Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  Zebley had represented Justin Cooper, the Clinton aide who installed the server at the Clintons’ residence and was a witness in the email case. But that didn’t make him a Clinton partisan or pose a conflict.

  And Mueller himself, of course, was a Republican.

  Trump had less to fear from any political bias than from the team’s deeply held belief in the rule of law.

  * * *

  —

  THE SATURDAY AFTER Mueller was appointed, May 20, Rosenstein called McCabe to ask him to meet with Mueller that weekend to discuss logistics. They gathered in Rosenstein’s office the next day. Zebley was there from Mueller’s team, along with one of Rosenstein’s staff. McCabe brought Carl Ghattas from the FBI’s national security team.

  An entirely different Rosenstein was on display from the previous week: Mueller’s appointment had relieved some of the pressure on him, but gone was any sense of warmth or willingness to confide in McCabe. And instead of logistics, he confronted McCabe with the photo of him in his wife’s campaign T-shirt. “You should think about recusing,” Rosenstein told him.

  McCabe was startled and upset. It wasn’t fair. As he’d already told Sessions and McGahn during his job interview, McCabe told Rosenstein that the bureau had already thoroughly examined the issue of his wife’s campaign and McAuliffe’s contributions and concluded there was no conflict. McCabe had done nothing wrong. He offered to produce internal FBI memos that had reached that conclusion.

  But Rosenstein persisted. Finally McCabe said, “If anyone should be recusing himself, it’s you.” After all, Rosenstein was a major witness to Comey’s firing. “You’re involved in this.”

  The comment infuriated Rosenstein. He told McCabe and Ghattas to leave the room so he could talk to Mueller.

  When they returned, Rosenstein looked sullen. “I’m not getting involved in this,” Mueller said. “It’s not in my scope. You guys have to figure this out.”

  * * *

  —

  TRUMP WAS SUPPOSED to name his choice for a new FBI director that week, but didn’t. He wasn’t that happy with any of the candidates he’d met. Trump left the next day for his first foreign visit as president, to Saudi Arabia followed by Israel. Accompanying him on Air Force One was an entourage that included Melania, Jared Kushner and Ivanka, Bannon, and Priebus. That the president was leaving a capital consumed by scandal, intrigue, the firing of the FBI director, and the appointment of a special counsel drew numerous comparisons to Richard Nixon’s trip to Egypt at the height of the Watergate crisis.

  During the flight Priebus asked Trump about Sessions’s resignation letter. Both he and Bannon worried Trump might use it as leverage with Sessions, as a kind of “shock collar,” as Priebus put it. As long as Trump had the letter, he had “DOJ by the throat,” Priebus said. He and Bannon had told Sessions they’d get the letter back from the president with a notation that he was not accepting it. But Trump told Priebus on the plane that the letter was back at the White House, somewhere in the residence.

  In fact it was in Trump’s pocket. On the flight to Tel Aviv he pulled it out and brandished it before some of his other senior advisers and asked what he should do with it.

  Back in Washington, Priebus again asked for Sessions’s letter. Trump “slapped the desk” and said he’d left it at their hotel. But Trump subsequently opened his desk drawer, pulled out the letter, and showed it to the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter.

  Back from the trip, Trump kept up a steady drumbeat of criticisms of Mueller and what Trump considered the special counsel’s conflicts. As the president later tweeted, “Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend.”

  He also complained that the law firm where Mueller had been a partner, WilmerHale, had taken on clients who challenged Trump policies, such as his tough stand on immigration. The firm also represented the Trump family members Ivanka and Jared Kushner.

  But even his closest advisers had trouble taking any of these complaints seriously. Mueller had resigned from Trump National in 2011 and asked in a letter to the club if a pro rata portion of his initiation fee could be refunded. The club’s controller had replied that he would be placed on a waiting list, which was the club’s usual refund policy. That had been the end of the correspondence. There was nothing “nasty” about it, or even a dispute. Why Trump thought otherwise—or was even aware of such a minor administrative detail—was a mystery.

  Trump hadn’t “turned down” Mueller to be FBI director; he’d sought Mueller’s advice, but Mueller neither applied for nor asked for the position.

  That a large law firm like WilmerHale had clients opposed to some of Trump’s policies wasn’t a conflict for Mueller. Trump wasn’t hiring WilmerHale to represent him. And Mueller hadn’t had any involvement with Ivanka or Kushner, who were prospective witnesses in the investigation.

  Mueller and Comey weren’t even close friends, though the fact that Mueller and Comey seemed cut from the same cloth (as The Wall Street Journal had noted) is probably what most unnerved Trump.

  Bannon told Trump that his complaints about Mueller were “ridiculous,” and the issue about the golf club fees was both “ridiculous and petty.”

  McGahn, too, told Trump the purported conflicts were “silly.”

  Trump ignored them.

  Trump took his complaints about Mueller to McGahn and asked him to reach out to Rosenstein. Now that a special counsel was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, McGahn was a key potential witness, which made contacting Rosenstein even more inappropriate. McGahn said he wouldn’t do it and told Trump he should enlist one of his personal lawyers.

  Even then, it was a bad idea. It would “look like still trying to meddle in [the] investigation” and “knocking out Mueller” would be “[a]nother fact used to claim obst[ruction] of just[ice],” according to notes of the conversation. The notes also indicate that McGahn warned Trump that his “biggest exposure” was not the act of firing Comey but his “other contacts” and “calls” and his “ask re: Flynn.”

  On May 23, the Justice Department said its ethics lawyers had reviewed potential conflicts involving Robert Mueller and “determined that Mr. Mueller’s participation in the matters assigned to him is appropriate.”

  * * *

  —

  A WEEK LATER, Trump finally sent Sessions’s resignation letter back to him, and only then because McGahn and Bannon had kept insisting on it. On it he’d scrawled “not accepted.”

  That same day, Trump interviewed yet another candidate to be FBI director: Christopher A. Wray, apparently at the behest of Chris Christie. (Wray had represented Christie in the Bridgegate scandal, and the two had been friends since they worked together as young lawyers in the Justice Department.) But Wray had also worked closely with Comey, as an assistant attorney general when Comey was the deputy, and Mueller, when Mueller was FBI director. The Yale-educated Wray was also cut from the same mold of elite former prosecutors that had troubled the Wall Street Journal editorial writers.

  Nonetheless, a week later Trump tweeted the news: “I will be nominating Christopher A. Wray, a man of impeccable credentials, to be the new Director of the FBI. Details to follow.”

  * * *

  —

  ALMOST EXACTLY ONE month after he was fired, Comey appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian influence on the presidential election. In the wake of the explosive reporting on his memos and Trump’s request for loyalty and interference in the Flynn investigation, Comey had maintained his silence. The public’s curiosity had reached fever pitch. For better or worse, Comey was the man of the hour, eclipsing anything he’d experienced b
efore, even at the height of the Ashcroft controversy.

  Spectators started lining up at 4:15 a.m. to get one of the coveted seats in the hearing room. All the major television networks aired live coverage, and more than eighteen million viewers initially tuned in, rising to nearly twenty million as Comey’s testimony continued. Millions more watched on live streaming services.

  “When I was appointed FBI Director in 2013, I understood that I served at the pleasure of the president,” Comey began. “Even though I was appointed to a 10-year term, which Congress created in order to underscore the importance of the FBI being outside of politics and independent, I understood that I could be fired by a president for any reason or for no reason at all. And on May the ninth, when I learned that I had been fired, for that reason I immediately came home as a private citizen. But then the explanations, the shifting explanations, confused me and increasingly concerned me. They confused me because the president and I had had multiple conversations about my job, both before and after he took office, and he had repeatedly told me I was doing a great job, and he hoped I would stay. And I had repeatedly assured him that I did intend to stay and serve out the years of my term. He told me repeatedly that he had talked to lots of people about me, including our current Attorney General, and had learned that I was doing a great job, and that I was extremely well-liked by the FBI workforce.

  “So it confused me when I saw on television the president saying that he actually fired me because of the Russia investigation, and learned again from the media that he was telling privately other parties that my firing had relieved great pressure on the Russian investigation. I was also confused by the initial explanation that was offered publicly that I was fired because of the decisions I had made during the election year. That didn’t make sense to me for a whole bunch of reasons, including the time and all the water that had gone under the bridge since those hard decisions that had to be made. That didn’t make any sense to me. And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me and more importantly the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple. And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them.”

  Comey also saw his opening statement as a way to make the farewell speech he hadn’t been able to deliver:

  I worked every day at the FBI to help make that great organization better, and I say help, because I did nothing alone at the FBI. There are no indispensable people at the FBI. The organization’s great strength is that its values and abilities run deep and wide. The FBI will be fine without me. The FBI’s mission will be relentlessly pursued by its people, and that mission is to protect the American people and uphold the constitution of the United States. I will deeply miss being part of that mission, but this organization and its mission will go on long beyond me and long beyond any particular administration.

  I have a message before I close for my former colleagues of the FBI but first I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is and always will be independent. And now to my former colleagues, if I may.

  At this point Comey struggled to hold back tears: “I am so sorry that I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to you properly. It was the honor of my life to serve beside you, to be part of the FBI family, and I will miss it for the rest of my life. Thank you for standing watch. Thank you for doing so much good for this country. Do that good as long as ever you can.”

  In written comments distributed to the committee, Comey gave a detailed account of his interactions with the president: the January 6 briefing at Trump Tower; the January 27 dinner; the February 14 meeting in the Oval Office; the March 30 and April 11 phone calls.

  As senators began their questioning, he elaborated on why he wrote the memos. “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document,” he said, the “he” being Trump. “I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.”

  Comey confirmed that one of his top advisers (whom he didn’t name, but was Jim Baker) had warned him not to tell Trump he wasn’t being investigated because “inevitably his behavior, his conduct will fall within the scope of that work.” But Comey had disagreed. “I thought it was fair to say what was literally true. There was not a counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Trump, and I decided in the moment to say it, given the nature of our conversation.”

  And the reason he felt so uncomfortable about the president’s request for loyalty was “the reason that Congress created a 10-year term is so that the director is not feeling as if they’re serving at, with political loyalty owed to any particular person. The statue of justice has a blindfolds on. You’re not supposed to peek out to see whether your patron was pleased with what you’re doing.”

  Senator Dianne Feinstein asked why Comey hadn’t been firmer with Trump when he brought up the subject of Flynn.

  “Maybe if I were stronger, I would have,” Comey answered. “I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took in. The only thing I could think to say, because I was playing in my mind—because I could remember every word he said—I was playing in my mind, what should my response be? That’s why I carefully chose the words.”

  He mentioned the tapes: “Look, I’ve seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes. I remember saying, ‘I agree he is a good guy,’ as a way of saying, I’m not agreeing with what you asked me to do. Again, maybe other people would be stronger in that circumstance.”

  Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, asked why Comey thought he’d been fired.

  “It’s my judgment I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey said. “I was fired in some way to change the way the Russia investigation is being conducted. That is a very big deal. And not just because it involves me. The nature of the FBI and the nature of its work requires that it not be the subject of political consideration. And on top of that, you have the Russia investigation itself is vital, because of the threat. And I know I should have said this earlier, but it’s obvious: if any Americans were part of helping the Russians do that to us, that is a very big deal. And I’m confident if that is the case, Director Mueller will find that evidence.”

  Angus King, the Maine independent, asked Comey what he thought Trump meant when he said “something like, I hope or I suggest or would you, do you take that as a directive?”

  “Yes,” Comey said. “It rings in my ear as: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

  “I was just going to quote that,” King said. “In 1170, December 29, Henry II said, who will rid me of this meddlesome priest, and the next day, he was killed.”*

  * * *

  —

  COMEY CAME ACROSS as both humble and credible. Trump was furious over Comey’s testimony and the massive media attention it generated, especially Comey’s admission that he’d “leaked” memos detailing what were supposed to be private conversations with Trump. Minutes after Comey finished testifying, Trump dispatched his personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, to put a positive spin on Comey’s testimony and brand Comey a liar and a leaker. “The President also never told Mr. Comey, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty’ in form or substance,” Kasowitz said at a press conference. “Of course, the Office of the President is entitled to expect loyalty from those who are serving in an administration, and, from before this President took office to this day, it is overwhelmingly clear that there have been and continue to be those in government who are actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications. Mr. Comey has now admitt
ed that he is one of these leakers.

  “In sum, it is now established that the President was not being investigated for colluding with the Russians or attempting to obstruct that investigation,” Kasowitz concluded. “As the Committee pointed out today, these important facts for the country to know are virtually the only facts that have not leaked during the long course of these events.”

  The next day, at a press conference with the president of Romania, ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl said Comey “did say, under oath, that you told him to let the Flynn—you said you hoped the Flynn investigation he could let—”

  “I didn’t say that,” Trump interrupted.

  “So he lied about that?”

  “Well, I didn’t say that,” Trump repeated. “I mean, I will tell you I didn’t say that.”

  “And did he ask you to pledge . . .”

  “And there would be nothing wrong if I did say it, according to everybody that I’ve read today,” Trump went on. “But I did not say that.”

  “And did he ask for a pledge of loyalty from you?* That’s another thing he said.”

  “No, he did not.”

  “So he said those things under oath. Would you be willing to speak under oath to give your version of those events?” Karl asked.

  “One hundred percent,” Trump said. As for Comey, “I hardly know the man. I’m not going to say, I want you to pledge allegiance. Who would do that? Who would ask a man to pledge allegiance under oath? I mean, think of it. I hardly know the man. It doesn’t make sense. No, I didn’t say that, and I didn’t say the other.”