Deep State

by James B. Stewart

  But McCabe had no one willing or able to publicly defend him.

  Trump, on the other hand, could barely contain his glee. “DOJ just issued the McCabe report—which is a total disaster,” he tweeted. “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey—McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”

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  BY THEN, Trump must have had a pretty good inkling of what was coming in Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, which was scheduled for publication on Tuesday, April 17. Copies and excerpts were circulating on the previous Thursday. And ABC was already touting its upcoming Sunday night 20/20 interview of Comey by George Stephanopoulos as a blockbuster, revealing that Comey had gone so far as to compare Trump to a mob boss.

  Trump had already taken to Twitter, calling Comey “a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did—until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and . . . untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”

  And “Big show tonight on @seanhannity!” Trump tweeted, promoting Sean Hannity’s segment that night on Fox News. Saying he was inspired by a video clip teasing Comey’s upcoming interview with Stephanopoulos, Hannity used the occasion to attack the “obvious Deep State crime families trying to take down the president,” consisting of the Clinton “family,” the Comey “family,” and the Mueller “family.”

  “Mr. Comey, you’re really going to compare the sitting president of the United States to a mob boss so you can make money?” Hannity went on. “If he’s going to use a sweeping analogy, I’ve decided tonight we’re going to use the Comey standard . . . and make some comparisons of our own,” including “the Clinton crime family,” the “Mueller crime family,” and Mueller’s “best friend,” Comey.

  Initially stunned by the events of the previous May, Comey hadn’t planned to write a book, and certainly not a Trump tell-all. When two fast-rising Washington literary agents, Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer, called to propose a book, he turned them down. But he did suddenly have time on his hands. He wanted to do something he thought was useful. His wife encouraged him. He had a lot of pent-up thoughts about the president and what he was doing to the American system of justice. And the agents dangled the prospect of a multimillion-dollar advance.

  So he called them back and said he’d write a book on leadership. The agents were blunt: a book on leadership wouldn’t sell. A book about Trump would. So the previous summer, he’d reached a deal to write a hybrid memoir-leadership book, hence the subtitle: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. Comey stopped doing interviews and speeches and refused all comment on Trump.

  There was fierce competition among networks for the first interview. Initially, Comey favored NBC’s Lester Holt, but ABC offered a radio tour and more affiliates, so he went with Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos and his producers were thorough; they spent time with Comey’s family; visited his New Jersey boyhood home; and conducted a five-hour interview with Comey himself, all of which got reduced to one hour of airtime that focused almost entirely on Trump and went far beyond anything Comey said in the book.

  As advertised, Comey repeatedly compared Trump to a Mafia boss.

  “How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?” Stephanopoulos asked.

  “Very strange. And I don’t do it lightly,” Comey answered, “and I’m not trying to, by the way, suggest that President Trump is out breaking legs and—you know, shaking down shopkeepers. But instead, what I’m talking about is that leadership culture constantly comes back to me when I think about my experience with the Trump administration. The—the loyalty oaths, the boss as the dominant center of everything, it’s all about how do you serve the boss, what’s in the boss’s interests. It’s the family, the family, the family, the family.”

  He repeatedly criticized Trump’s character.

  “You write that President Trump is unethical, untethered to the truth. Is Donald Trump unfit to be president?” Stephanopoulos asked.

  “I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia,” Comey said, bestowing faint praise. “He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.

  “A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it—that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds. And that’s not a policy statement. Again, I don’t care what your views are on guns or immigration or taxes.

  “There’s something more important than that that should unite all of us, and that is our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country. The most important being truth. This president is not able to do that. He is morally unfit to be president.”

  Not only that, but “the challenge of this president is that he will stain everyone around him. And the question is, how much stain is too much stain and how much stain eventually makes you unable to accomplish your goal of protecting the country and serving the country?”

  Later, Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think the Russians have something on Donald Trump?”

  In an answer sure to enrage the president, Comey said, “I think it’s possible. I don’t know. These are words I never thought I’d utter about a president of the United States, but it’s possible.”

  “That’s stunning,” Stephanopoulos said. “You can’t say for certain that the president of the United States is not compromised by the Russians?”

  “It is stunning and I wish I wasn’t saying it, but it’s just—it’s the truth. I cannot say that. It always struck me and still strikes me as unlikely, and I would have been able to say with high confidence about any other president I dealt with, but I can’t. It’s possible.”

  Even as the segment aired, Trump launched a new wave of Twitter attacks, calling Comey a “slimeball” and “slippery” and suggesting he be jailed. “The big questions in Comey’s badly reviewed book aren’t answered like, how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail), why did the DNC refuse to give Server to the FBI (why didn’t they TAKE it), why the phony memos, McCabe’s $700,000 & more?”

  The interview dominated the news all week. “If there was any chance that President Trump and James B. Comey could have avoided all-out war, it ended Sunday night,” the Times wrote. Comey called Trump “a serial liar who treated women like ‘meat,’ and described him as a ‘stain’ on everyone who worked for him. He said a salacious allegation that Mr. Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow had left him vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. And he asserted that the president was incinerating the country’s crucial norms and traditions like a wildfire. He compared the president to a mafia boss.”

  Comey was taken aback that the distilled interview focused so much on Trump—he called it “vertigo inducing”—and that his observation Trump was “morally unfit,” which wasn’t in the book, became the centerpiece of massive media coverage. But his literary agents were right about what would sell. Thousands of people greeted him at stops on his book tour, so many he couldn’t autograph all their copies. He vaulted to the top of the bestseller lists, selling 600,000 copies during the first week alone.

  Reviews were mostly positive (“compelling” was a common adjective), but there were whiffs of criticism from reviewers who blame
d Comey for Trump’s being president in the first place. And, in entering the partisan fray, Comey threw any claim to objectivity to the winds, emerging as a fierce anti-Trump partisan.

  As the columnist Frank Bruni wrote in the Times, “James Comey’s book is titled ‘A Higher Loyalty,’ but it surrenders the higher ground, at least partly. To watch him promote it is to see him descend. Not to President Trump’s level—that’s a long way down. But Comey is playing Trump’s game, on Trump’s terms. And in that sense, he has let the president get the better of him.”

  And Comey faced criticism from within the ranks of retired FBI agents, echoing thoughts that many current employees were reluctant to say, at least on the record. Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, told The Guardian that Comey, “and a number of other FBI employees who worked directly for him, have damaged the agency.” She called the book “tasteless at best. There is a total lack of dignity.”

  The former senior agent Bobby Chacon said of Comey, “I worked for him. He did a lot of good things at the FBI. He was popular and I didn’t like the way the White House sacked him. But he made mistakes and now has been overtaken by his emotions. I’m surprised he has been dragged down into street-fighting with Trump.”

  In the wake of Comey’s ABC interview and book tour, Trump’s approval ratings actually rose, from a low of 37 percent on December 13 to 44 percent in early May, according to RealClearPolitics.

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  ON JUNE 8, 2018, William Barr, the former attorney general who’d kept up a drumbeat of public support for Trump, sent an unsolicited nineteen-page memo to Rosenstein at the Justice Department, arguing that Trump should not be required to testify in any obstruction inquiry and that Mueller was out of bounds by even asking. Barr later acknowledged that it was the only time he’d sent such an unsolicited memo to the department.

  In essence, Barr argued that firing Comey and asking him to “let this go” of the Flynn matter were within a president’s constitutionally prescribed duties, and thus could not be the basis for a criminal charge.

  Barr indicated he didn’t think obstruction, in Trump’s case, was a “real crime.” “I know you will agree that, if a DOJ investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected President, it is imperative to the health of our system and to our national cohesion that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on evidence of a real crime—not a debatable one,” Barr wrote in the memo. “It is time to travel well-worn paths; not to veer into novel, unsettled or contested areas of the law; and”—in a clear barb aimed at Mueller and his team—“not to indulge the fancies by overzealous prosecutors.”

  Barr wrote that he was “deeply concerned” about the institution of the presidency, but given Trump’s ongoing humiliation of Sessions, and the degree to which Barr’s memo staked out the same position as Trump’s defense lawyers, it inevitably led to speculation inside the Justice Department that Barr was auditioning for a triumphal return to Pennsylvania Avenue.

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  ON JUNE 14, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, released his long-awaited report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. The report harshly criticized Comey for the way he disclosed the results of the case at his July 5 press conference. “We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct,” the report stated. “We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the Attorney General.”

  And “although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment.”

  That’s what drew the most press. “Inspector General Blasts Comey” was the headline in The Washington Post; “Comey’s Actions ‘Extraordinary and Insubordinate,’” reported CNN.

  And the revelation of the “No, no, he won’t. We’ll stop it” text from Strzok—which hadn’t been included in the earlier release—triggered a new wave of conspiracy theories and references to a “Deep State.”

  As the CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza accurately observed, “Those seven words are what Trump and his allies will seize on—casting them as definitive proof that the ‘deep state’ not only didn’t want him to win but was actively working to keep him from the White House.”

  The White House said the report “reaffirmed the president’s suspicions about Comey’s conduct and the political bias among some of the members of the FBI.”

  But nearly lost in the sensational details were some sobering conclusions that threw cold water on the Deep State conspiracy theorists: The inspector general found no reason to question the decision not to charge Clinton. He found that any political bias or opinions had not affected the outcome. Far from coddling or protecting Clinton, the report noted, Page and Strzok “advocated for more aggressive investigative measures in the Midyear investigation, such as the use of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to obtain evidence.”

  The report concluded, “We found no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations; rather, we determined that they were based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice. We therefore concluded that these were legal and policy judgments involving core prosecutorial discretion that were for the Department to make.”

  In short, after seventeen months and hundreds of interviews, the inspector general found no reason to reopen the Clinton case or doubt its conclusions.

  Even though they felt exonerated, the report nonetheless cast a harsh spotlight, yet again, on Page and Strzok. A week later, Strzok was told his job status was under review. (Much to her relief, Page had already found a job with a private law firm.)

  After thirty days, Strzok was told he would be terminated, but he could appeal. Strzok met with Candice M. Will, the head of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. He argued strenuously that he’d never lied or engaged in any illegal activity. At the end of the day, all he’d done was express some personal opinions in what he thought was a strictly private setting. None of his personal views had impacted his work, as the inspector general had concluded.

  To his pleasant surprise, in their next meeting, Will agreed with him. She told him he’d be suspended for sixty days but could return and “get back out there.”

  Strzok was elated. He signed a so-called last-chance agreement in which he agreed to the suspension and gave up his rights of appeal. He understood he’d be on probation: if he screwed up, he’d be fired.

  Strzok was at home when two agents delivered a letter, which he assumed was the agreement countersigned by Will. But when he opened it, it was from Bowdich, whom Wray had named his deputy. Bowdich overruled Will. Strzok was fired.

  “Deeply saddened by this decision,” Strzok wrote on Twitter. “It has been an honor to serve my country and work with the fine men and women of the FBI.”

  Trump was far more outspoken. “Agent Peter Strzok was just fired from the FBI—finally,” Trump tweeted. “The list of bad players in the FBI & DOJ gets longer & longer. Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the Witch Hunt, will it be dropped? It is a total Hoax. No Collusion, No Obstruction.”

  Seemingly oblivious to the findings of the inspector general, Trump added, “Just fired Agent Strzok, formerly of the FBI, was in charge of the Crooked Hillary Clinton sham investigation. It was a total fraud on the American public and should be properly redone!”

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  THAT SPRING TRUMP formally added Rudy Giuliani, who’d been informally advising him for months, to his legal team. Giuliani combined the skills of a practiced TV commentator with decades of experience as a prosecutor. But his most important attrib
ute might have been that Trump actually followed Giuliani’s advice.

  Soon after Giuliani’s arrival, the president’s risky dalliances with Michael Cohen stopped. The Trump Organization stopped paying Cohen’s legal bills. An increasingly desperate Cohen was no longer feeling the love.

  Cohen turned to television on July 2. In his first public comment since the raid on his office, Cohen told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.”

  Stephanopoulos reminded Cohen of his pledge to “take a bullet.”

  “To be crystal clear, my wife, my daughter and my son, and this country have my first loyalty,” Cohen said.

  And Cohen hired a lawyer who was openly hostile to Trump: Lanny Davis, a longtime Democrat best known for his prolonged and passionate defense of an embattled Bill Clinton.

  Mueller handed over many aspects of the Cohen investigation (such as the payments to Stephanie Clifford) to federal prosecutors in New York. They were outside the scope of Mueller’s mandate, and his doing so also served the purpose of placing probes of Trump into more than one set of prosecutorial hands. (An enduring lesson of Kenneth Starr’s investigation of Clinton was that it was a mistake to combine the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky cases, because Clinton allies needed to demonize only one prosecutor.)

  Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies in New York on August 21. He immediately implicated Trump in the Clifford payments and said during his plea hearing that he had worked “at the direction of the candidate in making those payments.”