However, the Trump campaign appeared to be the more wounded party in the dueling scandals. According to polls, he was far behind Clinton before the release of the Access Hollywood tape and had since fallen further still. RT remained largely silent on the tape until posting a video four days later of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov making light of the whole controversy with the incendiary remark “There are so many pussies around your presidential election on both sides.” But Russia and Putin seemed to have made a judgment that the election was lost for Trump. They shifted their efforts to discrediting the US election in general and undermining Clinton’s authority as its next president.
RT began introducing each of its election coverage segments with a Halloween-themed video clip portraying the horrors of a Clinton White House before cutting to the message “Choosing the lesser of two evils.” After mid-October, the Russians no longer tried to compare Mr. Trump positively with Secretary Clinton. Instead, they complained that Americans had never been given a decent choice. In the final weeks before Election Day, they continued promoting conspiracies about Clinton corruption and her connections with Islamic extremism. Their video “Assange: Clinton & ISIS Funded by Same Money” received more than a million views on YouTube before the election, and “Trump Would Not Be Permitted to Win” became their most viewed video about him, garnering 2.2 million views. Both featured John Pilger’s interview with Julian Assange.
Mr. Trump seemed to make the same shift in tactics to delegitimizing an inevitable Clinton win. He tweeted on October 15, “Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail. Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.” He insinuated that, unlike all previous candidates, he might not accept as legitimate a clear win by his opponent. At the final presidential debate on October 19, when asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he would honor the election results, Trump responded, “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” At a rally the following day, he said, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election—if I win.” On October 27, he told the crowd at a rally, “And just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right? What are we even having it for?”
The following day, October 28—eleven days before the election—offered one last surprise. While investigating allegations that former congressman Anthony Weiner had sent illicit texts to a fifteen-year-old girl from a laptop he shared with his then-wife, Huma Abedin, Secretary Clinton’s chief of staff, the FBI found thousands of new emails relating to Clinton’s work at the Department of State. Jim Comey, having promised in testimony to keep Congress informed of any updates to the investigation, felt he was obliged to inform congressional oversight of this new discovery. He sent a private letter to the Republican chairs of the eight committees, with copies to the eight senior Democrats, writing, “Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.” The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Jason Chaffetz, promptly leaked the letter, tweeting, “FBI Dir just informed me, ‘The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.’ Case reopened.”
The Russians jumped into action, and because Chaffetz had leaked the letter without having any actual information about the content of the emails, they could claim the emails contained evidence for their favorite conspiracy theories, alleging Clinton’s support for the Islamic State and writing that she was paid directly by foreign dignitaries to take meetings as secretary of state. They also used the association with Anthony Weiner illicitly texting a minor girl to reprise the idea that Clinton was involved with a child-sex ring. (This particular theory was so widely shared—including by people associated with Trump’s campaign—and so strongly believed that a month after the election, a man drove to Washington with an AR-15 rifle, went into the pizzeria in question, fired shots causing damage to the restaurant, and demanded to see the basement where children were being held so he could free them. The pizzeria had no basement, and the man was arrested without anyone being hurt.)
Again, Russia’s aim wasn’t to get anyone to actually believe the crazy stories they were publishing. The point of their influence operation was to overwhelm facts, to sow doubt that facts were even knowable. So when Jim Comey sent a second letter to Congress on Sunday, November 6, two days before the election, that read “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” it made no difference to the Russians or to the those in the US electorate who were susceptible to the Russian campaign.
On Election Day, November 8, no one really believed Mr. Trump had a chance—including the Russians, who had never pivoted back to promoting him, and who, it could be argued, gave Green Party candidate Jill Stein more favorable coverage. On election night, they’d planned a multifaceted campaign to discredit Clinton’s win, with the Twitter hashtag #DemocracyRIP.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Facts and Fears
I was eating a quick lunch at 11:31 A.M. in Muscat, Oman—2:31 A.M. on the US East Coast—when the Associated Press declared Donald Trump to be the president-elect. I had only a few minutes to absorb my shock before I’d be closeted in further meetings with the host government. I wondered what President Obama was thinking and if he now regretted his reticence to speak out about the Russian interference. I considered just how little impact Jeh Johnson and I had apparently had with the warning we’d issued a month before the election, and while I didn’t know what effect the Russian interference had—and really couldn’t know, because the IC was only assessing the world outside the US borders—I was disturbed and a little sickened to think the Russian efforts could have changed the outcome of the election. But the thought I kept coming back to was just how out of touch I was with the people who lived in Middle America. For the past several years, I’d watched as “unpredictable instability” around the world had prompted angry populations to rise up against their governments and societies. It led to al-Qaida, ISIS, and their ilk proliferating from Afghanistan to Southwest Asia and into North Africa and Europe. It led to civil wars in Libya and Syria and a global refugee crisis unlike anything the world had seen since the end of the Second World War, which my dad had helped end. Unpredictable instability brought pain, war, and suffering to the world. In the United States, it gave us Donald Trump.
I was far from being the only person who was shocked by the outcome, and as the Russians scrambled to stop their #DemocracyRIP social media campaign, President-elect Trump’s circle seemed to have no strategy for shifting from campaign mode to administration-transition mode. Rather than working with the State Department, or even contacting it, Trump was taking calls from world leaders, apparently from whoever could get his personal cell phone number. Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull famously obtained it from professional golfer Greg Norman and was one of eight world leaders to call Trump with congratulations on the day his victory was announced. With no State Department involvement, no one briefed the president-elect on bilateral issues or existing agreements, and the United States has no official record of what was said during those conversations.
I wondered if our intelligence team was faring better than State. On election night, we’d deployed a team with each of the campaigns, ready to give whoever was president-elect his or her first President’s Daily Brief—essentially the PDB prepared for President Obama. At the suggestion of the lead officer for candidate briefings, I’d handwritten nearly identical letters to both candidates. I assumed Secretary Clinton’s was being shredded, as planned. The one that was delivered read:
Dear President-elect Trump:
First, I want to offer congratulations to you on your election.
&nbs
p; Second, on behalf of the Intelligence Community, I want to pledge to you our unswerving commitment to provide the best intelligence we can muster. We will rarely be able to completely eliminate uncertainty for you and the Vice President, but we can at least reduce it, and thus help you manage risk, in the face of many difficult decisions you will undoubtedly face.
Finally, I hope you will support the basic writ of “truth to power” in which the Intelligence Community is expected to always “tell it like it is”—straight, objective, unpoliticized.
Again, my congratulations.
With great respect.
Sincerely,
Jim Clapper
I traveled from Oman to Kuwait and then to Jordan, where I had lunch with King Abdullah on Friday. The king tried to hide his pique that there had been no communication between Trump’s team and his government. He ended the lunch early, and I watched wistfully as someone carried off my plate after I’d had only a couple of bites of a superb steak. The next day, I flew from Jordan to Israel, ending another trip to the Middle East with a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. He seemed a different person, jubilant with the results of the election. He couldn’t stop smiling and noted that he’d had a terrific conversation with the president-elect within hours of Trump’s delivering his victory speech. I congratulated him, and he gave me another of his cigars.
When I returned to Washington, I focused primarily on what I needed to do before retiring—this time for good. Along with every other Senate-confirmed Obama appointee, I submitted a formal resignation letter, which was standard procedure for the transition between administrations. If a president-elect wished someone from a previous administration to remain in office, he’d reject the resignation and ask the official to stay on, as President-elect Obama had done with Secretary Gates. Still, despite the pro forma nature of the process, it did feel as if I’d taken a concrete step toward finally retiring, fifty-five years after I’d enlisted in the Marine Corps. I’d expected, if my former colleague Hillary Clinton had won the election, that she might ask me to stick around until she could get a new DNI confirmed. I didn’t expect President-elect Trump to ask, and I don’t think I’d have agreed to remain if he had.
The following morning I testified in what I believed—naïvely—was my final congressional hearing, with USD(I) Marcel Lettre, who’d replaced Mike Vickers, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work before the House Intelligence Committee. The topic of the hearing was officially “IC Support for DOD,” but it became an opportunity for Chairman Devin Nunes and a few other committee members to take their parting shots. They all had their pet issues, but after six years and more of often politicized agendas at hearings, I was no longer concerned I’d slip into the trap of making a statement the press would spin into meaning something I hadn’t intended. Besides, I couldn’t see any member of Congress calling for my head after I’d resigned, a thought that pleased me privately. So, after Nunes and ranking member Adam Schiff made their opening statements and gave me the floor, I smiled—a rare occurrence for me on Capitol Hill—leaned into the microphone, thanked them, and then said, “I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good. I’ve got sixty-four days left, and I think I’d have a hard time with my wife for anything past that.”
The hearing was unfocused and ranged widely from topics like analytic integrity to cybersecurity to threat assessments to deciding which overseas bases should house which DOD intelligence activities. Fifty minutes in, Schiff asked me about the Russian interference in the election and Russia’s continued presence in eastern Ukraine and Syria, and what I thought would change under a Trump administration. I replied that the Russians were continuing their activity on all fronts, and that I couldn’t speculate on what—if anything—would change. His follow-up questions all concerned Russian military activities, and he didn’t bring up the election interference again. His final question was about how Putin would react if—given his cordial relationship with the new US president—he could no longer blame all his woes on the “American bogeyman.” I thought that was a salient question, and I reaffirmed that Putin had indeed stayed in power in part by calling for Russian nationalism while painting the United States as bent on Russia’s destruction. The discussion moved on.
About an hour and a half into the hearing, my legislative affairs officer slipped me a note. Apparently, it wasn’t common knowledge that every political appointee had submitted pro forma resignations, and all the cable news channels and print media services that follow Washington politics were reporting “Clapper resigns!,” saying I’d quit in protest over Donald Trump’s winning the election. The story was trending on Twitter and was the top result on Google’s aggregated news site. For once, I hadn’t been tricked into making headlines. In the business, this is what we call an “unforced error.” At the next opportunity, I interjected into the live feed and House record, “I do need to clarify about my statement about resignation; it’s not effective until noon on 20 January 2017—not immediately—as is being reported in the media.”
The media expected conflict between Obama administration officials and Trump’s transition team, and so they saw it even when it wasn’t there. I’d meant it in September when I’d told the IC and intelligence industry associations “It’ll be okay,” and continued to use that phrase after the election, both in internal IC and in public speeches, and my office was working hard to help Trump’s national security transition team get up to speed. The president-elect had set up shop in Trump Tower in New York, and we arranged security to allow him to continue getting intelligence briefings there. He had designated Mike Flynn as his national security adviser, and without speaking about it directly, Mike and I put aside any animosity from his early exit from DIA to work toward a smooth transition of government. We had two phone conversations during the transition, both courteous and professional.
The media continued to see divisions that didn’t exist, and when Admiral Mike Rogers was seen at Trump Tower, reportedly interviewing to replace me as DNI, the Washington Post published a story purporting that I had cosigned a letter to President Obama recommending that Mike be fired. That simply wasn’t true, and ODNI public affairs director Brian Hale asked the Post to explain where the story had come from. The reporter, Ellen Nakashima, wouldn’t name any sources, but cited a recommendation I’d sent to the White House that CYBERCOM be split off from NSA. We explained to the Post that my suggestion to split the organizations was intended to optimize IC and national security capabilities, was based on six and a half years of watching CYBERCOM grow its capabilities, and said nothing about firing Mike. The Post wasn’t interested in this story without the conflict and wouldn’t change their article. Despite the public narrative, we continued to work with the transition team, giving them access to IC leaders and facilities.
Regardless of our cooperation with the Trump transition team, we hadn’t forgotten what Russia had done. The FBI and CIA were coming across new evidence of Russian activities relating to the election every day, and I was starting to see that the scope and scale of their effort was much bigger than Jeh or I had understood when we’d released our statement in October. In late November, Susan Rice asked the NSC staff to draft a menu of possible punitive measures the president could impose on Russia before leaving office. The resulting list spanned a spectrum that included increased sanctions, but I was particularly in favor of the suggestion to expel Russian spies and to close facilities in the United States that we knew were bases for espionage. Many FBI resources went into countering those efforts, and we could put those resources to better use if we shipped some of the counterintelligence threat back to Russia.
As we discussed those possibilities in the White House Situation Room, the public dialogue about Russian interference was heating up. Seeming to fear it called the legitimacy of his election into question, the president-elect responded defensively whenever the subject was raised. In an interview with Time magazine on No
vember 28, he countered a question on Russian activities with, “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point.” Asked who he thought had hacked the Democrats’ email accounts and IT systems, he responded, “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
We knew it was not someone in New Jersey, and I was fairly certain that President-elect Trump knew that as well. At an NSC meeting on Monday, December 5, President Obama told us he wanted CIA, FBI, and NSA to integrate all their relevant intelligence into a single report to pass on to the next administration and Congress. He also asked us to derive from it an unclassified document for public consumption with as much information from the classified version as possible. And critically, he wanted all of this done before January 20—the end of his administration.
After that meeting, John Brennan, Mike Rogers, Jim Comey, and I caucused privately. John had already volunteered to host a small group of analysts so they could share their findings, and we decided to expand the team to include almost thirty of the most seasoned people from the three agencies and from ODNI, working long hours through the ensuing holiday to produce as thorough a community assessment as possible.
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