Until then, the conversation had been cordial and about nothing of consequence. “I never saw anything that was really off,” he said. “The biggest thing is that you make things more dramatic.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “People sometimes say that about us, that we overdramatize things; sometimes things can feel more dramatic reading them than living through them. I get it.”
It began to drizzle. It was now or never. I had to find out if the information I had received was true. Had McGahn turned on the president? And if so, why?
“You’ve done a lot of damage to the president and nobody knows it,” I said.
McGahn tried to sidestep.
“I told them what happened—don’t know if that’s damage,” he said.
To be perfectly clear, I repeated myself.
“You did a lot of damage to the president. I understand that,” I said. I then pointed at McGahn. “You understand that.”
I paused. Then I pointed at the West Wing.
“But he doesn’t understand that,” I said. “You did a lot of damage to the president and only you and I realize it.”
“I damaged the office of the president; I damaged the office,” he said, in recognition that a White House counsel speaking so freely with investigators was highly unusual. His point was that such a precedent would likely make it harder for future presidents to stop investigators from speaking with White House lawyers. But I thought he was still understating the gravity of what he had done.
There was another pause. Our conversation had quickly turned from personal to professional, from casual to intense. But McGahn wasn’t looking for an exit. At least not yet. Instead, he seemed to want to know what I knew.
“That’s not it. You damaged him, and he doesn’t understand that,” I said. “It amazes me that he never understood why you really went in there and how extraordinary your cooperation has been.”
He again tried to downplay what he had done.
All was quiet for a moment, and then I added, “We’re going to have to write this at some point.”
McGahn did not like that. The idea of a New York Times story chronicling the extent of the White House counsel’s cooperation, going so far as to note that the special counsel felt as if he were “running” McGahn, would be devastating for his relationship with this most mercurial president. McGahn hinted at what we both knew: If the president realized the severity of what his own lawyer had done, he could be fired.
I told him that I understood the concerns about his job, but that that would not factor into our decision about whether or when to publish the story.
Just then, sheets of rain. My time was up. In the downpour, we shook hands.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, loud enough to cut through the storm.
“This is the last time we ever talk,” he responded with a smile as he turned and walked away.
II
THE INSTITUTIONALIST
JULY 10, 2015
ONE YEAR, SIX MONTHS, AND TEN DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
THE SEVENTH FLOOR OF THE FBI’S HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.—On summer Fridays in the mid-2010s, I tried to work from home in my sweats. There was no indication anything would get in the way of that plan on Friday, July 10, 2015, or that the day would be at all eventful, much less consequential. But on that day, as most of the capital was enjoying a long break the week after Independence Day, two things occurred at the FBI’s headquarters that would have a profound bearing on the following year’s presidential election.
The call from my regular contact at the FBI came in early that morning.
“Just get over here,” the voice said in the slightly irritated tone of most FBI agents.
This made no sense.
Just a day earlier, the FBI director, James B. Comey, had held one of his quarterly sit-downs with all the reporters who covered him and the agency to answer our questions about the bureau.
Now he wanted to see us again?
I threw on a sport jacket and hightailed it from my small one-bedroom basement apartment in northwest Washington over to the bureau’s headquarters six blocks east of the White House. After passing through the security screening, I was brought up to the same plain room where all of us on the FBI beat sat with Comey around a table at the same time the previous day.
Reporters don’t like being kept in the dark. As we waited for Comey to arrive, speculation filled the void.
Maybe the FBI had nabbed a major terrorist? No, we would have definitely heard something about that. Had the bureau discovered that one of its top agents was a spy? Was Comey sick?
Just then, Comey walked in, a grave expression on his face, quickly sat down in front of us, and studied a single sheet of paper.
Over his two years as FBI director, everything had seemed to go right for Comey. His predecessor, Robert S. Mueller III, rarely spoke to the press or connected with agents in the FBI’s fifty-six field offices spread out across the country. Instead, Mueller managed the bureau from behind closed doors in Washington, with a reserve that had distinguished his long career in federal law enforcement. As he remade the agency into a counterterrorism fighting force in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Mueller’s rigid style left many of the agents, analysts, and other personnel in the bureau feeling chastened and alienated. Members of Congress, tasked with oversight of the bureau, felt similarly miffed by Mueller. Comey had recognized this problem before he became director and brought to the job a personal charisma and communication skills that set him apart, not only from his predecessors at the agency, but from nearly every politician in Washington.
In his first year as director, Comey had gone on a “listening tour.” He visited all the field offices, giving a press conference at each stop, and spent hours getting lunch and coffee with lawmakers. Could anyone remember Mueller convening a single press conference, much less fifty-six of them? And since when did the director of the FBI owe anyone public utterances, on any subject, for any reason? Mueller’s model had been a posture of complete probity. But although Comey meant to imply no criticism of his predecessor, he was transforming the position of director from that of a sphinx—opaque and silent—into a veritable public figure. In his second year, Comey had begun using the directorship as a bully pulpit of sorts, speaking out about issues that went beyond the day-to-day churn of the bureau’s investigations. He had an ease about him in the role, an air that communicated the utter conviction that principle was on his side. For any flaws that Comey might have possessed, he did not seem to suffer much from self-doubt, at least not publicly. In February 2015, he had given an unusually candid speech at Georgetown University about race and policing in which he quoted the Broadway show Avenue Q, saying, “Everyone’s a bit racist.” Comey was widely praised for the speech, including by police commissioners and officers. That reaction stood in stark contrast to how many responded several years earlier when, as attorney general, Eric Holder said that the United States “has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot” but had been “a nation of cowards” on race.
But in the conference room on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters, Comey sat in front of a group of puzzled reporters, clearly disturbed. Normally comfortable speaking off the cuff, on that day he instead studied that piece of paper in front of him and then read some of it aloud.
“I believe the job of the FBI director is to be as transparent as possible with the American people, because we work for them,” Comey said. “As you know, I try hard to explain our work to them, and I am also committed to explaining to them when we make a mistake and what I intend to do about it. I’m here today to talk to you about a mistake, in a matter of heartbreaking importance to all of us.”
The mistake, Comey said, related to Dylann Roof, the twenty-one-year-old man who, the previous month, had joined an evening prayer service at the Emanuel AME Church in
Charleston, South Carolina, and then proceeded to execute nine Black parishioners with a Glock .45 handgun. Roof had said he committed the massacre in the hopes of starting a race war and that he believed Blacks were violent and had lower IQs than whites.
That morning, Comey said that because of what he described as a terrible breakdown in the FBI’s background check system, involving a cascading series of mistakes and bureaucratic miscommunications, Roof had been allowed to purchase the weapon despite an earlier drug arrest that should have disqualified him from gun ownership.
By 2015, mass shootings had become the norm in America. But the murders at Mother Emanuel, as the church is affectionately known, shocked a country that had grown numb to gun violence. Roof had targeted people at their house of worship, hunting them because of their race. The intensity of the grief was a powerful reminder of America’s deep and seemingly eternal racial wound. The nine victims were still being mourned in the Charleston community and beyond. In the days following the murders, the immediate survivors of the dead—in an act of grace that stunned the country—had forgiven Roof. And grace was the theme of President Obama’s eulogy as he led the country in mourning at the memorial service nine days after the shooting. As he finished speaking, the president broke into song, leading the congregation in “Amazing Grace,” a soaring moment of pain and promise that banished cynicism and enshrined the moment in history.
And now, as I sat in FBI headquarters, watching a stricken director and trying to understand the nuances of federal gun laws, I could see something remarkable unfolding before me. The bureau had spent two decades and tens of millions of dollars developing computer systems and training personnel to prevent guns from getting into the hands of murderers. Those efforts had failed monumentally and tragically, and here was the FBI director admitting to the country that it was his agency that had let it happen.
“We are all sick this happened,” Comey said. “We wish we could turn back time. From this vantage point, everything seems obvious.”
The FBI makes roughly twenty thousand arrests a year, a significant portion of which result in convictions and prison sentences and receive no public attention. But mistakes in cases can leave a lasting stain on the bureau. In the early 1990s, following lengthy standoffs at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho and Waco, Texas—during which a combined eighty-nine people were killed—the bureau was heavily criticized by the public and its actions were eventually investigated by government officials. After 9/11, government investigators placed significant blame on the FBI for failing to effectively utilize well-placed informants and for neglecting to share intelligence with other agencies that could have thwarted the attacks.
While it was very unusual for the director to make any pronouncement about an ongoing investigation, much less offer a heartbreaking mea culpa, Comey calculated that keeping the details about Roof’s gun sale secret could lead to similar negative consequences for himself and for the bureau. Unlike many of his predecessors, Comey believed in getting bad news out early and explaining it thoroughly. Transparency was the greatest disinfectant. Congress and the media became most agitated, and curious, when an official played “hide the ball,” seeking to withhold information from the public. If you leveled with them, Comey believed, those charged with oversight typically moved on to another target to scrutinize.
This approach had been hugely beneficial to Comey in his career. In 2004, shortly after he became deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush, he confronted the case of an accused terrorist named Jose Padilla who had been arrested on suspicions that he was plotting a “dirty bomb” attack on American soil. Although he was an American citizen and had been arrested in the United States, Padilla had been treated as an enemy combatant, and the Department of Justice had been holding him under extreme conditions in a military facility for two years, despite having not charged him with a crime. The Padilla case raised all sorts of questions about how long the government can detain an American citizen without affording him his constitutional rights to due process and a speedy trial.
In June 2004, Comey decided to air out those questions, holding a press conference to lay out the facts of the Padilla case. It worked. Questions about the prisoner’s detention leveled off in the weeks that followed.
Now, in the case of Dylann Roof, Comey was running the same play. Would it work again?
I rushed out of the briefing and back home, where I quickly pounded out a story that the Times posted online. The following day, the Times ran the story on the front page under the headline “Background Check Missed Charleston Suspect.” There was plenty of reason to be critical of the bureau’s grave error, and virtually no media outlet passed on the opportunity to assign blame for the mistakes that had proven catastrophic. But because Comey admitted to the FBI’s failure, it was only a one-day story. There would be no high-profile congressional hearings or investigations.
In my decade as a reporter for the Times, I had seen my fair share of savvy operators navigate media scrutiny, whether it was Yankees manager Joe Torre or the generals and colonels I had dealt with when in Iraq to cover the last year of the American occupation. But Comey had done something far more extraordinary than bring the media along to his point of view. He had resolved a serious political problem without resorting to classic moves in the Washington PR game—shifting blame, calling names, or diverting attention. Instead, he had simply traded on his reputation for principle and relied on exposing the facts to sunlight. Comey had tamed the political winds of Washington at a time when, unbeknownst to even its shrewdest players and observers, the rules of engagement were beginning to shift.
Comey could not have realized it at the time, but that moment would be the last high point of his professional career. From that point forward, a man who had appeared infallible, with an uncanny ability to steer through political storms, would face the greatest professional test of his life, which would humble him in ways that he could never have imagined as he commanded this impromptu press briefing.
On that same day, July 10, 2015, the seeds of his future and the colossal challenge he would face were being planted just down the hall from him. And it wasn’t just Jim Comey’s fate that was sealed that day; in a very real sense, the future of the country changed course that day as well. In the FBI’s counterintelligence division, which protects the United States against espionage and also leads the bureau’s investigations into the mishandling of national security secrets, agents and their supervisors initiated a classified FD-1057; that is, they began a highly sensitive investigation.
Title: Opening of Full Investigation on a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM)
Synopsis: FBIHQ, Counterespionage Section, is opening a full investigation based on specific articulated facts provided by an 811 referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, dated July 6, 2015 regarding the potential compromise of classified information.
This investigation is also designated a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM) due to a connection to a current public official, political appointee or candidate.
With this short and cryptic communication, the FBI had opened a criminal investigation into whether the leading Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, had mishandled classified information during her tenure as secretary of state through her use of a private email account. The investigation would be code-named Midyear Exam.
Hillary Clinton was a singular figure in American politics who just one month earlier had announced her campaign for the presidency. A partisan lightning rod, she was a longtime foil for conservatives, dating back to her husband Bill Clinton’s first national campaign in 1992, and ever since then Republicans had made it a mission to demonize Clinton, routinely accusing her of corruption. Those attacks, going back decades, had only hardened the view of Democrats that relentless investigations of Clinton were baseless and purely political.
Comey’s deputy director, Mar
k Giuliano, briefed him on the decision.
“You know you are totally screwed, right?” Giuliano said to Comey, suggesting that regardless of what the investigation revealed, half the country would be enraged.
Dating back to his days as a prosecutor, Comey knew the Clintons well enough to have a realistic view of them. In his view, they were neither the cartoon villains the Republicans made them out to be nor the innocent victims of right-wing conspiracies the Democrats would have you believe. But because those were the only two characterizations on offer in the political culture, Comey also knew that his deputy was right: The alternate realities from which Republicans and Democrats regarded the Clintons meant that no matter how the investigation ended, he and the FBI would come out damaged.
“Yup,” Comey said. “Nobody gets out alive.”
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 23, 2016
363 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
HUMA ABEDIN AND ANTHONY WEINER’S APARTMENT, MANHATTAN—As Hillary Clinton campaigned in Iowa for the Democratic nomination, facing a surprisingly strong challenge from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina sent a message to a disgraced former congressman on Twitter. She had read about his public scandals and had become fascinated with him.
“We should skype sometime,” the girl said.
“Where do you go to school,” said the disgraced politician, Anthony Weiner.
The girl told Weiner the name of her high school—the first of several comments she made to him that clearly showed she was under eighteen.
“You are kinda sorta gorgeous,” Weiner said.
She sent him photos and he commented on her physique.
“Your body is pretty insane,” Weiner said.
“You really think so?” the girl said.
In the previous five years, Weiner had destroyed his reputation and his political career after he had been repeatedly caught sending sexually explicit messages to women online. His wife, Huma Abedin, had risen to become Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. Despite being embarrassed beyond belief by Weiner, Abedin had fought for the marriage and stayed with him. Given the prominence of her job with Clinton, he was potentially a political liability for the Clintons if he ever made a mistake again. But given how he had been humiliated and the fact that Abedin had remained with him, it was hard to fathom he would ever do anything again to embarrass himself, Abedin, or the Clintons.
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