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

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  It is still unclear what, if anything, the informant accessed from Risen’s computer, because the flash drive still sits untouched in a safe at the FBI’s Washington field office. The Justice Department briefly looked into whether the informant had broken the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But the FBI ultimately concluded that the informant had likely made up the story about the source in Germany with the supposed NSA documents. The FBI severed its relationship with the informant and later told members of the intelligence community to stay away from him.

  The FBI would discipline the two agents who worked directly on the investigation. The handler was reassigned to counterterrorism, and his supervisor left the bureau. The victims of the theft—The New York Times and Risen—were never informed about the incident.

  And the moral of this story for the FBI, as it embarked on a labyrinthine counterintelligence investigation of a presidential campaign at the fiery peak of an election season, was this: These sorts of investigations are hard to do under the best of circumstances and can often go disastrously wrong.

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  AUGUST 11, 2016

  162 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  GASTON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA—A new political news site, Washington Babylon, needed something to draw readers in. So, the head of the site turned to a friend of his, a woman who had grabbed headlines in the political press for her role in the dramatic downfall of Congressman Anthony Weiner.

  The woman, Sydney Leathers, reviewed a new documentary called Weiner, which followed the former politician’s scandal-ridden mayoral campaign, giving it “two thumbs-down.”

  A reporter at the Daily Mail, Alana Goodman, quickly saw a passage eleven paragraphs into the review that seemed more important than the rest. Leathers had written, “I am certain his behavior continues to this day because a woman who claims to be one of his current sexting partners has reached out to me for advice.”

  If true, confirmation of a new Weiner scandal would be tabloid gold.

  Looking to report the news before anyone else jumped on it, Goodman contacted Leathers to see if she had more information about the woman who was messaging with Weiner. Leathers said she had the information but was unwilling to share it with her.

  For Goodman, the lead appeared dead.

  But weeks later, an agent representing Leathers reached out to the reporter. For several thousand dollars, the agent agreed to give Goodman the name of the woman with whom Weiner was corresponding.

  To Goodman’s surprise, Weiner’s latest target wasn’t even of age; she was a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina.

  There was no good way to approach such a young girl. This left Goodman with a reportorial choice. She could work the phones and try to reach the girl to get her to divulge her story. But that could be complicated in any situation, especially with a fifteen-year-old. Or she could jump on a plane down to North Carolina and try to land the story in person.

  Goodman decided to fly to North Carolina and, without any notice, make the approach cold. But not wanting to blindside the girl at school or show up at her house without warning, Goodman decided it would be best to first talk to her father, who is a lawyer. Goodman went to his office to broach the idea of speaking with his daughter.

  Most fathers would probably not react well to such an overture. But when Goodman talked to the father, he calmly said he knew about the messages and was unsure how to best handle the situation. The father said he was willing to talk to his daughter; he just needed to wait until later in the day because she was still at school. Goodman indicated that the Daily Mail was willing to pay for the story and protect the girl’s identity.

  After speaking with her father, the girl agreed to talk with Goodman and share all of the screenshots and messages she had from Weiner, and she also committed to sit for an on-camera interview. In exchange, the Daily Mail paid her $30,000.

  That evening, in a bland conference room at a nearby cheap hotel, the girl and her father sat for interviews.

  On September 20, the Daily Mail published the girl’s allegations in a twenty-two-hundred-word story—along with a number of embedded screenshots of the inappropriate conversations and photos that were exchanged—under the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Weiner Carried On a Months-Long Online Sexual Relationship with a Troubled 15-Year-Old Girl Telling Her She Made Him ‘Hard,’ Asking Her to Dress Up in ‘School-Girl’ Outfits and Pressing Her to Engage in ‘Rape Fantasies.’ ”

  Once the story was up, it took less than a day for federal investigators in New York to subpoena Weiner’s records to determine whether he had violated the law by exchanging sexual messages and photos with a child. Four days later, the FBI used a search warrant to seize Weiner’s phone, iPad, and laptop.

  FBI investigators examined the electronics. On the laptop, they found more than 300,000 emails, including many that had been sent or received from the domains @clintonemail.com and @clintonfoundation.org. The analysts could see that there was at least one BlackBerry message between Clinton and Abedin.

  On September 28, realizing the significance of the discovery, the case agent notified his superior, who later that day had a secure videoconference with the deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, and nearly forty other senior bureau officials, to discuss the findings.

  In the course of the Clinton email investigation, the FBI had failed to find emails from the first two months of her time as secretary of state, when Clinton had primarily used a BlackBerry to communicate with her staff. Investigators had speculated that the first two months would have been a key period for evidence, theorizing that if there was a smoking-gun email that showed Clinton acknowledging that she knew she was circumventing normal email channels and potentially handling classified information, it would have been in her first few months at State, when she was establishing systems and deciding how best to communicate.

  Suddenly, as a result of Anthony Weiner’s very public and ongoing self-destruction, the FBI had in its possession an extraordinary cache of possibly new evidence in a case that Jim Comey had closed three months before. But immediate action did not come from the discovery. For reasons that have never been explained, the computer and its contents somehow fell off the radar for senior officials at FBI headquarters in New York and Washington.

  Comey would later ascribe the oversight to the Russia investigation, which had taken over the agency’s attention that summer following the closing of the Clinton email case. But in mid-October, three weeks after FBI leadership first learned about the laptop, a senior Justice Department official named George Toscas asked them about what had happened to the emails one day after an unrelated meeting. That incidental question brought the issue back to life, and FBI leadership held a conference call with their colleagues in New York on October 26, along with attorneys from the Southern District of New York’s U.S. attorney’s office.

  The agents and lawyers on the call determined that if they wanted to look at the emails, they would need an expanded search warrant from the court. At 5:20 a.m. the following day, McCabe emailed Comey to ask “if you have any space on your calendar,” hoping to discuss what to do with Weiner’s laptop.

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  OCTOBER 20, 2016

  NINETY-TWO DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE—The Russia investigation created a once-in-a-generation challenge for Comey and the bureau as they sought to understand how a foreign adversary had launched such a wide-ranging attack on the United States. But there was a particularly frustrating aspect to the investigation that I would discover in the reporting for this book. Many details have not been reported anywhere before. Not only did top bureau officials feel as if they were fighting the Russians—they also felt as if they were fighting their own government. The contours of the Russian attack were coming roughly into focus, but the Americans were so unprepared for Putin’s aggre
ssion that they didn’t even know what to do with the evidence of it once it was in their possession.

  The American intelligence community had unique insight into what the Russians had stolen from the United States during a hacking campaign that began in 2014 and resulted in breaches of servers at the White House, the State Department, and nongovernmental institutions like the Democratic National Committee. Dutch intelligence—an agency allied with the Americans—had gained extraordinary access to the networks of a top hacking unit for the SVR, the Russian intelligence agency that is the modern-day KGB. The group—known as Cozy Bear—was one of the most notorious Russian hacking teams and had first breached the DNC systems a year before the election. Along with gaining access to their networks, the Dutch could see precisely what the Russians had stolen from American computers.

  Once the Dutch understood just how valuable the information they were receiving was, they began to share it with the Americans, handing over several flash drives to the FBI containing tens of thousands of pages of documents stolen from American institutions. The FBI had long been searching for ways to understand the Russians’ cyberaggression. Now, by seeing precisely what the Russians had chosen to steal, they had a vast evidentiary record to analyze and could have a chance to establish methods and motives.

  But the materials also created an incredibly serious legal question about the separation of powers in the U.S. government. Among the trove were documents stolen from Congress, the White House, and other government agencies. These documents were crime-scene evidence. But they were also the privileged communications of officials who were not known to have done anything wrong. Should the bureau be allowed to rummage around in the documents from another branch of government if there was no evidence that those officials broke the law? Was it right for the FBI to be looking through and assessing the messages sent by the top advisers to the president and other executive branch leaders?

  Bureau officials initially determined that it was probably safest for an American analyst to work with the Dutch to index the recovered documents, giving the FBI only the broad strokes about their contents. Few details are known about how the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, and White House handled the drives or what was on them. People familiar with their contents said that among them were emails that had been sent and received by President Obama. In May 2016, at least six months after receiving the drives from the Dutch, the bureau completed a memo about what material had been stolen. That August, Attorney General Lynch met with FBI officials to hear their argument for why they wanted full access to the drives.

  “Why shouldn’t we know what the Russians know?” one senior American official said. “The FBI said, ‘Fuck no, we should be able to look at it. What’s the privilege?’ ”

  It seemed simple to the investigating agents. The Russians were looking at the documents and might even eventually make them public, in which case they would no longer be considered secrets. And if they were able to access the documents, the bureau believed it could be of great benefit—possibly even allowing them to map out the Russians’ hacking playbook, or at least understand their strategies.

  In mid-October, Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director, and his top aide, Lisa Page, wanted approval to look at the materials but were facing strong opposition from Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, according to FBI text messages that have never been previously revealed. Three and a half weeks before Election Day, McCabe and Page discussed their need to get the CIA’s deputy director, David S. Cohen, on their side to help win over the Justice Department and White House, according to the text messages.

  “It would be very very helpful to get DDCIA to clarify that they DO want the content,” Page wrote in a text message, using the acronym for Cohen’s position.

  “The DAG continues to use that as an excuse,” Page said, referring to Yates.

  “We will very much need to get Cohen’s view before we meet with her,” Page said. “Better, have him weigh in with her before the meeting. We need to speak with one voice, if that is in fact the case.”

  “I will reach out to David,” McCabe responded.

  Page said that she had asked a top FBI counterintelligence analyst to put together a memo about everything the bureau’s cyber division knew about the drives. A meeting was scheduled at the Justice Department for October 20, between McCabe, Cohen, Yates, and the White House counsel, Neil Eggleston. But in that meeting Eggleston refused to give them the authority to examine the flash drives.

  As Election Day neared, the FBI had the contents of what had been stolen but was forbidden to look at them. When the Republicans on Capitol Hill later found out about the thumb drives, their conditioning led them to one conclusion: Surely they must contain the thirty thousand emails Clinton had deleted.

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  OCTOBER 27, 2016

  EIGHTY-FIVE DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

  THE COMEY HOME, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA—After her husband’s July press conference, the response had surprised Patrice. She knew that Jim would be criticized. But it was the fervor and tenor of the criticism that stood out. He ignored the press and public opinion for a living. But Patrice read everything, from the damning op-ed by the former Justice Department official to all the comments sections, too, which is never a good idea. Maybe it was just the heat of an election year, she thought. Whatever it was, as the fall approached, the intensity had dissipated, and the focus shifted to the increasingly bizarre national election.

  But, on a Thursday evening, just twelve days before the election, the issue that had created so much consternation in the summer came back. That evening, shortly after Jim got home from work, he and Patrice were alone in the kitchen when he told her that earlier that day he had been briefed by his deputies that agents investigating the disgraced former House member Anthony Weiner had made a startling discovery. Weiner was under a criminal investigation for sending explicit messages to a teenage girl over the internet, and on the devices he used to communicate with the girl, investigators had found an enormous number of Clinton’s emails, including some that the bureau investigators thought they had not found during the original email investigation, which had been closed several months earlier. Complicating things even further, the investigators could not just look at the emails to ensure they contained no classified information. They would need to go to court to get a warrant.

  There were less than two weeks to go before the presidential election, and now the Clinton email investigation that Comey had taken the rare step of personally and publicly closing in July was about to roar back to life.

  “It’s a shitshow,” he told Patrice. “They told me that there’s thousands of emails.”

  It would fall to the director to make the final decision about what to do. Making it all the more complicated, he reminded Patrice that he would have to tell Congress. Over the summer he had pledged that if there were new developments in the email case, he would notify the leadership and pertinent committees.

  This was a nightmare. And between Jim and Patrice, the looming dilemma would precipitate a kitchen conversation that would be a déjà vu reprise of their talk in late June, but this time the gravity of the moment multiplied a hundredfold as they alone peered into what this could lead to for the country.

  Of course Comey was talking to Patrice about it. And of course she was aghast—aghast that her husband and the country were in this position, and aghast that the renewal of the investigation just as the country was turning to decide what America would be for the next four years could hurt Clinton and help get Trump elected. As upset as she was getting, she knew that making a direct appeal to her husband about Clinton’s political fate would be a losing argument, and so she shied away from mentioning Clinton’s name as she pleaded with Jim.

  “You can’t do this this close to the election. You can’t do this to a candidate,” she said.

  She peppered Jim w
ith questions.

  “What the hell are Hillary Clinton’s emails doing on Anthony Weiner’s laptop? How is Huma Abedin that incompetent with emails? Why is this coming out now?”

  She asked why the FBI couldn’t just go get the warrant without having to tell Congress.

  “If we get the warrant, it will leak,” he said.

  If that occurred, he said, it would look as if the bureau had reopened the investigation and hidden it from Congress, after pledging transparency. That would compound the disaster.

  “What is our relationship with Congress if we’re going to lie to them and not say something?” he asked.

  Patrice understood that logic. But she could not get past the fact that this could be severely damaging to Clinton and that her husband was again going to become a target—a target in a far bigger way than in the aftermath of the press conference. She believed Trump had proven throughout the campaign why he was an existential threat to the country. Everything needed to be done to ensure he never set foot in the White House. If the FBI decided it had to charge Clinton after the election, Patrice was fine with that—so long as Trump wasn’t president.

  “It’s too close to the election. It’s too close to the election,” she said. “Don’t you understand that?”

  This irritated Comey. The timing had nothing to do with it. The FBI director was not supposed to factor partisan politics into his decision making. If it had been any time of year, he would have told Congress. He could not hide it from them now. Comey’s dilemma was actually not without precedent.

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  Four days before the 1992 presidential election, with Bill Clinton challenging President George H. W. Bush, a debate raged back in Washington in the office of the independent counsel overseeing the Iran-contra investigation. The prosecutor leading that office, Lawrence E. Walsh, faced a legal deadline. A judge said that Walsh had until October 30 to refile an indictment against Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense under Reagan. Walsh and his team contended that Weinberger had obstructed their investigation when he had made false statements to investigators and hidden notes from them.