Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  The American diplomat who received the cable had shared it with the CIA station chief Gina Haspel and the FBI agent assigned to the embassy. Haspel had looked at the cable and said it was an issue for the FBI, not the CIA. The FBI agent stationed at the embassy sent it along to Washington.

  Now, as Comey was briefed in the seventh-floor conference room at the FBI, he remained impassive, a flat expression on his face. Being told of the cable, he said only, “Say more.” But inside, he was roiling.

  The investigators said they were opening a counterintelligence investigation into ties between the campaign and Russia. Investigators and analysts had begun looking at public records and bureau files to identify potential links between officials on the campaign and Russia. It was a big and potentially damaging move to open an investigation into an ongoing campaign in the heat of election season, but no one who was briefed at the bureau believed the intelligence they had was anything but sufficient for such an action, and based on the intelligence handed to them by the Australians, it would be irresponsible not to open an investigation. They were potentially defending the future White House from Russian agents, and if they didn’t act quickly, they knew there was little chance of stopping them.

  Along with their long-standing trust in the Australians, the American investigators took the intelligence seriously because of Trump’s own behavior and the strange abundance of Russia-connected campaign staff.

  Like the investigators in the room, Comey recognized the perilous path the bureau was heading down and understood that the investigation would have to be handled as sensitively as any other in the bureau’s history. Most counterintelligence investigations involved questions of whether an American had been targeted by a foreign adversary. In this case, a foreign adversary had declared war on the election and might now be doing it with the cooperation of the campaign of one of the two major American parties. Whatever the connections were between the campaign and Russia, the bureau would be forced to explain why it had investigated a presidential campaign.

  Unlike many criminal investigations—such as the one into Clinton’s email server—this was not a look back at some conduct that had occurred several years earlier. This was a potential crime in progress.

  “We’ve just got to make sure we keep this very closely held,” Comey told his investigators.

  Comey later recalled that the bureau needed to be careful “because if they’re involved we don’t want to alert them, and if they’re not involved it would be an incredible smear” to the campaign. It was an almost impossible needle to thread, but the investigators knew what Comey meant. They would investigate but had to do so without making overt moves—investigative actions that could tip off Russia or Trump or lead to it being publicly reported that the FBI had an investigation under way. That meant no interviews could be conducted, because whoever was questioned would know what the bureau was up to. That also meant no search warrants; FBI agents busting down the door of Trump Tower would be a certain tip-off.

  That Sunday, the bureau officially opened the investigation, code-naming it Crossfire Hurricane. The following day, counterintelligence investigators flew to London to interview the Australian ambassador about his interactions with Papadopoulos. In the opening weeks of the investigation, the bureau, one by one, opened cases on Papadopoulos, Page, Manafort, and Flynn.

  Trying to ensure the investigation would remain secret, the FBI turned to using confidential informants. This tactic would allow the bureau to have people it controlled interact directly with campaign officials to see whether any of them would divulge more information about their links to Russia. In the weeks that followed, the bureau tasked four confidential sources; two of the sources failed to secure a meeting, but the other two were able to provide the FBI with a valuable understanding of their targets. One of the informants, Stefan Halper—a University of Cambridge professor—met with Page, Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis, the former co-chairman of Trump’s campaign. Another informant was able to meet with Papadopoulos several times (all after he left the Trump campaign in October 2016).

  The bureau also took another highly unusual step. In August, the intelligence community was scheduled to brief the presidential campaigns on threats to the country. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence took the lead in setting up the Trump campaign briefing but invited the FBI to give a ten-minute rundown on the potential national security threat posed by foreign intelligence agencies. Wanting to see the campaign’s reaction to the briefings on Russia or whether anyone—particularly Flynn—said anything unusual, the bureau sent its supervisory agent in charge of investigating the Trump campaign to give the briefing.

  As fraught as they were, especially when they involved politicians, counterintelligence investigations—and the agents who worked on them—were Comey’s favorites. The cases were like puzzles, and the challenge of solving them attracted agents who were thoughtful, open-minded, worldly, and patient. But these types of investigations were almost always more difficult than other criminal cases and came with more political complications. The investigations almost always included a foreign adversary targeting Americans or institutions and the reliance on spying tools and confidential sources feeding information. Foreign adversaries had tools and abilities that run-of-the-mill gang members, drug dealers, and fraudsters could only dream of. Making it even more complicated, those Americans who were targeted by these adversaries often had no idea that they were being worked over by a spy. “In an organized crime case you’re never investigating someone who doesn’t know they are hooked up and working for the Gambinos,” Comey later told me. “In a counterintelligence investigation you may have a sophisticated person and they’re sleeping with someone who is really a foreign agent. It just adds layers of complexity, and to my mind those are the most interesting and hardest cases to deal with.”

  But with their reliance on sources, these investigations are often complicated. And this counterintelligence investigation was happening almost in the immediate aftermath of one of the largest breaches of U.S. national security in history. That investigation had dramatically demonstrated how quickly these investigations can go off the rails. In order to better understand the forces at work in 2016, I reported more deeply into the previously unknown bizarre investigative turns that the FBI took in the wake of the Edward Snowden case in 2013.

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  In the spring of 2013, the United States faced one of its most significant espionage challenges in years—this time from an American. In May of that year, a young contractor named Edward Snowden who had been working at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii suddenly stopped showing up to work. Soon, he materialized in Hong Kong, set to leak and publicize a massive trove of classified documents he had taken from NSA computers. Snowden’s leaks about widespread surveillance of Americans swept the globe and rattled the intelligence community. In June, the Department of Justice indicted him on espionage charges.

  By August, articles about Snowden’s documents were still being published, and he had obtained asylum in, of all places, Russia. President Obama grew frustrated with the chaos Snowden had created and looked for someone to solve the situation. The president turned to his FBI director at the time, Robert Mueller, hoping he might be able to find a way to get Snowden back. But Mueller showed little interest in the project. He had already been at the helm of the FBI for longer than his ten-year term, and he expressed his displeasure to top bureau officials about having to deal with Snowden. Still, he followed Obama’s orders. Mueller began calling the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the FSB, to negotiate the return of Snowden so he could be prosecuted.

  For twenty-nine straight days, Mueller called the head of the FSB, often getting nothing of value from the interactions. One of the few things the Russians did hand over was Snowden’s email address so the authorities could contact him and try to persuade him to ret
urn home. The Russians, in a rare moment of candor, also told the FBI they had tried to get Snowden to take drugs and sleep with women—two strategies used by governments to gain leverage on potential sources. But Snowden showed no interest in their ploys.

  To gain an upper hand on communicating with Snowden, the bureau brought in its behavioral science team from Quantico to work on coming up with ways they should converse with him in emails. The bureau struck up an unproductive correspondence with Snowden. There was no way Snowden was heading back without an absolute assurance that he would not be prosecuted—something Mueller and the FBI could not offer. Snowden did show the bureau he had a sense of humor, at the end of 2013 emailing the FBI a Christmas card.

  In the middle of the Snowden investigation in 2013, Comey replaced Mueller as FBI director. The bureau had done forensics on everything Snowden touched and might have stolen from the NSA, but as the media published pieces based on those stolen documents in 2013, some stories appeared to have relied on documents to which Snowden had no access. The prospect that there might be a “second Snowden” emerged inside the bureau.

  By revealing himself, Snowden had given the intelligence community a chance to determine what might become public and change their programs to ensure they continued to function. But the idea that a different—and anonymous—person might also be leaking classified documents from the intelligence community terrified law enforcement officials more than what Snowden had already done. Snowden put a face and a name to his offenses. A phantom would make putting countermeasures in place harder, if not impossible.

  By late 2013, the FBI’s Washington field office heard from an informant who claimed that he knew a man in Germany who had access to a trove of NSA documents and might leak them.

  Maybe the bureau had found their “second Snowden.” The FBI opened a new investigation, code-named Fellow Traveler.

  The informant had an unusual background. He was a lawyer based in Europe who also did lobbying work in Washington for Middle Eastern countries. Not all the details of what then unfolded between the informant and the FBI are known, but the tale demonstrates the odd nature of counterintelligence and espionage work and the willingness of investigators to stick with a potential source, even when the source waffles or misleads them.

  The informant told his bureau handler—a counterintelligence specialist—that he wanted to help the FBI stop the man in Germany from leaking the documents. The informant agreed to lure the man to a meeting in Bruges—a small port city in northern Belgium known for its medieval architecture—while bureau agents secretly watched. They would meet at a small bar named Café Rose Red. The bureau would be able to listen in and then apprehend the man with the documents.

  But what the FBI failed to realize at the time was that the informant was slyly playing another side in a high-stakes game at the intersection of espionage and journalism. Even as the informant promised to help the FBI find the would-be leaker, he was in contact with a veteran national security reporter for The New York Times named James Risen. The informant told Risen, who wrote about government spying, that he could help the Times obtain documents from the source revealing abuses of American surveillance authority.

  The informant’s double game meant telling the FBI that Risen also planned to travel to Bruges around the same time in the hopes of obtaining the leaked documents. The involvement of Risen bothered the FBI for many reasons. The bureau believed that if Risen booked travel to Europe, the operation might be detected by foreign intelligence services and become enmeshed in compromise; foreign spies would almost certainly follow Risen, see whom he met with, and potentially approach the source or hack the source’s devices to obtain the documents.

  The informant told the bureau that it should stop Risen from traveling, adding that if the bureau could buy him twenty-four hours, he could meet with the source before Risen got there.

  “That’s all we need,” the informant told his FBI handler.

  The FBI is governed by strict guidelines on what it can do in regard to journalists, and the agent told the informant there was no way the bureau could interfere with an American journalist’s travel.

  “Unfortunately, with the way things are, for us to impede the free movement of a citizen-journalist is absolutely beyond the pale,” the agent told the informant.

  If Risen insisted on coming to Europe, the informant suggested he would have his assistant trick the reporter. The assistant could drive Risen to the potential meeting, but the car would break down. That wasn’t going to work for the FBI, either.

  “That is a good tool at a tactical level,” the FBI handler told the informant. “But that doesn’t save us from the wrath of the attorney general and headquarters. If he shows up in country, all hell is going to break loose.”

  In his conversations with his FBI handler, the informant acknowledged that he was misleading Risen. “Everything about my relationship with Jim has become a lie,” the informant told his FBI handler in one conversation. “It takes just one stick to fall down, and I am afraid the house collapses on me.”

  Despite the back-and-forth about Risen, the bureau decided to move forward with its plan to have the informant meet the source. The FBI’s Washington field office deployed an entire squad to Bruges and sent a supervisor to oversee the operation—a level of engagement unheard of for the bureau in a foreign country.

  The plan turned into a debacle. The source never arrived at the café, and the informant ended up getting drunk while waiting for him. When higher-ups at the bureau learned what had happened, they grew furious that an entire team had been sent to Belgium based on information from a man with little track record as a source who was also known to be double-crossing a reporter on the same matter.

  The entire episode flummoxed agents. Some thought the informant might be working alongside Risen on some scheme, while others, such as the informant’s handler, still believed that he was legitimately trying to help the FBI.

  At that point, and with that level of confusion, one might surmise that the agency, lesson learned, would cut its losses and sever ties with the informant. But that’s not at all what happened, and more often than not this is the rule of counterintelligence investigations, not the exception. In the case of the hunt for the “second Snowden,” the FBI persisted with the informant, even after the initial disaster, in an increasingly bizarre cascade of events, which culminated in the informant first offering to install spyware on Risen’s computer (under the presumed suspicion that the reporter was already in possession of the intelligence files) for the FBI and then, perhaps even more improbably, claiming to have stolen the files off Risen’s computer in a visit to his home.

  For the FBI, the prospect of knowing what was on Risen’s computer was enticing indeed. Risen had been one of the great intelligence reporters of his generation and persistently a thorn in the side of the government, because he often published stories that exposed surveillance overreach. In fact, at the time, the Justice Department and Risen were in a legal fight about whether he needed to comply with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury about one of his sources. Despite the informant’s offer, the bureau refused to go along with that plan.

  But then, in 2014, Risen invited the informant to his house in Maryland. The informant later said that while at the house he secretly copied a trove of documents from Risen’s home computer onto a thumb drive. Whatever was on the thumb drive, and whatever the informant’s motive for supposedly boosting the files from Risen’s computer, he did hand over a thumb drive to his FBI handler.

  The handler, uncertain about what to do, left the drive on a desk and declined to process it as evidence. The informant, growing frustrated by the delay, called a member of Congress, who then called the top brass of the FBI, who were now learning for the first time that some of their agents had materials that had been stolen from a New York Times reporter.

  It is not clear if the in
formant actually stole the files or if he made up that part of the story, and if so, for what reason—a bizarre attempt to frame Risen? But the simple fact that FBI agents had accepted potentially stolen documents from a journalist ignited a tempest at senior levels of the nation’s intelligence community.

  The episode came at a politically inopportune moment for the Obama administration, which was under intense pressure to stop what had become a crackdown on journalists and their sources. Along with fighting Risen in court, the Justice Department faced bipartisan criticism for secretly seizing phone records from the Associated Press and searching the emails of a Fox News journalist, whom prosecutors described as a potential criminal conspirator for asking questions about national security. In response to the uproar over the targeting of journalists, the then attorney general, Eric Holder, issued new rules making it harder for investigators to seize records from members of the media.

  And now this new quagmire. Senior officials across the government met to discuss what to do with the informant and the thumb drive. The officials considered whether the informant should be charged for hacking Risen’s computer. To even consider making that type of case, the FBI would have to examine the contents of a journalist’s hard drive, which had proven to be almost impossible in other cases. A related but far more heated debate erupted about whether to just look at what was on the thumb drive to see if Risen had the intelligence documents; even though the FBI had taken the most criticism within the government about how the drive was obtained, the bureau still wanted to access the files. A top FBI investigator eventually approached the attorney general with a plan. In a written document, the bureau explained how it proposed to analyze the contents of the flash drive. Putting it in writing—memorializing it, for future reference—angered Holder, who, when he saw the document, cursed and stormed out of the meeting.