By that point I had read the emails in question and come to my own conclusions. None of them was sent to or from anyone outside of government, and none was marked in a way that would indicate it was classified, but several did discuss sensitive intelligence sourcing that shouldn’t have been transmitted across open internet connections, where they could be intercepted by an adversary. Secretary Clinton hadn’t intentionally disclosed secrets, as CIA director Petraeus had done, but I was surprised that she’d participated in email conversations about such sensitive information. If a line IC employee had done the same, I expect we would have held proceedings to decide if that person should keep his or her security clearance and continue employment. So I didn’t know how Jim was going to handle this, and I watched live with as much interest as anyone.
The next fifteen minutes were riveting, starting with Jim’s opening assertion that he hadn’t coordinated or shared his remarks with the Department of Justice or any other government organization, and he affirmed, “They do not know what I’m about to say.” My entire front office stopped work to watch as Jim laid out the process the FBI had used to investigate the matter. They had come to the conclusion that 110 of the 30,000 emails given by the State Department to the Justice Department contained classified material when they were sent, including 8 email chains that had top secret information. There were another 2,000 emails that had information that was unclassified when they were sent but was later classified. In investigating the servers Secretary Clinton had used, the FBI had also found several thousand work-related emails that were not in the collection of 30,000 that she had given to the State Department. The bureau didn’t assess that she’d hidden those, merely that her personal server had no archiving capability, and they’d not turned up in normal recovery procedures.
After nine minutes of discussing the investigative process, Jim changed tone. “That’s what we have done. Now let me tell you what we found. Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” He noted that that included seven email chains with information from “Special Access” programs, protected even more carefully than other top secret intelligence. The FBI had also determined that it was possible that hostile actors had gained access to Secretary Clinton’s account, but that the FBI didn’t have the capability to know if they actually had.
Finally, he said he was opting for “unusual transparency” in discussing his recommendations to the Justice Department. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” he noted, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” further stating that previous such cases brought for prosecution “involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.” He continued, “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.” He thanked the FBI for its apolitical professionalism, adding, “I couldn’t be prouder to be part of this organization,” and then left the stage. To me, it was a stunning rebuke of a presidential candidate by the director of the FBI, and what could only have been a difficult decision for my friend and colleague who’d spent his career in service to the nation and to speaking truth to power. In this case, the “power” was the American people. Whatever the consequences would be, he did what he considered to be the right thing and in the best interests of the nation.
The Russians—to be fair, along with everyone else—immediately jumped on Jim’s announcement. RT led with video of Clinton’s saying, “Nothing I sent or received was marked classified at the time,” followed by Comey’s acknowledgment that “110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.” A viewer would have had to pay close attention to appreciate the significance of the word “marked.” RT, Sputnik, and the online trolls played off one another to portray Clinton as corrupt and the FBI as complicit. Any number of conspiracy theories took root. Some alleged that she’d deleted the emails to cover up crimes. On July 10, Seth Rich—a young Democratic National Committee staff member—was killed in Washington in a botched robbery. Within hours, internet conspiracy theorists, including the Russians, suggested that Rich had been murdered at Clinton’s behest to cover up the email leaks. They dragged out the “Clinton body count” rumors, dating back to the 1980s, which claimed that Bill and Hillary had been assassinating political rivals. Leading into the party conventions that summer, the Russians had laid sufficient groundwork to get a subset of American voters to believe nearly anything about Hillary Clinton.
Still, if things appeared bad for Clinton and the Democrats, they were worse for her opponent and his party. Even before it officially kicked off on July 18, the Republican National Convention seemed headed for chaos and animosity between Mr. Trump’s team and the old guard GOP. In particular, Trump campaign staff worked behind the scenes to rewrite the party platform, which when it was released noticeably dropped calling for “maintaining or increasing sanctions” on Russia and of promising “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine in support of their resistance to Russian aggression. Reflecting deep divisions in the Republican Party, the governor of Ohio, John Kasich, who had run against Mr. Trump for the nomination, refused to come to Cleveland to introduce him as the nominee.
With the Trump team setting the agenda, the convention seemed to revel in pessimism about the state of the nation and the direction it was heading. On Monday, Mike Flynn led the crowd in chanting “Lock her up!” in reference to the Clinton email scandal. He seemed so consumed by partisan anger that I barely recognized the man I’d traveled the world with when he’d still been in uniform. On Wednesday, Senator Cruz, who finished second in primary voting, declined to endorse Trump, and—to raucous boos and jeers—told Republicans to “vote your conscience.” On the final night, Mr. Trump delivered a dark speech about how far the nation had fallen, declaring that he was the only person who could “make America great again.” Accepting the nomination, he said, “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.” While RT focused their coverage on Black Lives Matter protesters who had clashed with police in the streets of Cleveland, most media coverage of the Republican National Convention portrayed a broken Republican Party in crisis.
Before most of the media had landed in Philadelphia for the Democratic Convention four days later, Russia launched its big surprise. Russian intelligence—specifically their military intelligence agency, GRU, the agency with which Mike Flynn had met—had quietly gained access to the Democratic National Committee networks in July 2015. Sometime in March 2016, Putin and the Russian leadership decided that it was worth the risk of diplomatic blowback if they were caught, and the GRU went on the offense, exfiltrating emails and large volumes of data. In April, Russia used a third-party “cutout” to send more than nineteen thousand DNC emails and more than eight thousand documents to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, attempting to cover its tracks and to give WikiLeaks some degree of deniability in knowing the source of the leaks. It took WikiLeaks three months to verify the emails were authentic before it released them, and I find it implausible that Assange, as he claims, didn’t figure out d
uring that period that Russian intelligence was his source.
The DNC had actually realized they had a problem in April and hired the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to assess the situation and try to save their systems. CrowdStrike detected the Russian activity and did what it could to quietly remediate the damage. On June 14, the DNC went public, acknowledging they’d been hacked by Russian intelligence. The next day, a hacker self-styled as Guccifer 2.0 claimed to have been the perpetrator. The name was clearly a reference to the Guccifer who had first revealed Secretary Clinton’s email address and domain information in March 2013. Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian, just as the original had, although he communicated very well in Russian and not well at all in Romanian. The US IC determined later that Guccifer 2.0 was not, in fact, a single person, but was a persona used by multiple Russian state hackers working in tandem.
On Friday, July 22, the day after Mr. Trump’s acceptance of the Republican nomination, WikiLeaks dumped the DNC emails online. The most incendiary of them were between DNC staff members disparaging Secretary Clinton’s opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, saying that he didn’t deserve the nomination. In one exchange DNC chair and congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote, “He isn’t going to be president.” The national media—not without cause—concluded that Senator Sanders’s campaign was never given a fair shot at winning the nomination. On Sunday, Sanders called for Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair, remarking in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, “I told you a long time ago that the DNC was not running a fair operation, that they were supporting Secretary Clinton.” In the late afternoon of the day before the convention began, Wasserman Schultz stepped down as DNC chair.
In response Mr. Trump published a barrage of tweets late Sunday, including: “The Democrats are in a total meltdown but the biased media will say how great they are doing! E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!” and “The highly neurotic Debbie Wasserman Schultz is angry that, after stealing and cheating her way to a Crooked Hillary victory, she’s out!” The mainstream media outlets seemed to have little time to discuss the DNC’s and CrowdStrike’s claims that Russian intelligence was behind the cyber theft and leaks, and ironically Mr. Trump seemed to be the only one publicly discussing their source, tweeting, “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”
The following day the FBI announced it was opening an investigation into the hacking, and the Democratic National Convention scrambled to cover the absence of the DNC chair. Bernie Sanders supporters protested on the conference floor, and the entire assembly seemed to be in disarray. Just a week prior, the national press had speculated that the RNC might implode while trying to find a way to nominate a more palatable candidate than Donald Trump. In a single day, Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks had completely upended the narrative.
Mr. Trump, for his part, continued to hold rallies as the Democrats tried to pull their convention together. On Wednesday, the day before Secretary Clinton was scheduled to accept the nomination, he was in Miami, gleefully answering questions about the hacked emails. One person asked him if he should tell Putin to stay out of the US presidential race. “Why do I have to get involved with Putin?” Trump replied. “I have nothing to do with Putin. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn’t respect our President. And if it is Russia—which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is—but if it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see. I will tell you this . . .” He turned from the questioner to face the cameras, and his next words absolutely chilled me: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” He turned back to the questioner and said, “Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”
Some fifty-five years earlier, I’d first taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and now, in 2016, I was confronted with the fact that our election was under attack by a foreign power—the Russians no less, who’d wanted to destroy the United States for nearly the entire time I’d been alive—and that a candidate for president had just encouraged them to use their intelligence services to help him defeat his opponent. I didn’t know what would come next, but I felt I bore some responsibility for protecting America from these threats. I’d grown up in a family devoted to serving the nation. I myself had served in every administration since President Kennedy’s and was a political appointee for both President Bush and President Obama. I’d tried to serve apolitically, and yet, hearing Donald Trump ask Russian intelligence to attack his political opponent—in a very specific, direct way—made me fear for our nation.
The following day, July 28, Secretary Clinton’s acceptance of the nomination was overshadowed by the earlier remarks of Khizr Khan, a Muslim and Pakistani immigrant, and a longtime US citizen whose Army officer son, Humayun, was killed in Iraq in 2004. With his wife, Ghazala, standing beside him—too emotional to speak—and with Humayun’s photo on screens around the convention center, Khan told the assembled delegates about his son’s service. He said that Clinton had referred to Humayun as “the best of America,” and that “if it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.” Pulling a copy of the Constitution from his coat pocket, he raised it in front of him and addressed the Republican nominee directly:
Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the US Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words “liberty” and “equal protection of law.” Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
The following day Mr. Trump responded, telling George Stephanopoulos, first, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.” And then he “hit back” at the Khans and their religion. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.” There was immediate backlash from Republicans, with Senator Susan Collins going as far as to say she would not be voting for Mr. Trump in the general election. For about a week—from the WikiLeaks dump until he publicly attacked a Gold Star family—Mr. Trump had led Secretary Clinton in national popularity polls. After July 29, that would never happen again.
Following the two conventions, by long-held tradition, both candidates were eligible to start receiving intelligence briefings. This seemed to come as a great shock to many elected officials and some of the Washington Beltway media, even though giving classified briefings to candidates was a tradition that began in 1952, when President Truman offered them to both General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson, and the newly formed CIA conducted them. Truman felt an obligation to provide these because of his own ignorance when he’d taken office. He hadn’t known of the existence of the Manhattan Project until twelve days after he was sworn in as president, and he had been Roosevelt’s vice president. That practice had continued for every election since 1952, with the CIA handling briefings until 2008, when ODNI assumed the responsibility. (As a point of trivia worthy of note, there have only been three elections in which briefings were offered to candidates from both major parties: 1952, 2008, and 2016—the only years in which one of the candidates wasn’t already receiving intelligence briefings as the incumbent president or vice
president.) Regardless, both candidates gained access to this intelligence by virtue of their nominations, and I had no place in clearing them or not. Further, in our effort to make sure that there was no political influence on the briefings, only career intelligence officers gave the briefings, not political appointees like me.
Nevertheless, Republican senators and representatives sent a flurry of communications to my office, insisting we withhold President’s Daily Briefs from Secretary Clinton. At the same time some media—including the generally conservative Foreign Policy, of all outlets—along with some very senior intelligence officials, insisted that I “withhold PDBs” from Mr. Trump. Senator Harry Reid even suggested publicly that we should give “fake briefings” to the Republican nominee. We, of course, didn’t give these suggestions any countenance, and I went out publicly to dispel myths—first, the complete fiction that my office was giving President Obama’s President’s Daily Brief to either candidate. In fact, one team from my office produced and delivered the PDB, and a completely different team produced and coordinated the cross-agency effort to brief the candidates with intelligence on broad global topics that were separate from the intelligence President Obama received on his secure iPad.
As we had in prior elections, we set ground rules months before the briefings started, which the White House concurred with on June 22, and the IC operated independently from that point forward. We had a list of topics that we offered to both candidates, and both could ask for briefings on any or all of them. They could also request briefings on other subjects, although precedent dictated that if we agreed to do so, we’d make sure the other candidate had a chance to receive the same information. We don’t tell either the opposing campaign or the public what takes place in those briefings: not what topics each candidate shows interest in or gets briefed on, not how either candidate reacts, and not what questions are asked. I’m sticking to that precedent in this book.
Facts and Fears Page 44