I met Linda Power, my trusted source on the Russia investigation, in early November 2016 for lunch at a restaurant inside a Georgetown hotel. It was a quiet weekday afternoon, and the spacious restaurant seating with its tall, ionic stone columns and private tables with windows overlooking the outdoor garden offered the right blend of propriety and comfort that made for successful interviews. I was surprised to hear that she wanted to meet in person since she was likely as slammed with assignments as I was with Election Day nearing.
It had been a busy month. Both Clinton's and Trump's dirty laundry was brought out, and both were being publicly harangued. On October 7, WikiLeaks started dumping twenty thousand pages of emails it plucked from Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. These had been attributed to a spear-phishing attack by Russian hackers.1 Phishing is when hackers pose as trustworthy individuals to obtain passcodes, usernames, and other information from users. Spear phishing is a more targeted attack on a corporation or individual, although the emails didn't reveal anything we didn't already know, such as some of the Clinton Foundation's in-house conflicts and excerpts from paid speeches she made to Wall Street corporations that one of her staff members noted may make her vulnerable politically, for example, supporting a no-fly zone in Syria.2
Also on October 7, Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made a public statement noting that Russian cyber-espionage experts were trying to influence our election.3
That significant revelation was overshadowed later that day when the Washington Post released what was later dubbed “Pussygate” in Mother Jones and other magazines. This was a video recording of Donald Trump and Access Hollywood TV host Billy Bush on their way to a set during which Trump described inappropriately touching women: “I don't even wait. And when you are a star, they let you do it, you can do anything, even grab them by the pussy.”4
Trump later made a public apology for his remarks, which some lawyers and psychologists equated to promoting sexual assault. In the ensuing months, I spoke with federal law enforcement sources who were still angered by how the Access Hollywood tape had overshadowed their announcement about Russian interference in the election. It was a revelation that they considered monumental. But then again, the WikiLeaks disclosures of Podesta's emails had also overshadowed the announcement of Russian meddling in the election. Was the timing of the WikiLeaks disclosures made by the Russians to overshadow that moment?
On October 28, 2016, a few days before I met with Linda, FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI started looking into newly found emails on a Clinton aide's husband's laptop that could be relevant to the email investigation.5
I knew Linda had arrived in the restaurant before I saw her, since I heard her laughing with a waiter and heard her heels clicking on the floor. I often wondered if she, as a member of the intelligence community, knew how to walk through a room unnoticed.6
“Hey, stranger,” she said as I stood up. “How are you?” Then she looked at my tired face and laughed.
“About as good as me, I see. And the fun is just beginning,” she added.
After a few minutes, we ordered. I knew better than to inundate Linda with questions before she'd had some food.
We made small talk about the campaign for a while and replayed our own version of the Saturday Night Live reel of Trump stalking Clinton onstage during the presidential debate.7 We did that quietly, laughing and allowing ourselves the relief. Election Day was around the corner, and we were both on overload.
Linda and I had an unwritten code between us. Our humor had boundaries. We didn't voice our opinions on any of the even more disconcerting features of the campaign race—the way Trump riled the crowds to chant “Lock her up” or booed the media at the rallies, or whether Clinton's email investigation would yield anything about Benghazi, the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia's attack against two US government buildings in Libya, during which four Americans (including the US ambassador Chris Stevens) were killed on September 11, 2012, when she was secretary of state.8
“So, what do you think about the Comey investigation? Are they going to find anything?” I asked.
“Who knows?” she replied.
“But you have to admit. That was a gutsy move for Comey to make, practically on the eve of the election. He could have let it slide. But he thought he was doing the right thing,” I said.9
“The email investigation, that's not the real question.”
I nodded. The trail Linda and other sources had been leading me down over the past several months led straight back to Putin, WikiLeaks, and Clapper's statement.
“There's more to this than I'm seeing, isn't there?” I asked.
Linda didn't respond.
I waited awhile and drank some water. The waiter brought our food and set it down.
“My theory, the way Obama is dealing with this is because he doesn't want to come off as influencing the campaign and favoring Hillary. I mean, if stuff's going down,” I said.
And then there were several other instances of Comey trying to do what he thought was right. Because he considered himself an honest man who believed in the truth, and it ended up getting him in hot water along the way. But he may have been doing the right thing. It's just that in this politically charged environment it doesn't look that way.
What I liked about dealing with Linda was her ability to measure everything she was willing to tell me against her sense of right and wrong. That sense didn't come only from her internal barometer, but from a stick-to-your-ribs patriotic code she'd subscribed to in service to her country. She had that no-nonsense moral fortitude that made me trust her.
This was one thing I felt I had in common with not just Linda but many of the intelligence officials I had interviewed. Intelligence folks, like journalists, are supposed to remain even-keeled and neutral. I like to believe that I have that kind of personality. People are supposed to stick to certain moral guidelines. I believe deeply in our free election system, the vote my parents and grandparents had fought for the right to cast.
People like Linda were the courageous ones. They risked their jobs and jail time in order to communicate the truth. I was sitting with her because she had something important to say. I gave her space to say it.
“They're talking,” she said.
“Who is talking?” I asked. “Trump?”
“His campaign, people connected to him,” she said.
“Talking to whom?”
“Who do they think is responsible for the spear phishing on Podesta's emails? Who do they think is responsible for Assange's dumping all those emails out there?” she questioned. “They're traitors.”
I looked up.
“They have committed treason,” she said. She had used that word in the past. Subsequently, I did some research. Legally, treason is something that only exists in times of war as I understood it.
“Yes, but even if it's true, does anyone think it's going to matter?” I asked. “I mean, do people believe Trump will win the election?”
“The election is close.”
One of the most frustrating things about both the Russian cyber-espionage attacks and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives was that we could all sense something unnerving and extremely serious was going on. There were people in intelligence circles who undoubtedly knew details about both things they weren't revealing.
Yes, it was frustrating to be fed nuggets rather than the full meal of the Russian influence campaign and how much coordination there may have been between some Trump campaign officials and the Russians. But that's just the way this level of reporting usually works. You end up having to piece together different sources of information. It's like a puzzle. You're putting together as many of the pieces as possible and trying to make sense of the bigger picture. I kept peppering Linda with questions. I kept pushing for more of the details. How do you know this information? Was it coming from human intelligence gathering? Or was it from wiretaps? I would ask those questions, but I knew getting specific answers would put Linda in danger. This is all highly sensitive information that the US government keeps under wraps for a reason. Mainly because they want to protect their sources and methods for information gathering around Putin and in the Kremlin. A great deal of US espionage originates in the cyber realm these days.
Most people weren't aware of our cyber-offensive or cyber-defensive strategies. Cyber operations was an exclusive field with a history that only stemmed back to the late 1990s, when people were switching up their Commodore 64s for faster desktop computers, and when the internet had just started to become mainstream. It's conceivable nobody back then could predict a time when terrorists recruited suicide bombers through the internet, or operatives could attempt and possibly succeed in undermining an election and a democracy in this realm. In the beginning, cyber espionage was lawless, like the Wild West, and there were unwritten codes of honor.
To find out more about these unwritten codes, I spoke to Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA. Hayden was one of the first Americans to function as a cyber operative himself.