Damaged as he was, Comey put on a show.
He walked the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the public, through the ugly details of the March 2004 hospital exchange. He described how the White House had tried to undermine the Justice Department and the lengths he had to go to—including the never-before-discussed race to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft—to stop Cheney, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.
“It was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card,” Jim said. “They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was….I was angry. I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”
The testimony made enormous news and fed a growing narrative that the Bush administration had expanded and abused its executive power in the years after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The testimony had dramatically changed how Comey was viewed in Washington. Instead of being branded as a senior official in the Bush Justice Department at a time when legally dubious practices occurred, Jim had put immense distance between himself and the Bush administration. Some Democrats even considered him a whistleblower.
If his bitter resignation from the Bush Justice Department in 2005 hadn’t signaled that his career in government was over, the Senate testimony that day in 2007 certainly had. He had publicly turned on a Republican administration. Democrats might have looked at him more favorably, but he was still not a Democrat and would almost certainly not be considered for a top position if Democrats reclaimed the White House. But six years later, in a Rose Garden ceremony to announce Comey’s nomination to be director of the FBI, the president cited the showdown over the surveillance program, saying Comey had joined Mueller in “standing up for what he believed was right.”
“He was prepared to give up a job he loved,” Obama said, “rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong.”
* * *
—
A cardinal rule of American politics was that if you expose the truth of your opponent’s flaws more than they expose yours, then, armed with the facts, the voters will make the right decision. You win. And if you have the benefit of your opponent’s ample public record that helps you make the case that they are a racist or a misogynist—all the better. You win.
For Democrats in 2016, this conventional wisdom was turned upside down. Trump’s victory marked the most shocking presidential election result since Harry S. Truman beat Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. And it left Democrats more enraged than they had been even after a thirty-six-day recount led to George W. Bush winning the 2000 election. But Trump’s win did more than put Democrats on the losing side of a presidential election. It fundamentally undermined their view of politics and the country. In Trump’s case, on Election Day the country knew that he had discussed grabbing women by their genitals, had filed for bankruptcy six times, lied almost daily about many aspects of his own life and business, and conducted himself like no other modern presidential candidate as he made racist comments on the campaign trail and even attacked the family of an American service member who died in Iraq. And despite the voters knowing all of that, he still won.
It wasn’t as if Trump had beaten someone who, like himself, had no government experience. He had beaten Hillary Clinton, the person Democrats believed was probably more qualified to be president than any other modern candidate. Democrats thought she had embarrassed Trump in the debates and were confounded that he had even remained in the race after the Access Hollywood video came out. On top of that, the Republican establishment that Democrats had faced off against over the past two decades had shunned Trump. The Bush family had signaled they had no interest in supporting him, and Mitt Romney had given a speech during the campaign calling him “a phony, a fraud.”
“His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University,” Romney said.
For Democrats, there was also the way Trump had beaten Clinton. From the day Trump declared his candidacy, he turned dog whistles on issues like immigration into bullhorn moments and tapped into Americans’ nativist sentiments. Democrats asked themselves, how could anyone get away with this? Making it all the more confounding, Trump won in a way that ran directly against what the Republican Party had concluded was its only path forward. An autopsy the party did on itself after Romney’s 2012 loss said that Republicans needed to broaden their support and appeal to minorities. To do that, they needed to tack to the center on immigration. Instead, Trump had run to the far right on the issue.
The blast radius of blame from the Clintons and the Democratic Party spared no one. Clinton and her supporters pinned her loss on the far-left wing of the Democratic Party controlled by Bernie Sanders, Russia’s election meddling, and a hostile media (particularly the Times and my coverage of emails). But no one received harsher treatment for her defeat than Comey. His decision to reopen the investigation into her emails had come so close to the election that it was almost a given that it had a measurable—and perhaps decisive—effect on the outcome. It was the quintessential October surprise, resurrecting her most damaging issue just as voters were making their final decisions. It was simple: To Clinton and her supporters, had Comey not sent the letter to Congress, Trump would never have won.
Trump’s victory also changed Democrats’ view of the July press conference. Now the press conference, when coupled with Comey’s decision in October to reopen the email investigation, was seen by Democrats as a one-two punch that sabotaged her campaign.
One top Democrat, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, said that there should be dire consequences for Comey: Obama should fire him.
“What Jim Comey did was so highly improper and wrong,” Nadler said shortly after the election in a television interview on CNN. “From the very beginning in July, he was putting his thumb on the scale right then.”
Speaking as though he were describing a third world country where sinister groups like the military, the police, and security services fight for power, Nadler referred to the FBI as a police agency.
“And it’s unforgivable for a police agency to opine, frankly, publicly about legal conduct,” Nadler said. “The president ought to fire Comey immediately, and he ought to initiate an investigation.”
As the political ground under Comey shifted, the perception of his conduct from the law enforcement establishment and watchdogs who scrutinized the bureau changed. The inspector general for the Justice Department, who had declined to open an inquiry into the press conference in its aftermath, announced that he would be examining how Comey had handled the entire email investigation.
Ever since the angst of July had been compounded by the horror of October, Patrice had started to keep a mental list of the people she had thought were friends, only to have even some long friendships wrecked by a national election. It was not a short list. Harsh judgments and harsher criticism are facts of public life, but for Patrice this was beyond her understanding. After the election, though, singling out individuals would be impossible; her estrangement list would have to be expanded to include half the country. But was it her husband’s fault that Clinton had set up her private server and discussed classified matters in her messages? Was it his fault that Clinton was not the greatest at connecting with Americans? Was it his fault she didn’t campaign in a swing state like Wisconsin in the final days of the campaign?
In the weeks that followed, the press flayed Comey. He eagerly wanted to tell his side of the story. But he felt unsure of when he should do it and whether to do it in public. He could have held one of his quarterly meetings with reporters. But that might cause too much of a stir. He could do it during testimony
before a House or Senate committee. But there was no hearing coming up on the calendar. As Comey waited for the right moment, he went up to Capitol Hill to meet privately with senators, including the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein of California. Comey believed that behind closed doors he could walk lawmakers through his decision making. In an intimate setting, Comey believed, he could make them see how he had had no choice but to go public. He explained to the senators that his conundrum had been between speaking and concealing. If it ever came out that the FBI kept the investigation secret, Comey said, the bureau would have been accused of covering up for Clinton to ensure her victory, inflicting grave damage on the bureau’s reputation and credibility. Comey believed the lawmakers had heard him, giving him the sense that maybe, if he ever had to face them in a public setting, their criticism would be more muted.
More uncertainty existed about what a Trump presidency would look like than any other winning candidate in American history. Many of the same commentators, reporters, and politicos who discounted Trump’s chances of winning now believed that he would temper his behavior because he was going to become president. But despite his giving a traditionally gracious speech the night of his victory, the transition ushered in an even more outlandish version of Trump. The tweeting and unpredictability that dominated the presidential campaign now embodied the person who would lead the country and the team that assembled around him. He fired the head of his transition team. He had unstaffed calls with foreign leaders, on unsecured phones. And he held reality-television-style auditions for cabinet positions. The anger on the Left grew more intense. It boiled over as evidence emerged about Russia’s efforts to aid Trump in the election and questions arose about whether Trump and Putin had colluded.
Trump, who had celebrated Comey’s independence for holding the press conference and reopening the email investigation, was becoming more and more agitated with the media coverage of Russia’s election meddling and refused to accept the mounting evidence that Putin had thrown his weight behind his candidacy.
“Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card,” Trump tweeted. “It would be called conspiracy theory!”
Trump then ratcheted up his skepticism of Russia’s meddling.
“If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?” Trump tweeted.
With all the vitriol being directed at Comey by Democrats, a subtle shift occurred as the goat became the last line of defense. As angry as the Democrats were with Comey, Trump was becoming a bigger threat and needed to be stopped. And now the characteristics that Democrats hated in Comey, like his independence and ego, became assets for them. For reasons that were largely political, the only institution that might be able to credibly investigate Trump was Comey’s FBI. The election of Trump had ushered in a rarity in Washington: unified government. For only four of the previous sixty years, Republicans had controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress and had a conservative advantage on the Supreme Court. They now had that again. If Trump wanted, he could pressure House and Senate Republicans to hold back on investigating his administration, campaign, or Russia’s election meddling, potentially jeopardizing bipartisan oversight. And, as president, Trump could replace nearly everyone in the executive branch. That meant Trump could have pretty much whomever he wanted as attorney general. But out of everyone in the executive branch, Comey had a special status designed to protect his job. When the bureau’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, died in 1972, after serving in his post for forty-eight years, Congress made it law that every director would be appointed to a fixed ten-year term. Hoover amassed far too much power over his time. The new ten-year term would insulate FBI directors from politics, because they knew they could make tough decisions without fear of being fired. Many legal minds said that the fixed term was unconstitutional, because the president had the authority to replace anyone he wanted in the executive branch. But the post-Watergate norm that law enforcement needed to be kept at arm’s length from politics stopped nearly all presidents from dismissing their FBI directors. Comey had already displayed his independent streak. While Democrats blamed him for Trump’s election, they knew he had not done it as part of a plot to get Trump elected. They hoped serving as a check on the new president would appeal to his interest in rewriting his own narrative.
First, Comey needed to meet the president-elect.
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 5, 2017
FIFTEEN DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
THE WHITE HOUSE— The election meddling so alarmed Obama that in the days after Trump won, he ordered the intelligence community to conduct a formal assessment to determine who had been behind it. Eight weeks later—a remarkably short time for such a weighty report—the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, completed the report, briefed Obama on it, and prepared to release an unclassified version to the public. In an Oval Office meeting with Obama, Comey and the other intelligence chiefs detailed their sourcing methods and laid out their conclusions: The Russians had meddled in the 2016 election to damage Clinton, benefit Trump, and undermine Americans’ faith in democratic processes. Most significantly, Putin approved and directed the complex operation.
The document’s conclusion—which would be present in the unclassified report the next day but would not include sensitive sourcing methods—would have an enormous impact on how the public saw the incoming president. The Obama administration intelligence officials saw it as their job to conduct an intelligence review of the greatest attack ever on an American election—a review that the incoming administration might never perform. But for Trump, it would be seen as bitter Democrats using the power of the intelligence community to tar him before he even set foot in the White House. While the intelligence report did not determine whether the Trump campaign had coordinated efforts with the Russians, the finding that Putin had tried to get him elected gave Democrats enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his presidency. And for the media, it set up a once-in-a-generation story that combined celebrity, politics, and espionage: A reality television star, unmoored from the norms observed by his predecessors and with a penchant for crudeness, might have become president because a defeated foreign adversary put him there.
Given how this intelligence document would shape the perception of Trump’s presidency, it is important to understand how it was created and what it was based on. The intelligence chiefs based their conclusions on the U.S. government’s best intelligence. Intelligence is different from evidence. It is not meant to be seen in shades of black and white or used at a criminal trial. But it is essential to give American officials the best possible understanding of dynamic and changing events across the world.
The intelligence agencies attach confidence levels to their conclusions to assess how probable they believe it is that they have accurately captured the truth. These designations can be more important than the actual intelligence. For example, an agency can hear that a foreign adversary has new nuclear weapon capabilities. But if a “low confidence” designation is attached to the intelligence, it means it’s essentially worthless.
For Russia’s election meddling, the CIA and the FBI determined that they had “high confidence” in the report’s central conclusions. The NSA reported only “moderate confidence.”
The differing confidence levels appear to have come down to the intelligence community’s sourcing inside the Kremlin. Because the information came largely from a human source cultivated by the CIA, the NSA—which was, for much of the run-up to the election, kept in the dark about the source—approached the information with additional skepticism.
The legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reported in his book Fear that the central conclusions were based on six human sources who h
ad been providing the Americans with accurate information for years. However, only two of them were “solid.” One of those sources, Woodward wrote, was offered exfiltration out of Russia in the waning days of the Obama administration because the CIA had serious concerns about the source’s safety. However, the source declined to leave, fearing the ramifications for his family.
Since then, it has been reported that the source had been uniquely important in identifying Putin’s direct role in the plot and effort to get Trump elected. The source had been offering accurate intelligence to the Americans for decades, rising from a role as a mid-level official to a top-level aide with access to Putin and knowledge of the inner workings of the Kremlin. Although he was not in Putin’s tight inner circle, he was around the Russian president regularly—even close enough to take pictures of his desk. Information from the source had been handled in the most secretive way possible: The CIA kept it out of the president’s daily briefing and instead passed it along to the White House in a sealed envelope to limit the number of eyes on it.
In early 2017, the CIA had grown particularly concerned about the source’s safety, including the possibility that he would be assassinated, after it was reported in the American media that the intelligence community had moles in the Russian government. This created angst at the CIA, where officials already questioned his trustworthiness, believing his unwillingness to leave might be a sign that he was working as a double agent for the Russians and had fed bad information to the agency. The CIA launched a review of his career to see whether the information he had passed along over the years had been reliable. Analysts concluded he had been truly helpful. But even when the source passed that review, some CIA agents and analysts still had doubts.
Months into the Trump presidency, the source would eventually be persuaded by the CIA to leave Russia and live in the United States. His departure left a major blind spot in the Kremlin for Western intelligence, who were almost certain that the Russians would be back for more, seeking to undermine the American 2018 midterms as well as the 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 12