emails from some employees about this, who said if I did what Hillary Clinton did I’d be in huge trouble.” At the same time, “What I’m getting from the left is savage attacks for violating policy and law by talking publicly about somebody who wasn’t indicted, by revealing facts that you should’ve been prescribed from revealing by decades of tradition.” As he pointed out, “It is a uniquely difficult time.”

  So Comey devoted a good part of his speech to explaining, yet again, his reasoning in the Midyear case. Back in Washington, at the behest of Michael Kortan, the FBI’s head of public affairs, Page put together some talking points for answering questions about Midyear, especially from retired agents. Strzok, too, discussed the case in a conference call with former agents.

  Despite these efforts to tamp down the controversy, on October 17 it broke into public view. The Daily Caller, a conservative, pro-Trump website co-founded by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host and commentator, reported that “FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey urging the Justice Department to not prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information.” The story named no sources but said, “According to an interview transcript given to The Daily Caller, provided by an int
ermediary who spoke to two federal agents with the bureau last Friday, agents are frustrated by Comey’s leadership.”

  The only person quoted by name in the story was Joseph diGenova, a fierce Trump partisan, a Washington lawyer with close ties to Rudolph Giuliani, and a frequent guest on Carlson’s TV show. “People inside the bureau are furious,” diGenova maintained. “They are embarrassed.” Then he turned his attack onto Comey personally. Comey was a “hack” and a “crook. They think he’s fundamentally dishonest. They have no confidence in him. The bureau inside right now is a mess.”

  The whole story looked as if it were ginned up by diGenova and might easily have been dismissed as right-wing agitprop. But then Trump tweeted a link to the article, “EXCLUSIVE: FBI Agents Say Comey ‘Stood in the Way’ of Clinton Email Investigation,” and “‘Don’t know how Comey can keep going.’”

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  THE WEINER LAPTOP investigation might have languished indefinitely but for the determined efforts of the New York case agent who examined the laptop’s contents.* As the sole proprietor of what he now knew to be hundreds of thousands of emails with Clinton’s name on them, and the election just a month away, he was, as he later put it, “a little scared.” Even though “I’m not political” and “I don’t care who wins this election,” he feared the revelation that the bureau sat on such a trove “is going to make us look really, really horrible.”

  As he put it, “Something was going to come crashing down.” Even though “I didn’t work the Hillary Clinton matter. My understanding at the time was I am telling you people I have private Hillary Clinton emails, number one, and BlackBerry messages, number two. I’m telling you that we have potentially ten times the volume that Director Comey said we had on the record. Why isn’t anybody here?” He also worried that Comey hadn’t been informed. “As a big admirer of the guy, and I think he’s a straight shooter, I felt like he needed to know that we got this. And I didn’t know if he did.”

  Feeling he “had nowhere else to turn,” on October 19 he went outside the normal chain of command and met with two prosecutors from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. He figured if they “got the attention of Preet Bharara, maybe they’d kick some of these lazy FBI folks in the butt and get them moving.”

  The prosecutors got the sense that the agent was stressed and worried he’d be blamed if nothing more were done and the existence of the emails became public. He worried that “somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this.” Concerned that the agent might “act out,” they briefed Bharara. Although the Clinton email investigation lay outside the Southern District’s jurisdiction, Bharara had someone get in touch with Toscas at the Justice Department in case “something had fallen through the cracks.”

  The news that his message had gotten through came as a relief to the agent. “Not to sound sappy, but I appreciate you guys understanding how uneasy I felt about the situation,” he said in an October 21 email to the Southern District prosecutors he’d met with. And he wrote to his boss and another agent in New York: The prosecutors “understood my concerns yesterday about the nature of the stuff I have on Weiner computer (ie, that I will be scapegoated if it comes out that the FBI had this stuff). They appreciated that I was in a tight spot and spoke to their chain of command who agreed.” He now felt reassured “I did the right thing by speaking up.”

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  TWO DAYS LATER, on October 23, the Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett broke the news that the Virginia governor McAuliffe’s political action committee had given $467,500 to Jill McCabe’s unsuccessful run for the state senate: “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife.”

  That came as news to McCabe, who, by design, had known nothing about contributions to his wife’s campaign.

  The FBI issued a statement, saying McCabe played no role in the campaign and at the time had no involvement in any Clinton investigations. The article also noted that McCabe had sought ethics guidance and had followed it.

  Still, that McAuliffe had given such a large sum to Jill McCabe’s campaign made Comey uneasy about the appearance of any influence or conflicts. He wished McCabe had told him (unaware that McCabe hadn’t known). In that case, he would have assigned someone else to oversee the email investigation—not because he thought there was an actual conflict or that McCabe had done anything improper, but because it might be used “to undercut the credibility of the institution.”

  Those concerns were immediately borne out: Trump promptly tweeted a link to the article, and the Republican National Committee chair, Reince Priebus, issued a statement: “Given all we know about how the corrupt Clinton machine operates, it’s hard not to see this as anything other than a down payment to influence the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”

  Rudy Giuliani jumped on the news, calling the Journal story a “shot to the solar plexus” in an appearance on Fox & Friends. He added, “We’ve got a couple of surprises left.”

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  THE DAY AFTER the Wall Street Journal story, Toscas asked McCabe about the status of the Weiner laptop, a subject that had largely slipped McCabe’s mind. McCabe asked Strzok and Priestap and realized with some dismay that the investigation had languished. As Jim Baker put it, “We took our collective eyes off the ball, didn’t pay attention to it, and when it came back and we were informed that it was not resolved, then it became a crisis.”

  Prompted by McCabe’s questions, on October 26 Strzok and Toscas convened a conference call that included other Midyear team members, and they finally spoke directly to the New York case agent. He felt frustrated, as he put it, that they were “asking questions that I had already repeatedly answered in other calls.” The laptop contained as many as 650,000 emails, and as the agent told them, “We could have every email that Huma and Hillary ever sent each other.”

  These appeared to include the emails from Clinton’s earliest days as secretary of state—the time period when she was most likely to have explained or commented on her decision to use private email—which the FBI had been unable to retrieve through other means.

  That revelation rekindled the sense of urgency that had briefly prevailed back in September. For Strzok this was the “tipping point” that this might not be just another case of duplicate emails. Strzok briefed Page, who described the development as “good news, in a bad news way”—good news, she explained, in the sense that “more evidence is always good news. It might either change our decision or outcome or further substantiate the outcome we reached.” And bad news, because “I cannot believe we are, we are here. We are doing this again on October 26th. Like, oh, my goodness.”

  That same day, The Wall Street Journal’s Barrett again contacted Kortan, indicating he wasn’t finished with the McCabe story. Now he was pursuing a lead that McCabe had tried to tamp down the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation before the election, which, if true, suggested that McCabe had favored Clinton in the wake of his wife’s McAuliffe-financed campaign.

  In an email to Kortan, Barrett asked if it was “accurate” that, “in the summer, McCabe himself gave some instruction as to how to proceed with the Clinton Foundation probe, given that it was the height of election season and the FBI did not want to make a lot of overt moves that could be seen as going after her or drawing attention to the probe.” He asked, “Anything else I should know?”

  Kortan conferred with Page and McCabe, who suggested Page talk to Barrett and find out more about the story.

  That same day, Giuliani again teased an upcoming “surprise” that would propel Trump to victory. Appearing again on Fox News, he said to expect “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.

  “I’m talking about some pretty big surprise,” he said.

  Comey and McCabe wondered, what was Giuliani talking
about? Was someone in the FBI, likely in New York, leaking?

  Comey ordered the FBI’s inspection division to launch an investigation. “I was concerned that there appeared to be in the media a number of stories that might have been based on communications reporters or nonreporters like Rudy Giuliani were having with people in the New York field office,” Comey later explained. “In particular, in, I want to say mid-October, maybe a little bit later, Mr. Giuliani was making statements that appeared to be based on his knowledge of workings inside the FBI New York. And then my recollection is there were other stories that were in the same ballpark that gave me a general concern that we may have a leak problem—unauthorized disclosure problem out of New York.” The same day as Giuliani’s Fox appearance, McCabe hastily arranged a conference call with Lynch and the head of the FBI’s New York office, who got “ripped by the AG on leaks,” as he put it.

  That same evening, Strzok and others briefed McCabe on the status of the Weiner laptop and their call with the New York case agent. Even though McCabe was going to be out of town the next day, they agreed it was urgent they brief Comey. Early the next morning—at 5:20—McCabe emailed: “Boss, The MYR team has come across some additional actions they believe they need to take. I think we should probably gather today to discuss implications if you have any space on your calendar. I am happy to join by phone. Will push to Lisa and Jim to coordinate if you are good.”

  Comey responded at 7:13 a.m., “Copy.”

  The Midyear team was waiting in Comey’s conference room when the director walked in at 10:00 a.m. with a grin on his face. He had no idea what the meeting was about but was amused to see the familiar faces of the Midyear team gathered together once again. “The band is back together,” he observed. The grin quickly faded as he saw the sober looks around the conference table.