In reporting for this book, I learned more about the intelligence collection for the assessment. According to a former top government official, the CIA had at least one other source in Putin’s orbit who provided information that the intelligence community relied on to reach its conclusion about Putin’s role in the election interference. On top of that human source, the intelligence community had some form of electronic surveillance that they believed buttressed the validity of their sources and of the report. The assessment was regarded as solid and authoritative. No such review had ever been undertaken so quickly before, and its speed was due to the emergency that it confirmed: The United States had been attacked. And the United States was vulnerable to more attacks.
Comey was pretty sure this was going to be his last time in the Oval Office with President Obama. There was a bowl in the Oval Office filled with apples, part of the health consciousness that Michelle Obama had brought to the White House. He wondered, will fresh fruit be a thing in the next administration?
As he walked out, he casually took one of the apples from the bowl, later sharing it with his daughter that night at home. That apple was a witness to one of the most important intelligence briefings in American history.
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 6, 2017
FOURTEEN DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
A CONFERENCE ROOM ON THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR OF TRUMP TOWER—If Obama was going to be briefed, then the incoming president needed to be briefed, too. A day after the Oval Office meeting, the intel heads traveled to Trump Tower in Manhattan, the same place where Russian operatives promising dirt on Clinton had met with Don Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner seven months earlier.
It would be Comey’s first meeting with Trump. The encounter would be momentous. Since the election, Trump had openly questioned the news reports that Russia had actually been behind the hacking, saying it could have been China or “some guy in his home in New Jersey.” Now the intelligence chiefs had to tell the incoming president why he was wrong. Moreover, Comey knew that four of Trump’s associates—including one who ended up sitting next to him at the briefing, Michael Flynn—were under investigation for their ties to Russia. Trump had already shown how sensitive he was about losing the popular vote, and Comey planned to take the lead on briefing the president-elect, one-on-one, on another personally sensitive subject: the Steele dossier.
There was an added urgency to the briefing. The intel chiefs had been told that Carl Bernstein, the veteran Watergate reporter for The Washington Post who now worked as an analyst for CNN, had a copy of the dossier and planned to publish it. If CNN said that the intelligence community had the dossier but had kept it secret from Trump, Comey thought it could deepen his suspicion that there was a “Deep State” aligned against him.
Comey was already learning how erratic Trump could be and was unsure he could trust his response to the briefing. In anticipation of discussing highly sensitive material with the president-elect, he thought there was a good chance he might need to document his side of the meeting to create a record. Complicating matters further, everything he would be discussing with Trump would be classified, so he wouldn’t be able to record his impressions on an unsecure laptop. He asked one of his aides to bring along a computer that was approved for the transfer of classified material. It was something he had never done as FBI director. It was something he had never even contemplated as necessary.
Comey initially thought that Trump would come to the FBI’s field office in Manhattan to receive the briefing, because it involved the most highly classified information and Comey believed that the proper place to discuss such matters would be in a secured government facility, where it’s harder for adversaries to eavesdrop. But Trump’s aides balked at that suggestion and insisted on meeting at Trump Tower, and a small conference room on the fourteenth floor was agreed to. It’s unclear if the FBI or the intelligence agencies swept the room for bugs or did anything to secure the space. In Trumpian fashion, a makeshift secured facility was created. A thick dark gold curtain was hung over a large glass wall that faced a hallway. The curtain was slightly too long and bent at the floor. There were eight chairs around the table and a row of chairs in front of the curtain, where incoming CIA director Mike Pompeo, spokesman Sean Spicer, and other aides sat. Trump arrived ten minutes later and sat at the conference table with Reince Priebus, Mike Pence, and Flynn.
The Trump team’s reaction to the briefing on the Russian interference bothered Comey. Instead of asking questions about how the attack was orchestrated or how another one could be prevented in the future, they tried to figure out how to spin the assessment to falsely claim to the public that the intelligence community had concluded that Russian interference played no role in the election result. The report had made no such determination.
When Trump was informed about the sources the intelligence community had relied upon within the Russian government, he told the intelligence chiefs that he was skeptical of their trustworthiness.
“I don’t believe in human sources,” Trump said. “These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country. I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies.”
After the briefing, Comey pulled Trump aside in the conference room for his one-on-one about the dossier. The FBI director told Trump about the specific allegation in the dossier that, in 2013, Trump had prostitutes urinate on a bed in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow that Obama had slept on, and that the Russians had video footage of it.
Trump fixated on the prostitutes and appeared defensive. To put Trump at ease, Comey told him that he was not under investigation.
Trump’s behavior in their first encounter showed Comey several things. The incoming president seemed to have no interest in evidence that Russia, a foreign adversary, had meddled in the election. Trump was incredibly defensive about the issue of prostitutes. And he acted as arrogant and blustery as he had on television. In his years working in the Bush and Obama administrations, Comey had never before felt the need to protect himself by writing contemporaneous memos to document what he had witnessed or done. But Trump had so unnerved him that he thought he had to do it now. Someday the details of the meeting might come out, and he feared Trump wouldn’t tell the truth. As his armored sports utility vehicle pulled away from Trump Tower, Comey began typing out a memo on the laptop.
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it important to document,” Comey said. “I knew there might come a day where I might need a record to defend not just myself but the FBI and our integrity.”
In the months that followed, Trump obsessed about the dossier to Comey and with aides, and in public. A week later, FBI agents would interview the primary subsource relied upon for the dossier. The subsource would tell the FBI that the allegation about Trump and prostitutes was, like much of the dossier, “rumor and speculation.” But inside the FBI, for reasons that still remain unclear, Comey was apparently not told of the interview. And so as Trump complained about the dossier and the Russia investigation that spring, Comey would not know about the doubt that had been cast on some of the dossier’s most salacious allegations. The FBI would become increasingly convinced as it continued to investigate the dossier that some of its information had been planted, as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. But years would pass before Trump would be told about this.
When Comey returned home, he didn’t tell Patrice that he’d written the memo. But she knew her husband well enough to pick up that something had gone awry. He was not angry but quiet—the same way he’d retreated into himself at the height of the battles between the Justice Department and Cheney over torture and surveillance during the Bush administration.
Going forward, Comey’s demeanor would be different whenever Trump came up. Before, when Trump did or said something ridiculous, Comey could just make a joke. But it wasn’t funny anymor
e.
* * *
—
What Patrice didn’t know was that her husband’s demeanor belied problems that Patrice never could have fathomed. He had just learned something highly classified that raised questions about whether one of the people closest to the president had been working secretly with the Kremlin: the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
The problem was directly tied to Obama’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia for Putin’s election meddling. Curiously, Putin had chosen not to retaliate, and Trump had publicly praised the Russian leader’s decision as “very smart.” The White House, meanwhile, had tasked the intelligence community with finding out why Putin had reacted this way.
Intelligence analysts—including those at the FBI—sifted through the mountains of wiretaps and source reporting they collected on a daily basis. As part of that process, in early January they reviewed wiretaps on the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. The wiretaps revealed that Kislyak had spoken to Flynn five times on the day the sanctions were announced. On the calls, Flynn had told Kislyak not to overreact to the new sanctions, suggesting the Trump administration might offer the Russians more leniency when they were in power—in spite of Moscow’s attack on the American electoral process. This left Comey and his team flummoxed and even more suspicious of the links between Trump and Russia. Why would Flynn, a retired Army general who had served as the military’s top intelligence official, offer that kind of assurance to a foreign adversary, especially when he certainly knew that the Americans would be listening? The FBI, which was already investigating Flynn, now expanded its investigation to take an even deeper look at him.
Now Comey had to grapple with the possibility that the incoming president’s national security adviser was in cahoots with the Russians. Comey briefed the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, telling them that it was up to them whether to brief the White House, and a briefing was scheduled in the days that followed.
Then, on January 12, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a column questioning the Obama administration’s delay on addressing Russia’s hacking. In the column, Ignatius, citing a senior U.S. government official, said that Flynn had spoken with the Russian ambassador several times on the day Obama announced the sanctions.
“Holy shit, that’s a FISA leak; that doesn’t happen,” Comey said to aides. Someone had leaked the contents of Flynn’s wiretap, which are considered the most tightly held forms of intelligence.
Comey thought to himself: I hope political people who are about to leave the administration are not freaking out about Trump becoming president and doing something improper.
The Ignatius column prompted immediate questions about Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador. Contact is one thing, but was Flynn undermining current U.S. foreign policy? In televised interviews, Pence and the incoming chief of staff, Priebus, insisted Flynn had not discussed sanctions on the calls. To Comey, either they were all conspiring together to cover up Flynn’s discussions with an ambassador for a country that had just sought to tip the election for Trump, or, more likely, Flynn had lied to the incoming vice president and chief of staff.
Both were bad.
Comey and Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, along with other top Justice Department and FBI officials, began debating what to do. Yates wanted to warn the incoming administration that their national security adviser might have lied to the vice president. She claimed that Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians, who knew Flynn had lied. Comey did not believe it was his responsibility to police lying in Trump’s inner circle; that could be a never-ending task. And Comey thought the chances the Russians would use the call as kompromat were overblown. Most important, he wanted the FBI to get to the bottom of Flynn’s relationship with Kislyak. Why had they talked with such frequency, and why had Flynn lied about discussing sanctions relief with the Russian ambassador? If the bureau engaged the Trump transition team, Flynn would almost certainly find out that the agency was scrutinizing his conduct and might take additional measures to mask his contacts and destroy evidence.
With Inauguration Day approaching, Patrice Comey and her daughters planned to attend what would be a massive Women’s March on the National Mall the next day to protest Trump and his treatment of women and to sound an alarm at the sudden and shocking turn the country had taken. Patrice wanted to check with her husband before they went, because they could be photographed there and word might get out that the FBI director’s entire family was protesting the new president.
Comey told her they should go.
“Don’t get arrested,” he said.
V
THE ROAD TO MUELLER
JANUARY 20, 2017
INAUGURATION DAY
THE OVAL OFFICE—Five hours after being sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump bounded into the Oval Office for the first time as commander in chief. With the solemn and historic transfer of power completed, a signature of America’s constitutional democracy, Trump now crossed the threshold of the most storied office in the world, as its occupant for the next four years. The energy from his inaugural address, and from the validation of his dramatic electoral victory, brought a certain buoyancy to Trump in his first moments behind the Resolute desk. Some of his children and many of his former campaign aides, now thrust into high-level positions within the new administration, surrounded him. This array of confidants and officials was a diverse and poorly organized group who brought to the White House little government experience and a dizzying collection of political viewpoints and agendas. Now, tasked with translating the slogans from the rollicking campaign into a coherent governing agenda, they faced the daunting challenge of coordinating the launch of a new administration.
The Trump campaign had indeed been unlike any other in American political history. Every element of the effort to win the White House had been unconventional: It featured a meager and constantly shifting organizational structure, embraced messaging that frequently pushed into taboo territory, and took on a tone seemingly antithetical to the serious and sober nature of serving in the highest office in the country. In the end, the Trump campaign, in its road-show quality, had reflected the character of the candidate.
But this was the moment—Trump’s first time walking into the Oval Office as president—when everything was supposed to change. Few things hold such a place in the collective American imagination as the power of the presidency. Runners-up fade with time, but presidents assume a sort of immortality. Surely the weight of history and the sense of majesty the office conjures would be the antidote to the lack of discipline and seriousness reflected in the Trump campaign and in the candidate himself. Or so went the story that Jim and Patrice Comey, establishment Republicans, the Washington elite, and many voters told themselves. The accuracy of this theory would be tested when Trump and his team first assembled in the space from which every U.S. president since John Adams had wielded power.
Throughout his life, Trump had been a man whose identity was uniquely tied to buildings. He measured success in the size of the skyscrapers that bore his name. Through the scale of these buildings, Trump had built his personal brand and public persona. He projected an image of himself as a master builder, and in the reflection of his projects Trump saw himself as the rich and powerful figure he constantly strove to become. Now, a question hung over the moment:
Would the man make the office, or would the office remake the man?
As it turned out, Trump had already begun redecorating the Oval Office in his signature style before he ever set foot inside as president. Obama’s crimson drapes had been replaced with golden ones the new president had picked, adding an immediate Trumpian touch. Photos of Trump’s parents were arranged on a desk in the back of the room. And the desk that Obama had occupied just hours before was completely bare, except for two
landline phones, a coaster, and a small box with a red button atop that Trump could hit when he wanted a Diet Coke brought to him.
What else could Trump ask for?
Entering into the Oval Office for the first time as president, Trump could have focused on the history that had been made in that illustrious space, or on the possibilities for what his own administration might now achieve there. Instead, he immediately fixated on one thing: the lighting.
In all of the buildings Trump had erected—in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and overseas—he always paid special attention to the lighting. He knew that a dim and shadowy setting would never make a good impression. And now he could tell that the Oval Office lights—which project up toward the ceiling and, just as important, are indirect and remain concealed, almost magically producing exceptional brightness—would create optimal conditions for the cameras taking pictures of him, making a dramatic backdrop to document his new life as the most powerful person in the world. For a man who had never served in government, and for whom so much of existence was being seen through the lens of a camera, Trump now sought to create in the Oval Office a stage set reminiscent of the famous, stark, and imposing boardroom of The Apprentice. Except here, the power was not a fantasy.
This attention to the aesthetics of the Oval Office above all else began to answer the question of whether the grandeur and gravity of the presidency would transform Trump. Because rather than investing him with a newfound sense of sobriety and seriousness of purpose, stepping into the West Wing for the first time as president had in fact magnified Trump’s constant focus on the superficial. It appeared to those who knew him that entering the White House hadn’t so much changed Trump as it had supercharged his innate attraction to the shiny trappings of wealth and power.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 13