A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

  Third, Putin wanted to help Donald Trump win. Trump had been saying favorable things about the Russian government and Putin had shown a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle.

  At the heart of the Russian interference campaign was the release of damaging emails stolen from organizations and individuals associated with the Democratic Party. There were also indications of an extensive Russian effort to penetrate voter registration databases maintained by the states. In late July, the FBI learned that a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor named George Papadopoulos had been discussing, months earlier, obtaining from the Russian government emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Based on this information, the FBI opened an investigation to try to understand whether Americans, including any associated with the Trump campaign, were working in any way with the Russians in their influence effort.

  As with the Clinton email investigation, for months the Bureau resisted all calls from reporters and other outside observers to confirm an investigation was under way. It was simply too early, we didn’t know whether we had anything to go on, and we wouldn’t want to tip off any of the individuals we were examining. The FBI and the Department of Justice did not officially confirm our investigation—and then only in a general way—until March 2017.

  A harder question was whether, during the heat of a presidential campaign, to tell the American people more about the overall Russian effort to influence the election. President Obama and his national security team wrestled with that question throughout August and September. At one meeting with the president, we discussed whether some kind of public “inoculation” made sense. That is, arming the American people with knowledge of the hostile effort to influence their voting decisions might help blunt its impact. I said I was tired of being the guy at the podium with controversial news—especially after the beating I had taken since the July 5 announcement—but I was willing to be the voice on this, absent any alternatives. I also acknowledged to the president that an inoculation effort might accidentally accomplish the Russians’ goal of undermining confidence in our election system. If you tell Americans that the Russians are tampering with the election, have you just sowed doubt about the outcome, or given one side an excuse for why they lost? This was very tricky. President Obama saw the dilemma clearly and said he was determined not to help the Russians achieve their goal of undermining faith in our process. The administration continued to consider the idea of inoculation and what that might look like.

  A few days later, to offer an option as the Obama team deliberated, I followed up on the idea of providing a “voice of inoculation” by drafting and sharing within the administration a newspaper opinion piece in my name. It laid out what the Russians were doing with the dumping of stolen emails, highlighted hacking aimed at state voter databases, and placed those activities in the context of historical Russian election disruption efforts. I intended that as a warning to the American people. But there was no decision. The Obama team’s deliberations were, as usual, extensive, thoughtful, and very slow. I suspected a major factor in their deliberations was the universal view of pollsters that Donald Trump had no chance. During a September meeting about the Russian effort, I remember President Obama reflecting that confidence in the outcome, saying of Putin, “He backed the wrong horse.” Why risk undermining faith in our electoral process, he seemed to conclude, when the Russian efforts were making no difference? And why give Donald Trump the excuse to blame Obama for frightening the American people? He was going to lose anyway.

  Finally, a month later, in early October, the Obama team decided some kind of formal statement from the administration was in order after all. The director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, and the secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, were prepared to sign it. The FBI leadership team and I decided that there was not an adequate reason for us to also sign on. By that point, there was widespread media coverage of a Russian campaign to influence the election. Numerous unnamed government officials were identified as sources in those stories. Prominent legislators issued statements and told the media they had been briefed about the Russian interference campaign. Candidate Clinton herself was talking about the Russian effort to elect her opponent. The websites and social media outlets pushing out stolen emails—including WikiLeaks and the Twitter page of its founder, Julian Assange—were widely and publicly associated with Russia. Given all of that, the administration’s October statement was at best a marginal addition to the public’s knowledge. Adding the FBI’s name would change nothing and be inconsistent with the way we hoped to operate on the eve of an election.

  Despite what politicians and pundits may say, there are no written rules about how the FBI and the Department of Justice should handle investigations as elections draw near. But there is a powerful norm that I always tried to follow: we should try to avoid, if possible, any action in the run-up to an election that could have an impact on the election result. In October 2016, there was no good reason for the FBI to speak about the Russians and the election. Americans already knew what was happening, so the FBI could reasonably avoid action.

  But “avoid action” was not an option when the Clinton email investigation came back to my office in October in a powerful and unexpected way, four months after I had declared in front of cameras that the FBI had done a thorough investigation and was finished.

  At some point in early October, someone at FBI headquarters (I think it was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe) mentioned to me that former Congressman Anthony Weiner had a laptop that might have some connection to the Clinton email case. I don’t remember the conversation clearly. I suspect that is because it seemed like a passing comment and the notion that Anthony Weiner’s computer might connect to Midyear and Hillary Clinton made no sense to me.

  Weiner was a disgraced former Democratic congressman from New York, who resigned in 2011 after revelations that he was sending naked pictures of himself to a variety of women. He was also the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Secretary Clinton’s closest aides. The FBI had come into possession of the content of Weiner’s laptop as part of a criminal investigation into Weiner’s alleged improper contact with underage girls. The criminal investigators in New York had a search warrant that allowed them to review certain files from the laptop. In the course of their work, the criminal team saw other file names, but they could not open those under the authority of their search warrant, which was confined to materials directly relevant to the sex case. And some of the names on those thousands of email files led the criminal team in New York to think they might be related to the Clinton case.

  At 5:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 27—twelve days before the election—McCabe sent me an email saying the Midyear team needed to meet with me. I had no idea what that was about, but of course asked my staff to set something up as soon as possible. Later that morning, I walked into my conference room and smiled broadly at the team leaders, lawyers, and executives from the Midyear case, each sitting in the same seats they had occupied so many times in the year of the Clinton email investigation.

  “The band is back together,” I said, as I slid into my seat. “What’s up?”

  It would be a long time before I smiled like that again.

  Members of the team explained that it appeared Weiner’s laptop contained hundreds of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal email domain. This was an enormous trove of Secretary Clinton’s emails. In 2014, Clinton had turned over to the State Department about thirty thousand emails and deleted about thirty thousand others as personal. This was far higher than those totals. But there was something else that caught their attention. The Midyear team had never been able to find Secretary Clinton’s emails from her first few months as secretary of state, a period during which she was using an AT&T BlackBerry email domain. The investigators had been keen to find those early emails because if there were so-called smoking-gun emails—perhaps in which the secretary had been instructed not to use her person
al email system or in which she had acknowledged doing something improper with classified materials—those emails were likely to be at the beginning of her tenure at State, when she first set up her own email address. But we had never found those early BlackBerry emails.

  For reasons no one around the table could explain, the Weiner laptop held thousands of emails from the AT&T BlackBerry domain. They told me those might well include the missing emails from the start of Clinton’s time at the Department of State. The team said there was no prospect of getting Weiner’s consent to search the rest of the laptop, given the deep legal trouble he was in.

  “We would like your permission to seek a search warrant.”

  Of course, I replied quickly. Go get a warrant.

  “How fast can you review and assess this?” I asked.

  Everyone in the room said that this review would take many weeks. There was, they said, simply too much material to do it more quickly. They needed to individually read tens of thousands of emails, and it had to be done by people who knew the context. This was not a situation where we could bring in hundreds of FBI employees to do the work. They wouldn’t know what they were reading or looking for. The team told me there was no chance the survey of the emails could be completed before the November 8 election, now less than two weeks away.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do it as quickly as you can, but do it well, always well, no matter how long that takes.”

  After the meeting, the team contacted lawyers at the Justice Department, who agreed we needed to immediately get a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. Now we had another decision to make.

  In July, and in the period since, I had repeatedly told the country and Congress that the FBI had done an honest, competent, and independent investigation and we were finished. There was no case here. People could take that to the bank. Yet, on October 27, the FBI and the Department of Justice had just decided to seek a search warrant to review a huge trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including information that conceivably could change our view of the investigation. And, as I was assured by top investigators at the Bureau, there was no prospect of finishing the review before the election. What was our responsibility?

  As I’ve noted, our long-standing tradition is to avoid, if at all possible, taking any action that might have an impact on an election. That tradition, that norm, was part of my identity. It was why the FBI hadn’t signed the October Obama administration statement about Russian election interference. If this was a brand-new investigation, doing nothing would have been an option. But in the Clinton email case, I saw only two choices, only two doors, and they were both actions.

  One door was marked “Speak.” By speaking, I would tell Congress that the FBI’s prior statements about the investigation being over were no longer true. That would be really, really bad. It would put the Bureau, and me, in a place where we might have an impact on an election. Really bad, nauseating even. To be avoided if humanly possible.

  What was that other door? “Conceal,” is what it read to my eyes. On behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an organization whose success relies on the public trust, I had testified under oath in public hearings to Congress and the American people that this case was finished. Now I knew that was no longer true. To remain silent at this point, while taking the step of getting a search warrant to review thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including possibly the missing early emails, would be an affirmative act of concealment, which would mean the director of the FBI had misled—and was continuing to mislead—Congress and the American people.

  Speak or conceal—both terrible options. The Midyear senior team debated them both. We talked, then broke so people could think, then we talked again. We sat around my conference table and looked at it from every direction we could think of. My chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, took his normal seat at the opposite end of the oblong table from me, so he could quietly watch all the participants and their body language; his job was to make sure I was hearing from everyone, with nothing held back. He has unusual emotional intelligence, and if he saw something concerning—someone hesitating or being talked over—he would speak to the person privately and alert me so I could draw that person into a later discussion. The FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker, played a similar role. He was a longtime and wise friend, and I could count on him to bring arguments and concerns to me if they weren’t being adequately voiced. He would often come to me privately and play devil’s advocate because he knew we needed every view, every concern, every argument.

  We made arguments against our arguments, but even with a dozen perspectives, we kept coming back to the same place: the credibility of the institutions of justice was at stake. Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States in less than two weeks, what would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department, or her own presidency if it later was revealed, after the fact, that she was still a subject of an FBI investigation? What if, after the election, we actually found information that demonstrated prosecutable criminal activity? No matter what we found, that act of concealment would be catastrophic to the integrity of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Put that way, the choice between a “really bad” option and a “catastrophic” option was not that hard a call. We had to tell Congress that things had changed.

  As we were arriving at this decision, one of the lawyers on the team asked a searing question. She was a brilliant and quiet person, whom I sometimes had to invite into the conversation. “Should you consider that what you are about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” she asked.

  I paused for several seconds. It was of course the question that was on everyone’s mind, whether they expressed it out loud or not.

  I began my reply by thanking her for asking that question. “It is a great question,” I said, “but not for a moment can I consider it. Because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent force in American life. If we start making decisions based on whose political fortunes will be affected, we are lost.”

  In other words, if we at the FBI started to think like every other partisan in Washington thought—what’s good for my “side” or whose political futures we might help or hurt—then the FBI would no longer have, and would no longer deserve, the public trust. The reservoir would be empty.

  I instructed the team to tell the senior staff at Justice that I believed it was my duty to inform Congress that we were restarting the investigation. I would say as little as possible, but the FBI had to speak. I said I would be happy to discuss the matter with the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. I’m not sure exactly why I opened the door to them in a way I hadn’t in July. I think part of it was a human reaction; I had taken an enormous amount of criticism for freezing them out in July. Part of it was also that I thought they would see the issue as I did and support me in what was to be a brutal situation. After all, the attorney general had publicly testified in July that the email investigation had been done well and was complete. Now her own prosecutors were seeking a search warrant. Surely, she would see that concealing that would be dishonest and a catastrophe for the Department of Justice. But, through their staffs, Lynch and Yates communicated that they thought this was a bad idea, that they would advise against it, but that it was my call and they didn’t see a need to speak with me about it. They didn’t order me not to do it, an order I would have followed.

  They didn’t want to choose a door: Speak or Conceal?

  After I got this answer, I briefly toyed with the idea of communicating to them that I had decided not to tell Congress, just to see what they would do if I shifted the responsibility entirely to them, but decided that would be cowardly and stupid. Once again it became my responsibility to take the hit. I told the Midyear team to offer Justice the chance to review my draft letter to Congress and suggest any changes. They took that opportunity and, while preserving their advice against my doing it, offered some useful suggestions for how to
describe what was going on, and in just a few sentences.

  On Friday morning, October 28, which oddly enough stuck in my head as the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Ramsey Rapist attack, I sent the letter to the chairpersons and the ranking members of each committee to which the Bureau had provided information in the wake of the “completion” of the Clinton email investigation. As I did in July, I again emailed the entire FBI workforce about what was happening:

  To all:

  This morning I sent a letter to Congress in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation. Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them.

  Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.

  My letter to Congress was released to the press in about ten minutes, which in Washington was about nine minutes later than I expected. And my world caught back on fire.

  The lovers and the haters from July largely switched positions. The fear that my letter was going to bring a Trump victory drove some normally thoughtful people around the bend. There was much hysteria about how we were violating Justice Department rules and policies. Of course, there were no such rules and there had never been another situation in the middle of an election like this. I suppose reasonable people might have decided not to speak about the renewed investigation, but the notion that we were out there breaking rules was offensive. “Tell me what you would do in my shoes and why you would do that,” I asked, unheard, of op-ed writers and talking heads on television. I knew the answer, of course: most of them would do what would be best for their favorite team. Well, the FBI can’t have a favorite team. The FBI represents the blindfolded Lady Justice and has to do the right thing outside the world of politics.