Army of Trolls
It’s in this context that, on June 15, 2018, I read what the president wrote about the Paul Manafort case on Twitter—not understanding what has happened in the courtroom, evidently not even knowing what sentencing is, but saying that the judge had been unfair. Manafort, the former manager of the Trump campaign, had been indicted on a variety of charges and had just had his bail revoked after new charges of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. The president tweeted, “Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!” Earlier that day, the president had walked out onto the White House lawn and taken impromptu questions. He said, about Manafort, “He worked for me, what, for forty-nine days, or something? A very short period of time.” You think it was forty-nine? It was 144.
Imagine what the judge must have been thinking when she heard the president’s comments. Judges abhor witness tampering. They regard it as a crime committed against themselves and their court. Under normal circumstances, anyone accused of witness tampering who was out on bail would lose that bail and go to jail. That is what happened to Paul Manafort. But what was it like for that judge on her way into work that morning? I had to wonder if she asked herself, What is the president going to say about me if I do the right thing today? Is he going to tweet about this? Send his army of trolls after me? This judge, Amy Berman Jackson, if she thought about it, didn’t care—she went ahead and did what she had to do. But my fear is that someday a judge will care. Someone will be cowed. The fact is, plenty of people in Washington are cowed already: such as the Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom believe that the president is unfit for office but are afraid to stand up to him.
If the principle of noninterference with the wheels of justice holds for a president as a broad, general matter, it is a hundred times more important that he not weigh in on anything that affects him personally. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on a criminal prosecution but to comment on one that potentially affects himself. He does both of these things almost daily—and directly and repeatedly—to millions of followers on Twitter and viewers on television. He is not just sounding a dog whistle, weighing in with a glancing suggestion that can be interpreted. He is lobbying for a result. He is telling the judge, the defendant, and the world his preferred outcome.
People don’t appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. I was offended by Bill Clinton, who plainly lied in his deposition in the Paula Jones case when he denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Many people minimized the significance of those lies, saying, So what if he was dishonest about his personal sexual activity—everyone lies about that, it’s okay. It was not okay. But now, with President Trump, we are being battered every day. Every day brings a new low. A new ridiculous assertion. There are literally hundreds of examples. During a fund-raising speech in Missouri, he revealed that he got into an argument with Justin Trudeau and started citing statistics to the Canadian prime minister he acknowledged he had just made up. In a press conference with British prime minister Theresa May, he directly denied saying what anyone can hear him saying in an interview recorded the day before. The president exposes himself as a deliberate liar, someone who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wishes. If he were on the box at Quantico, he would break the machine.
What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency? But news reports of such episodes come and go in a blink of an eye. A common reaction is, Of course he did that—it’s Trump. That’s what he does. How is the whole nation not offended?
The president, by calling the Russia investigation a witch hunt, is basically telling the judge, the system, and the investigators: This is what I want to happen. In the end, whatever Trump does, he will not get his way. Even if he were to fire Bob Mueller, the various investigations and prosecutions now reside in too many hands and too many locales to be contained. But that’s beside the point. The president is doing exactly the thing a president is not supposed to do. There are no shades of gray here. The president is trying to destroy what Americans have long assumed about who we are and how the justice system works. He is doing two kinds of damage. There’s the head-on-collision damage: the “phony Witch Hunt,” “FBI corruption,” in-your-face insult damage. And there’s the much more insidious damage that results from remarks like the ones he made before Manafort’s hearing. They continually lower the bar on presidential conduct, now and for the future.
7
Mess and Crisis
ABOVE ALL, PROTECTING THE RUSSIA CASE
‘Can You Come Over?’
On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first day on the job as acting director, I arrived at the office early, went through the morning meetings, did my briefs, and by 10 A.M. I was sitting down with senior staff involved in the Russia investigation, many of whom had also been involved in Midyear Exam.
As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. This was highly unusual. Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. Federal policy, written by the Department of Justice, strictly restricts such contact. There should be no direct contact between the president and the FBI director, according to the White House contacts policy, except for national-security purposes. The FBI does have frequent, routine, and direct contact with the White House by way of the National Security Council and other facets of the national-security structure, but when it comes to topics that do not concern national security, the FBI is supposed to go through Justice, which then makes contact with the White House counsel’s office. And vice versa: If the president or any other senior White House official needs to get a message to the Justice Department or the FBI, that message is supposed to go through the White House counsel to the deputy attorney general before it gets to us. The reason for all this is simple. Investigations and prosecutions are delicate and complicated, and can affect the lives of many people; they need to be pursued according to fixed rules, without a hint of suspicion that someone with power wants to put a thumb on the scale. That means those on the front lines must have insulation from politics—or even the perception that political considerations may be at play. So the president calling the acting director of the FBI is, and was that day, remarkable.
The president was waiting on the line. The Russia team was in my office. I walked over to my desk and took the call on my unclassified line. Another strange thing about this call—the president was calling on a phone line that was not secure. He did not call on the yellow TS phone—yellow being the color for Top Secret. (Red is the color for Secret and green is the color for Unclassified. When agents talk among themselves about sending emails or texts, they’ll say things like, I’ll send on the red side, or, I’ll send on the green side.)
It was the president’s voice on the other end of the line, not the voice of an assistant waiting to connect him. The voice said, It’s Don Trump calling. I said, Hello, Mr. President, how are you? Apart from my surprise that he was calling me at all, I was surprised that he referred to himself as “Don.”
The president said, I’m good. You know—boy, it’s incredible, it’s such a great thing, people are really happy about the fact that the director’s gone, and it’s just remarkable what people are saying. Have you seen that? Are you seeing that, too? What’re you doing over there?
I was taken off guard, now understanding that this topic—how the Bureau judged what the president had done—was not going away.
He said, I received hundreds of messages from FBI people, how happy they are that I fired him. There are people saying things on the media, have you seen that? What’s it like there in the building?
This is what it was like in the building: You could walk out of my office on the seventh floor a
nd go to any floor of the Hoover building, and you would see small groups of people gathering in hallways, standing together, some people even crying. Tears streaming from their eyes, from the distress that you would expect if there had been a death in the family. The death of a patriarch, a protector.
I can’t speak for every agent and employee of the FBI. But the overwhelming majority of people in the Bureau liked and admired Director Comey. They liked his personal style, the integrity of his conduct, the changes that he instituted. For many of us, myself included, it was a point of pride that the FBI had such a leader, who honorably represented us in the world. Many other agencies struggled because they lacked capable people at the top. We felt lucky. We had someone who would stand up for us and always try to do the right thing. Even among people who disagreed with Comey—and there will always be disagreements, even serious ones, in a complicated place like the FBI—few ever doubted that he habitually acted in good faith. Now he was gone, and we felt as if we’d been cast onto the dustheap. We were laboring under the same dank, gray shadow of uncertainty and bleak anxiety that had been creeping over so much of Washington during the few months Donald Trump had been in office.
I didn’t feel like I could say any of that to the president on the phone. I’m not sure I would have wanted to say it to him in person, either, or that he would have cared. I told him, Most people here were very surprised, but we are trying to get back to work. We’ve had our whole series of morning meetings, and my leadership team is just keeping everybody focused on the job we have to do.
The president said he thought most people in the FBI voted for him—he thought 80 percent. He asked me again if I knew that Comey had told him three times that he was not under investigation.
Then he got to the reason for his call. He said, I really want to come over there. I want to come to the FBI. I want to show all my FBI people how much I love them, so I think maybe it would be good for me to come over and speak to everybody, like tomorrow or the next day.
That sounded to me like one of the worst possible things that could happen. He was the boss, and had every right to come, but I hoped the idea would dissipate on its own. I said, You are welcome to visit FBI headquarters anytime you want to.
He said, Why don’t you come down here and talk to me about that later? Can you come over, and maybe we can talk about how I could come out to the FBI and show the FBI people how much I care about them? When can you come down?
I was tempted to make a joke of this—When can I come down? No other appointments on my calendar today with presidents of the United States. Nothing that would conflict with this one. But I didn’t make a joke. I told him I’d be there whenever he wanted.
After we agreed on a time to meet, the conversation turned in another direction. The president began to talk about how upset he was that Jim Comey had flown home on his government plane from Los Angeles. He wanted to know how that had happened.
I told him that I had talked to Bureau lawyers about the matter here last night. They assured me that there was no legal issue with Comey coming home on the plane, and I decided that he should do so. Even though he was no longer the director, the existing threat assessment indicated he was still at risk, so he needed a protection detail on his trip home. Since the members of the protection detail would all be coming home, it made sense just to bring them back on the same government plane, the one they had used to fly out there. The plane had to come back anyway.
At this, the president flew off the handle: That’s not right! I don’t approve of that! That’s wrong! He reiterated his point five or seven times.
I said, I’m sorry that you disagree, sir. But it was my decision, and that’s how I decided.
He said, I want you to look into that! I thought to myself: What am I going to look into? I just told you I made that decision. There’s nothing left to look into.
The president asked, Will Comey be allowed into the building? Will he come back in, to get his personal stuff out of his office?
I said I didn’t think he planned to come in. His staff was going through his office and packing his personal effects, which would be taken to his residence.
The ranting spiraled: I don’t want him in the building. I’m banning him from the building. He should not be allowed, I don’t want him in FBI buildings.
I waited until he had talked himself out.
Finally, toward the very end of the conversation, he said, How is your wife?
I said, She’s fine.
He said, When she lost her election, that must have been very tough to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?
I replied, I guess it’s tough to lose anything. But she’s rededicated herself to her career and her job and taking care of kids in the emergency room. That’s what she does.
He said, Yeah, and there was a tone in his voice that sounded like a sneer. He said, That must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.
The conversation concluded shortly after that, with the president saying he thought I would do a good job and that he had a lot of faith in me.
The whole Russia team was still in the room, so they had heard my half of it. I told them the other half—the things the president said. I also wrote a memo about the conversation that very day. I wrote memos about my interactions with the president for the same reason that Comey wrote memos about his own interactions. I wanted a contemporaneous record of conversations about fraught and difficult matters, which in this specific instance was also a conversation with a person who cannot be trusted. I wrote contemporaneous memos not just about my interactions with Trump but also about my interactions with the attorney general, with the deputy attorney general, and with the vice president and some of his aides. These memos were not exhaustive records of the conversations, but summaries of important points.
Foremost in my mind, as I was writing these personal accounts, was the repeated notice, or warning—first from the attorney general and then from the president himself—that an interim director might be installed. From the moment I learned of Comey’s firing, I fully expected that I, too, would be fired, or removed from my position and reassigned somewhere else. Any minute, any hour, any day now, I thought, I’ll be turned out of this office.
My daughter, who was thirteen years old at the time, would joke about this with me. That whole first week in the acting director’s chair, when I came home at night, she would say, Did you get fired today, Dad? Not today, honey, I would answer—but tomorrow’s a new day! This kind of gallows humor had sustained me for years both at work and at home. And joking about my tenuous position helped me accomplish something important. I was trying to be open with my kids about important issues affecting our life together, so that if the worst possible scenario occurred, they would not be taken by surprise. When the director got fired without warning, both of my children were very upset, especially my son, who had spent time around Jim Comey and looked up to him. My son was shaken and upset by the way Comey had been summarily dismissed. So I felt that I had to be candid with them about the possibility that something like that could happen to me, too. I would tell them, I don’t know how the current situation will be resolved. I am the acting director now, but this could all end at any moment. We’re going to hang in, and ride it out, and see what happens.
In the days following Comey’s firing, the core of my concern about being replaced was a fear of what might happen to the Russia case. A special counsel had not yet been appointed. The FBI pursued multiple facets of the Russia case. But the Senate Intelligence Committee had begun its own Russia investigation. And immediately there were conflicts among these investigations.
The Senate committee investigators wanted to start interviewing people, including some of the witnesses in the Bureau’s cases. If the Senate investigators leaned too far forward and interviewed people under oath, those statements could create problems for the FBI investigation if we wanted to interview the same subjects. The Bureau needed to do some high-level deconfl
iction work, and we had not been getting much help in that regard from the Department of Justice.
As soon as I became acting director, I convened a series of meetings about the Russia investigation—including the meeting that was interrupted by the call from the president—in which I directed an overall review of every aspect. Was the work on solid ground? Should it continue? Were there any individuals that we’d identified on whom we should consider opening new cases? If I was going to be removed, I wanted the Russia investigation to be on the surest possible footing. I wanted to draw an indelible line around it, to protect it so that whoever came after me could not just ignore it or make it go away. That’s what we had been working on when the president called.
Praying for Rain
As the president requested, I went back to the White House that afternoon. When I arrived, at 2 P.M., the bodyguard Keith Schiller came down again and greeted me like I was his buddy, like someone he sees every day—Hey, what’s going on? He took me to the Oval Office, where the scene was almost identical to the one I had walked into the previous night. Trump was behind the Resolute desk in the same posture I’d seen before, sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward. He lifted one arm and jutted it out, five fingers splayed, directing me to take a seat in one of the little wooden chairs. Reince Priebus and Don McGahn were there.
The president launched back into his speech about what a great decision it was to fire Jim Comey, how happy it had made people, how wonderful it was that the director was gone, because so many people did not like Comey, even hated him—the president actually used the word “hate” to describe people’s general feelings about Director Comey. He baited me again, looking for me to say, Yes, sir, you’re right. Everyone’s happy at the FBI. He was very pleased to see people telling the media that they did not like Director Comey, and he asked if I had seen that, too.
The Threat Page 23