Exonerated

by Dan Bongino

  The one man who could have ended all the specious speculation, all the unproven, unsubstantiated, and untrue allegations, was James Comey, the FBI director appointed by Obama who had repeatedly told Trump he was not under investigation. But the character-free Comey took the easy path instead of the right one. And he let the media rumors fester like an open sore.

  And then, on March 20, 2017, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey reversed course, making it clear that the Trump campaign was, in fact, under an investigative microscope:

  I’ve been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed. Because it is an open, ongoing investigation, and is classified, I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining.20

  On one level, Trump may have found this reassuring. But on another, it must have seemed ominous. He knew that the FBI was investigating his campaign. He had no control over what any of those interviewed might say. He also knew from experience—just look at the dossier—that anyone could say anything about him, and that the FBI might take utter lies as the truth. It was nuts. He was a victim of a completely maddening set of circumstances. And the fallout from all the allegations and aspersions was crippling. His administration and the entire Republican Party were being wounded on a daily basis in the media mosh pit over Russiagate fantasies.

  Did Trump speak out and complain about all of this? Of course. He was anything but shy about his frustration. He even took to Twitter—the most public of forums—to express his disgust. It is no surprise that he wanted to stop the bleeding from a confirmed witch hunt that was based on opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

  He wanted the false narrative to end but there was no end in sight.

  On May 9, 2017, asserting his right as the president of the United States to appoint and to fire the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Trump axed Comey.

  If the president thought this move would allow his administration to flourish and allow him to regain his reputation, he was sorely mistaken. By firing Comey, Trump unwittingly ignited another firestorm, opening another front in a partisan war.

  This was no longer just about Russiagate. This was about the FBI’s and the DOJ’s reputations. The Russiagate investigation had been going on for ten months. So far, not a shred of evidence confirming a conspiracy had been uncovered. Papadopoulos had been interviewed and had delivered nothing because there was nothing to deliver. Flynn was in trouble on a number of potential charges, but none of them involved coordination with Russia and the campaign. And Manafort was tied to a laundry list of criminal and financial crimes—but none involved the campaign. Investigators had nothing but rumors, appearances, and coincidences. The scandal, truth be told, was that there was no scandal. And that was a big problem for our premier law enforcement divisions.

  This was the reality, then, that launched Plan C.

  The dossier and Steele’s reports to the FBI were now going to be more important than ever.

  1Papadopoulos, Deep State Target, 60.

  2Ross, “Devin Nunes Casts Doubt on Joseph Mifsud Narrative in Letter to Intel Agencies,” The Daily Caller, May 5, 2019, https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/04/Nunes-mifsud-papadopoulos/.

  3Papadopoulos, Deep State Target, 99.

  4Ibid.

  5Byron York, “Trump Campaign Vet: Informant Used Me to Get to Papadopoulos,” The Washington Examiner, May 28, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-campaign-vet-sam-clovis-says-informant-used-him-to-get-to-papadopoulos.

  6Papadopoulos, Deep State Target, 101–102.

  7Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt, and Mazzetti, “F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet with Trump Aide in 2016,” The New York Times, May 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-trump.html.

  8Papadopoulos, Deep State Target, 106.

  9Ibid., 61.

  10Ibid., 87.

  11Select Committee on Intelligence—Republicans, “Ranking Member Nunes Demands Information on Mifsud From Government Agencies,” Youtube video of a Fox News clip, 4:53, May 20, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WP_FSujL4Y.

  12Easley, “GOP Report: Clapper Told CNN Host About Trump Dossier.”

  13Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Philip Rucker, “Justice Department Warned White House That Flynn Could Be Vulnerable to Russian Blackmail, Officials Say,” The Washington Post, February 13, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-warned-white-house-that-flynn-could-be-vulnerable-to-russian-blackmail-officials-say/2017/02/13/fc5dab88-f228-11e6-8d72-263470bf0401_story.html?utm_term=.cedf72afa7da.

  14David S. Cloud, “Yates Warned White House That Trump’s National Security Advisor ‘Could Be Blackmailed’ by Moscow,” The Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-senate-yates-testimony-20170508-story.html.

  15Robert S. Mueller III, “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” vol. 2, 23, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-document.html#g-page-235.

  16Ibid, citing his 302 interview.

  17James B. Comey, “Statement for the Record Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” June 8, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf.

  18Apuzzo and Rosenberg, “Sessions Is Likely to Be Grilled on Reports of Meeting with Russian Envoy,” The New York Times, June 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/us/politics/sessions-is-likely-to-be-grilled-on-reports-of-meeting-with-russian-envoy.html?mcubz=1.

  19Schmidt, Mazetti, and Apuzzo, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence,” The New York Times, February 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html?module=inline.

  20Washington Post Staff, “Full Transcript: FBI Director James Comey Testifies on Russian Interference in 2016 Election,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/20/full-transcript-fbi-director-james-comey-testifies-on-russian-interference-in-2016-election/?utm_term=.6f2e4f300a07.

  CHAPTER 6

  Plan C: Operation Save the FBI From Itself

  Trump’s decision to banish James Comey was completely justified. Under Comey, the bureau completely mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation from its start to its inglorious finish. And as we’ve seen, the FBI’s handling of Russiagate was completely inept and tainted by pro-Clinton agents idiotically texting their own biases to one another over unclassified and discoverable electronic devices. Plus, Comey repeatedly lied to the president he was serving, telling Trump he wasn’t under investigation.

  Trump may have drawn momentary comfort from Comey’s assurances at one point. But Comey’s claims were a laughable deflection of the truth. When a candidate’s campaign is under investigation, you can bet the candidate is under investigation, too. Everyone in the campaign is a stone’s throw away from the man in charge. There is no way anyone could honestly say with a straight face that Trump was not being investigated.

  Except, of course, the inept James Comey.

  In addition, we know now that Comey wrote memos every time he met with Trump, documenting, in his mind, possible attempts at obst
ruction. Why was he writing memos about these encounters? Was Comey some kind of avid diarist? Did he compulsively document all of his encounters with Obama? No, he did not. Comey even told the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, that he didn’t “memorialize” anything Obama said. But with Trump, things were different:

  I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone)—once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions.1

  So Comey was writing up his Trump encounters—which, again, I’m sure that Trump, who was new to the office and the protocols that go with it, wishes he had dealt with differently—for possible future legal action.

  In other words, Comey may not have been formally investigating Trump, but he was clearly stockpiling evidence to advance his rogue investigation and his personal vendetta.

  You know what I think about Comey and his memos? He abused his power and used his detailed knowledge of the destructive games played by D.C. swamp rats to set up Trump. On a normal day, the president likes to shake things up, create disturbances to keep everyone humming and to be his usual unedited man of action. That’s how he rolls. We’ve all seen it. And Comey, who was very guarded around Trump and very dishonest—at least when it came to revealing the dossier contents and the extent of the investigation—knew this. He had seen that the president was actually bothered, annoyed, and crippled by Russiagate on that very first meeting. Comey was, in essence, setting a trap for Trump.

  One day after firing Comey, as Democrats began constructing a false obstruction narrative that Comey had been fired to stem the Russiagate investigation, Trump spoke up about Comey. While hosting Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Ambassador Kislyak in a May 10, 2017, meeting in the Oval Office, the president told his visitors that firing FBI director Comey had relieved “great pressure.”

  “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nutjob,” Trump said, according to a summary document of the meeting.2 “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

  Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

  Instantly, his enemies pounced again. This was treated by Never Trumpers and the left-wing media as explosive news.3 But was it really any surprise that Trump was relieved by the removal of Comey? Trump is the guy who fired him! Of course, he wanted Comey gone. News flash: that’s why he fired him!

  Being a straight shooter is a great thing in politics. We need more people who will tell the unvarnished truth. But when your enemies are hell-bent on destroying you and eager to set you up, telling it like it is can be downright dangerous because your words will be twisted to be used against you. Trump’s statements about firing Comey were a gift to anyone who wanted to float an obstruction fairy tale. And that’s just how they were used.

  MUELLER GOES INTO THE BREACH

  Comey didn’t exactly go quietly. He started leaking notes through a friend—something he actually admitted in a hearing. On May 11, the New York Times ran a story saying Trump had demanded loyalty from Comey.4 Big deal! Isn’t that a given? Shouldn’t a president want a loyal staff? What did that prove? Then, on May 16, the New York Times published an article about memos by Comey. This is how it began:

  President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.5

  Of course, this is completely debatable, slanted reporting. What the president actually said to Comey, according to the article and according to the memo, was: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go…. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

  Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt was clearly sensationalizing the quote. Trump didn’t ask Comey to do anything. Trump was stating a wish. It was not a directive. It was not an order. It was not a query or a request. How Schmidt and the New York Times arrived at Trump’s asking Comey to shut down an investigation that was never shut down is quite a leap.

  All Comey’s memos of meetings with Trump allege that the president said a number of things regarding FBI investigations—but they were things that could be open to interpretation. The media loves writing about this Comey stuff, and they use it to paint the president in a completely negative light. As acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe—whose wife, Jill, lost the 2015 Democratic Virginia state senator bid despite the help of Virginia governor and former Hillary Clinton consigliere Terry McAuliffe—convened a meeting with his Russiagate team. He also claims in his book, The Threat, that he met with Rod Rosenstein to review investigation options. At some point, the idea of opening a new avenue of the Russiagate investigation was broached: probing the president of the United States on obstruction-of-justice charges.

  McCabe then met with the “Gang of Eight,” a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen who work on intelligence issues, to broach the obstruction angle. “In that process, no one [objected to the investigation],” he says. “The leadership on the Hill did not disagree.”6

  McCabe obviously took this as a green light. The president was officially, but not publicly, a target of the FBI.

  Meanwhile, with the Comey firing and the Comey memo leaks, along with the relentless dossier coverage, calls for a special investigation began to intensify. The anti-Trump brigade was now approaching peak hysteria.

  Remember, at this point Jeff Sessions had already recused himself, much to Trump’s dismay, because he was worried that his failure to recall a series of mundane interactions with Russian ambassador Kislyak made him appear compromised. So Rod Rosenstein, the recently minted deputy attorney general, was made the acting attorney general as far as the Russiagate investigation was concerned. Sessions and Trump asked Rosenstein, who was appointed to his new gig in April, to draft a memo that listed the ways Comey had played fast and loose with Justice Department protocols leading up to the 2016 election. They then used that memo as exhibit #1 for firing Comey. Was Rosenstein happy about this?

  He says he has no regrets. But stories have surfaced that he was furious about being used as the author of Comey’s demise. It made him look bad in the D.C. swamp, especially at FBI headquarters, where Comey still retained some support.7 In fact, Rosenstein now had to work with McCabe, who counted Comey as a pal. Meanwhile, the outcry regarding Comey’s leaks about what the president supposedly said was getting louder and louder. Democrats began calling for an independent investigator—and they threatened to deny a vote to confirm a successor to Comey until their demands were met.

  Rosenstein could have refused. He could have called Comey’s firing what it was—the president’s exercising his right to appoint and fire the FBI director. He could have called Russiagate what it was: a weaponized witch hunt. He could have called the Democrats’ bluff. Some legal experts say that when Trump had him draft the “fire Comey” memo, Trump inadvertently made Rosenstein part of the removal procedure, which meant he was obligated to appoint someone else to manage the inquiry.8

  Almost, but not quite.

  The guy had been on the job a month. He was thrown into the hot seat. Too bad everybody got burned.

  Here’s my take on Rosenstein. The guy, as I’ve said, is a company man with more than two decades as a government lawyer, but he was a political novice who was basically destroyed by his time in the spotlight. When he showed up as assistant attorney general and was asked to
write the memo to fire Comey, he probably never expected his Comey-critique would ignite a major firestorm. This is understandable. Back in November 2016, after Comey reignited the Clinton email investigation just days before the election, the FBI director was public enemy #1 among Democrats. He was absolutely loathed as the guy who handed Trump the election by dragging Clinton down when he reopened the investigation into her email server misuse. So Rosenstein might have thought he was going to be a hero to the D.C. swamp denizens for calling Comey out.

  But the narrative on Comey had somehow shifted, as the sleazy, dishonest FBI director managed to spin himself as the last bastion between Trump and the rule of law. And when Comey was fired, Rosenstein wasn’t a hero; he was suddenly a villain. A Judas. So he burned Comey, but somehow he felt burned by Sessions and Trump, who used his input to fire Comey. How much allegiance and gratitude did this career lawman now feel toward his bosses? Probably not very much.

  It’s likely that Rosenstein, conflicted about his bosses, looked for guidance. He consulted the law on appointing a special counsel:

  § 600.1 Grounds for appointing a Special Counsel.

  The Attorney General, or in cases in which the Attorney General is recused, the Acting Attorney General, will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted and -

  (a) That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances; and

  (b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.