ABOVE ALL, PROTECTING THE RUSSIA CASE
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 and 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 deconfliction 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.
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.
I told him I had not seen that. I did not tell him what I in fact had seen: the Hoover building as a site of dejection. I said, Well, sir, I don’t know, I guess it’s possible, as I told you before, but most people seem shocked and surprised by what happened. They will rebound. We will move on. Right now people are just trying to figure things out.
Later, when I reviewed this exchange and this whole conversation in my memory, I would ask myself, Should I have been more confrontational? As absurd as this unfolding situation was, it’s hard to overstate the significance, for a career government employee, of having conversations with the president of the United States. Even when it’s Donald Trump, it is still President Trump. So the reflex, the automatic response I felt from the deepest part of myself, was to be respectful and responsive. At what point is it appropriate to answer the president with a flat no? At what point is it appropriate to say to the president, Your perception is disconnected from reality?
At the time, I felt—because he was pressing me aggressively to capitulate to the force of his opinion—that I was holding my ground simply by not waving a white flag and agreeing. Maybe I should have said outright: No, no, no—everything you want to believe is wrong. But I said what I said.
Among all his odd claims, one stood out as being especially dubious. He said, as he had said during our phone conversation earlier that day, We’ve had so many FBI people calling us, sending us messages to say they’re so glad the director is gone.
Who would do that? Who in the Bureau would send a message to the White House about something of this nature? It was not beyond the realm of the possible—there had been so many leaks in the months building up to this point. But for anyone in the Bureau to make or maintain contact with people in the White House would be unambiguously inappropriate—an absolute violation of the White House contacts policy. But the president kept saying it was happening.
Almost as a leading question, he said again that there was great dislike for Director Comey in the FBI, and he asked if I thought people were glad he was gone.
I said, Some people were frustrated with last summer’s outcome on the Clinton case—it’s possible that some of those people are glad. Other than that, I’ve seen no evidence that people are happy about the director being fired.
The president changed the subject. He said that he wanted to come to FBI headquarters to see people and excite them and show them how much he loves the FBI. He asked if I thought he should come. I said, Sir, you should come to the FBI whenever you want, you are always welcome. I was trying to think of a way to take some of the immediacy out of his proposal—to emphasize that we were just down the street, no need to hurry. He pressed me to answer whether I thought it was a good idea for him to come, and I said it was always a good idea to visit his people at the FBI. I was trying to communicate that the door was always open, so that he wouldn’t feel that he had to crash through it right away, because I knew what a disaster it could turn out to be if he wanted to come to the Hoover building in the near future. He pressed even further, asking specifically, Do you think it would be a good idea for me to come down now? I said, Sure.
He looked at Don McGahn, and I realized what was happening. They were trying to paint me into a corner. The president said, Don, what do you think? Do you think I should go down to the FBI and speak to the people?
McGahn was sitting in one of the wooden chairs to my right. Making eye contact with Trump, he said, in a very pat and very prepared way, If the acting director of the FBI is telling you he thinks it is a good idea for you to come visit the FBI, then you should do it. Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you’re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?
It was a bizarre performance.
In this moment, I felt something like I’d felt in 1998 when I sent Big Felix in to meet with Dimitri Gufield. The same kind of thing was happening again now, here, in the Oval Office. Dimitri needed Felix to endorse his protection scheme. This is a dangerous business, and it’s a bad neighborhood, and you know, if you want, I can protect you from that. If you want my protection. I can protect you. Do you want my protection? The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate. I’ll be your krysha. The president wanted to be able to come out of this meeting and say, The acting director of the FBI invited me to speak at headquarters. The president and those around him wanted me to endorse the story they planned to tell about Comey’s firing—even more, wanted me to tell their story for them.
The president and Don McGahn were both looking at me, the president’s question hanging in the air: Did I think it was a good idea for him to visit the FBI?
I said it would be fine. I had no real choice. This was not worth the ultimate sacrifice.
Moving on, the president doubled down on a favorite theme—how much the FBI people loved him and supported him. He again quantified his voting tally among the FBI workforce. He said, again, At least 80 percent of the FBI voted for me.
How could I, or anyone, possibly know that? The FBI does not take candidate preference polls. That would be prohibited. For almost all federal employees, it is also prohibited to ask subordinates whom they voted for. Then the president asked me, Who did you vote for?
No superior had posed such a question during my time in public life. Not sure how to answer, I dodged—gave a total nonanswer. An idiotic answer: told him I always played it right down the middle. I heard myself saying this, and I kicked myself—kicked hard—and I continue to kick myself about it.
He gave me a sideways look, a little nod, like, What was that?
The president went on to talk about logistics and timing, and whether it would be better to come and speak to the FBI on Thursday or Friday. Today was Wednesday. I pointed out that a speech in the outdoor courtyard of the building would hold the largest crowd. I also knew it was supposed to rain on Friday, which could cause logistical problems for an outdoor event and probably force it to be canceled. I did not mention those problems. We agreed the visit would take place on Friday. We decided that his staff would talk to our staff about coordinating a joint message. He said he wanted me to promote the visit internally as much as I could—he wanted a big crowd. Make sure that courtyard is full, he told me. Praying for rain, I shook his hand, and I was dismissed.
Back at the Hoover building, I told my assistant to reach out to the White House about the possible event, and I said that if it couldn’t work, that was fine with me. We conveyed to the White House all the things that needed to happen to arrange an immediate presidential speech at the FBI, and I think everybody involved decided it was more than anyone could do that week. The president soon had other things on his mind. North Korea conducted a missile test. There was fallout from his private Oval Office meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, in which he had disclosed classified information. And the president was still preoccupied with Jim Comey, warning in a tweet that Comey had better hope that “there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press”—probably an empty threat. For whatever reason, the visit to the FBI never happened.
When I left the Oval Office, I went straight to a prep session at the Bureau. Jim Comey had been preparing for two weeks to testify at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Worldwide Threats Hearing—an annual event where the director of national intelligence and the heads of the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency share their assessments of the most urgent threats to U.S. national security and answer questions from senators about those threats. Preparation for the hearing typically involves a number of lengthy background sessions with staff and a review of hundreds of pages of briefing material; it also requires drafting an official statement for the record. This year the FBI’s investigation of interference by Russia into the conduct of American elections, both recent and future, would be foremost on many people’s minds. Even at this early stage, before the appointment of a special counsel, the evidence for Russian interference—widespread hacking of people and organizations; widespread manipulation of social media—was voluminous. And that’s just the evidence already known to the public. Even before the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security had jointly stated that they were “confident” that attempts to “interfere with the US election process” were being “directed” by the Russian government.
Ever since becoming acting director—in other words, for less than forty-eight hours—I had wondered whether I should cancel my participation in the Worldwide Threats Hearing or go ahead with it. In the end I decided that it was important to go. I believed I had to live up to every responsibility Comey had shouldered, every commitment he had made, in order, first, to send the right signal to the men and women of the Bureau, and, second, to send the right signal to everybody else. The message was that the FBI would miss nothing in this transition. There would be no dropped balls. We remained open for business.
So when I left the Oval Office, I went straight back to a prep session that night. I had been to a lot of these meetings for Comey and Mueller—when I was involved in the prepping. Usually I had been the guy sitting at the right hand of the director, listening to everyone else’s contributions and trying to distill it all into better formulations.
Chiming in when you have a shapely little idea, I quickly discovered, is very different from sitting at the head of the table while a dozen people to your right and left argue the pros and cons of issue after issue, firing ideas and comments at you nonstop—all of which you have to take in while also assessing how those answers will be interpreted and processed by members of Congress, the president, and the media. I had never fully appreciated the complexity of that task. After two and a half hours of this, my tank was full. I had to get some sleep.
Thursday morning I came in early. I did not go to the morning briefs. I sat alone in my office and tried to figure out what to say. I knew the senators would ask about morale at the FBI: some version of the questions the president had asked me three times now—questions about what was happening inside the Bureau, how the workforce had responded to Comey’s firing—and I had to have a ready answer. But I still did not know how to do that in a way that was both honest and deft. While considering how to navigate the obvious tensions, I decided that now was a moment when being direct was far more important than being deft. I called Jill, told her what I planned, and warned her to get ready for the reaction. I checked the decision with two other trusted associates, and then I got in the car to go to the Capitol.
Reporters yelled questions as I arrived at the hearing, and with the other intelligence heads I was herded into an anteroom. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, thanked me for coming. I sensed relief among the group that I had shown up, since there would likely be a lot of FBI-related questions. A staff member gave us the order of march. We filed through a darkened passage behind the dais where the senators sit, rounded the right corner, and arrived at the long table where all of us would sit, facing the committee members. The space between our table and the dais was packed with photographers, the low whirr of camera shutters clicking, and when we sat down and pulled our papers out of our bags, the cameras were right there, on the other side of the table, less than a foot from our faces. I had no idea where I was supposed to look, whether I was supposed to acknowledge the camera somehow—smiling would be wrong, that I knew—or to ignore everything and try to do what I would do if I were by myself, just sitting at a table. A small thing, but a notable moment of lack of preparation. Somebody should tell anybody who testifies at a committee meeting like this: Be ready for dozens of cameras right up in your face.
It was Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, who asked the question I had been expecting. He mentioned news reports that Director Comey had “lost the confidence of rank-and-file FBI employees.” He asked if, in my opinion, that was accurate. I said, “No, sir, that is not accurate. I can tell you, sir, that I worked very, very closely with Director Comey,” and I went on to answer the question—this time—without hesitation. I said, “I can tell you that I hold Director Comey in the absolute highest regard. I have the highest respect for his considerable abilities and his integrity, and it has been the greatest privilege and honor in my professional life to work with him. I can tell you also that Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does until this day. We are a large organization; we are 36,500 people across this country, across this globe. We have a diversity of opinions about many things, but I can confidently tell you that the majority—the vast majority of FBI employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”
One of the regularly scheduled meetings with the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and some of their staff fell on the next day, a Friday. In these meetings—to review the President’s Daily Brief materials—when the most senior participants had especially sensitive things to discuss among a smaller group, one of us would say, Can you stick around afterward? This routine briefing on May 12 was my first as acting director. After the meeting, I asked Rod Rosenstein if he could stay behind, so he did. It was just him and me.
I wanted to talk with him about the budding conflict between the FBI and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Russia case. I was concerned that the committee’s requests to interview personnel and review materials were going to cause problems for our own investigation and future prospects for prosecution. I wanted to lay down some procedural ground rules. Among other things, I wanted the committee to agree that they wouldn’t talk to witnesses until after the FBI had interviewed them. I also wanted them to agree that they wouldn’t make recordings or recorded statements of witness testimony—too many people going over the same ground with witnesses can result in discrepancies and can often have the effect of muddying the facts rather than clarifying them. The FBI, the Justice Department, and congressional committees can work well together when the rules are understood and all parties act in good faith; the whole enterprise can fall apart in confusion if any element is out of whack. Because the terms I sought were prosecutorial equities, I felt the deputy should negotiate them on the Bureau’s behalf.
Immediately, Rod saw the need that I was pointing out, and he said, Yes, absolutely, you should refer all those questions to us. But I had come to this conversation wanting more than a specific answer to this one specific request. I wanted a broader affirmation that the Department of Justice would be more actively involved. My basic message was, I need you to protect the process here.
After speaking to those points, Rod shifted his gaze. As he leaned back in his chair, I could see that he was not looking directly at me. His eyes were focused on a point in space a few yards beyond and behind, toward the door. He was a little glassy-eyed. He started talking about the firing of Jim Comey. There was emotion in his voice. He was obviously upset.
He said he could not believe what had happened. He said he was shocked that the White House was making it look as if Jim’s firing had been his idea. He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing. Judging from later press accounts, Rod said much the same thing to others.
The jolt of this news, even in a week of constant jolts, was extreme. I could not believe what I was hearing. I did not know why he was telling me this. He seemed to be in such distress. I thought he simply did not know quite what to do. There was a long quiet moment. Then I said, Are you sleeping at night? No, he said, he was not getting much sleep. Is your family okay? I asked. He said there were news trucks in front of his house.
He was grasping for a way to describe the nature of his situation. The conversation involved a fair amount of silence. One remark stands out in my memory. He said, There’s no one that I can talk to about this. There’s no one here that I can trust.
He said that he had been thinking about appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation. He asked for my thoughts about whether we needed a special counsel. I said I thought it would help the credibility of the investigation. He told me he thought of Jim Comey as not just a friend but also a mentor, someone he looked up to. This was hard for me to hear from the guy who had just fired my boss. And, incredibly, he then said, The one person I would like to talk to about this situation is Jim Comey.
I went back to my office in a state of—I am starting to wish that there were more synonyms for shock. I didn’t know how to think about what had just happened. I felt as if he had been asking me for advice, and I had not really given him advice. No substantive counsel. I thought about his isolation and the difficulties of his situation. I made an appointment to go back and see him that afternoon.
I returned to see Rosenstein by myself. I thanked him for seeing me. I told him that the decision to designate a special counsel was entirely his, and I said I didn’t think I’d given him the benefit of my best thoughts on the issue, and I would like to do that now, for whatever it was worth. This is the gist of what I said to him: I feel strongly that the investigation would be best served by having a special counsel. I’ve been thinking about the Clinton email case and how we got twisted in knots over how to announce a result that did not include bringing charges against anyone. Because the same thing might happen with the Russia case, it raises the question of how the FBI could possibly announce such a result to a world that has become so intensely focused on the question of collusion. Had we appointed a special counsel in the Clinton case to begin with, we might not be in the present situation. Director Comey would not have had to make the decisions he felt he had to make, which ultimately—according to your memo, Rod—led to his termination. I see a high likelihood of history repeating itself as we move forward. Unless or until you make the decision to appoint a special counsel, the FBI will be subjected to withering criticism from the Hill. The mere act of enduring that criticism could destroy the credibility of both the Justice Department and the FBI.
He was very engaged. He was not yet convinced. He pointed out that he was, essentially, the only politically confirmed official at Justice involved in the Russia investigations—Jeff Sessions, after all, had had to recuse himself because of his role in the campaign and (as would soon be revealed) because of his meetings with Russian officials during that time. Rosenstein also wanted to be around to influence the selection of the next FBI director.
I told him I understood his concern. But, I said, if we’ve appointed a special counsel who will take this investigation wherever it needs to go, then everything else will take care of itself. Ultimately, the White House is going to choose the new FBI director on its own terms; that decision was wholly in the administration’s control. The priority had to be doing the right thing for the Russia case.
We talked a lot. He again spoke of his memo that had been used to justify Director Comey’s firing. He said he could tell as early as January, from his first conversations with the attorney general, that Jim Comey would be fired.
By the end of the meeting, he said he would continue to consider appointing a special counsel, but he did not see this as an urgent matter—if a special counsel was needed, Rosenstein did not think the appointment had to happen quickly.
On Saturday afternoon, May 13, Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein interviewed me for the position of FBI director. It was a cordial meeting, and the questions were the ones you’d expect. Example: What do you think is the biggest challenge to the FBI right now? Easy, I said. Technology. Not in terms of any particular case or type of threat. I believed we had the experience and the capability to meet operational threats in counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and all other realms. But in the long term, we were going to be mightily challenged by changes in technology—from encryption to interpreting increasingly large data sets. And I said that if we don’t get better at identifying, acquiring, and delivering technological solutions to our workforce as an organization, we are not going to be able to keep the country as safe as possible. I don’t think that’s the answer they expected, and it was not an answer that engaged them in this meeting. But it is the answer that I’m still very confident about.
At one point, an aide brought an iPhone to the attorney general. On the iPhone screen was a picture from 2015 of me and my family at a swim meet where my kids were competing. We were all wearing T-shirts that said DR. JILL MCCABE FOR STATE SENATE. The morning that picture had been taken, the T-shirts had arrived in the mail, and we put them on, and one of our friends took a family photo. Then the friend posted the photo to Facebook. Then the right-wing media took the photo and falsely claimed that I had gone out canvassing for my wife’s campaign.
So in my interview to be FBI director, instead of having a full discussion of the challenges to American law enforcement, I had to explain in detail to the attorney general why a family snapshot was not the damning political artifact that it had been made to appear to be—while the attorney general looked skeptically at me, as if he didn’t believe what I was saying.
The whole conversation felt like a charade. In the end I said, Honestly, if I could be so bold as to give you my best advice as to what I think you should do here—I think you should look hard and well to find the best candidate from outside the FBI to come in and be the next director. I think you should try to get that person on board as fast as you possibly can, and as deputy director I will try to help that person get up to speed as quickly as possible. But to be candid, I will become eligible for my retirement in March 2018, and it is my intention to retire at that time and go into the private sector.
Through the weekend, though, the issue of the special counsel was apparently gnawing at Rosenstein. On Sunday morning he called me on my cell phone. Using coded language, he said that if I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Comey, he would be very interested to hear what Comey thought about the question of appointing a special counsel. I said that I would have to think about this.
I was doubtful that seeking Comey’s advice and relaying it in this manner would be ethical under the circumstances. It also seemed unwise on its face. That afternoon, I convened a conference call with some of my senior staff to discuss whether to seek Jim Comey’s opinion on the special-counsel issue. We all concluded that I should not. He was no longer an FBI employee. It would be inappropriate to discuss investigative issues with him. It was also just a bad idea. Comey was a party to the matter Rosenstein was dealing with—and regardless of one’s admiration for Jim, there was no getting around the fact that his thoughts on this topic would be inherently conflicted. Seeking advice on how to handle the situation—as Rosenstein seemed to want to do—would pull him immediately into dangerous waters. Rod never asked me about this again.
On Monday the fifteenth, I met again with the Russia team. From January until Comey was fired, we had been having discussions with him about how to handle the topic of whether the president was under investigation. Jim Baker said, Even though we don’t have a case open on the president, we do have a case open to see whether his campaign coordinated with the Russians in a way that would have been illegal or improper; and as the leader of his campaign, by definition some of his activity and behavior would be within the scope of the investigation. Baker thought it was jesuitical—basically, too cute by half—to say the president was not under investigation. But Comey chose to give the president the reassurance that, at that moment, he himself was not.
It is important to remember that opening a case does not mean that a crime has been committed. And the FBI is rightly circumspect in its statements. That said, as analysts and scholars have discussed at length, there arguably could have been grounds for a case against the president, on two fronts. The first was obstruction of justice. The events of the preceding few days were significant. The president’s possible connection to obstruction was no longer limited to his having been the leader of a campaign, some of whose members may have crossed a line in various ways. Now the president himself had fired the director. Prior to that, on at least two occasions, the president had asked the director to drop the inquiry regarding Mike Flynn. He had also repeatedly referred publicly to the investigation in a demeaning and dismissive way. He had called it “a witch hunt.” And on May 11, in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, the president had explicitly connected his decision to fire Jim Comey to what he called “this Russia thing”—seemingly abandoning the idea that it had been Rod Rosenstein’s idea, and that the cause involved the handling of the email case. These facts could well combine to form an “articulable factual basis”—the predication needed to open a full investigation—that the federal crime of obstruction of justice might have occurred. They could be interpreted as implying that the director had been fired in an effort to obstruct the Russia investigation, and specifically the investigation of Mike Flynn.
On the collusion side, all those same facts could raise suspicion that the president might have been aware of, and supportive of, his campaign’s many interactions with the Russian government and people connected closely to it, specifically in hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and using the DNC emails to harm Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
In theory, could the attorney general also have been a target of investigation? His denial, during his confirmation hearings, that he had ever met with anybody from Russia about the 2016 campaign was widely questioned at the time. Then the FBI received a letter from Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, and Senator Al Franken, of Minnesota, noting reports that Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at least twice during the 2016 elections, including one meeting that took place during the Republican National Convention. The senators were concerned that Sessions’s testimony during confirmation hearings “could be construed as perjury,” and they asked us to look into what actually happened—the reported events that seemed to contradict the confirmation testimony Sessions had given. Then the two senators sent two follow-up letters during the following two months asking for updates on the matter.
Traditionally, the Bureau does not open perjury cases on people based on statements made in confirmation hearings unless Congress asks us to look into a particular statement by a particular person. The FBI does not want to be turned into the confirmation police. We trust that the process has its own integrity. Senators can and should ask probative questions that will reveal obfuscation or dishonesty. It could be a different story if Congress were to ask the FBI to look into the circumstances around what actually happened, as opposed to what someone testified to.
If—hypothetically—the FBI had information about events suggesting that a cabinet nominee’s testimony had been untrue, and Congress asked us to look into it, a case on that person could be opened. Even to consider such a move would require consultation with the Justice Department, because a case like that would be a SIM—a sensitive investigative matter, requiring special handling according to the attorney general guidelines.
If the FBI found itself in circumstances like these, where the facts and our obligations under the guidelines were clear, and we chose not to open a case because it might involve government officials in the highest ranks, the Bureau would be guilty of dereliction of duty.
On Monday, May 15, I went back to Justice to inform Rod Rosenstein of where we stood with the Russia investigation. In his office, I renewed my strong request that we should appoint a special counsel to pursue the Russia investigation. The pressure was on to move quickly. He didn’t argue with what I was proposing, and he also did not yet endorse it.
Jim Comey, when he briefed the leadership on the Hill about the Russia case, assured them that we would keep them updated as to significant developments. I was due to provide another briefing, and the possible appointment of a special counsel would count as a significant development. Rosenstein said, Well, I’m going with you. Great, I said, I’d love to have you. But you’d better be ready, because if you’re there, they’re going to ask if you’re going to appoint a special counsel—and some of them are not going to take no for an answer. He thought about that but did not pronounce a decision. His chief of staff, Jim Crowell, was making arguments similar to mine.
Having been in his job for only three weeks, Rod may not by this point have developed a reflexive understanding of how frequently, as an intelligence organization, the FBI had to make its way to the Hill, and what kinds of things we briefed the various intelligence committees on. When we were involved in any momentous or controversial matters, we would go up and brief the congressional leadership, the group called the Gang of Eight: the majority and minority leaders of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairs and the ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. That group is typically pretty secure.
As I saw it, one key reason for briefing the Hill was this: By putting the deputy attorney general on notice and informing Congress of the Bureau’s actions, we would be drawing an indelible line around the cases we had opened—the four known publicly and any others that may have gone forward.
In this meeting, Rod spoke again, and in more detail, about his experience of writing the memo that the president used to justify Comey’s firing. On May 8, Rod said, he went to the White House. Don McGahn told him the president wanted to fire the director. The president had written a termination letter—long and rambling, as later press accounts discussed. By the time Rod walked out of the Oval Office that day, he had been enlisted to write a memo to justify Comey’s firing. This memo accompanied the revised letter that the president sent to Comey.
As Rod recounted to me his memories of that meeting, he became very animated. He talked fast, he gestured a lot, he got up and walked around, he was a flight of ideas. He continued talking in this way about his experience of Comey’s firing on May 9. The false story that had taken shape in press reports—the notion that the whole thing had been Rod’s idea—was eating away at him.
He wondered aloud if there was some way to collect explicit evidence of the president’s apparent motivations and put it unequivocally on the record. No option for doing so seemed feasible. In any case, the president already had publicly made the connection between Comey’s firing and “this Russia thing,” with his comments to Lester Holt.
That’s where we left it on Monday. The clock was ticking. I thought I would get fired any minute. Somebody was going to knock on my door and say, Pack your bags, you’re moving to Anchorage. We urgently needed a special counsel, but there was only so much I could do about that. I had to do what I could do, as fast as I could do it.
On Tuesday I went back to Justice for another meeting with Rod and some of his staff. Lisa Page came with me, to take notes. I couldn’t track this conversation and transact it as I needed to and also make a record of it. When we sat down in his office, I pressed again for the appointment of a special counsel. I said, You have to do this. We’re going to go to Congress—tomorrow, I hope—and I’m going to lay the scope of our investigation out for the Gang of Eight, and some of them are going to come after you with reasonable demands that we need a special counsel appointed quickly. The attorney general has recused himself. It’s a mess. We need somebody independent to oversee this.
Rod was still not fully convinced. He said the same things he said the week before: What happens with the director’s job? Jim Crowell weighed in heavily on my side of the argument. Rod’s attention flew all over. It appeared to me that he was at the end of his rope. The stress of these issues, and his role in this whole situation, seemed to be overwhelming. In the middle of this meeting, he took a phone call. It was Don McGahn, calling to ask him to arrange for me to go back to the White House, to interview for the director’s job. So we set that up for the next day.
In this same meeting Rod talked about interviews with candidates for director. Then he flipped back to talking about possible candidates for the special counsel job. It was hard to track whether he was talking about candidates for one job or for the other. One minute, he said Mueller had been asked to interview for the position of FBI director; Mueller had gone in for an interview with Trump, and left his phone there, and then the phone had to be retrieved. Then he said John Kelly was another candidate for FBI director.
I said I didn’t understand what qualified Kelly as a prospect. Kelly had no law-enforcement or legal background of any kind. And why would he leave his cabinet-level position as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to become director of the FBI? Rod said, No, he wouldn’t leave DHS. He would just run both. I said, You’ve got to be kidding. Those are two massive jobs. Each one is a huge challenge for any human being. For one person to do both would be impossible. Rod said, This is a strategy for disruption. It is not a serious attempt to find the right FBI director. It is a strategy for disruption.
That night, Rod provisionally agreed to meet with the Gang of Eight the next day. He wanted to do it as late in the day as possible. And before I left his office, Rod also gave me the president’s original draft letter firing Comey, which he had kept after his May 8 White House meeting. I read it, I took it back to the Hoover building, sealed it in an envelope, signed the seal, and put it in my safe.
By the afternoon of May 17, Rosenstein had confirmed his agreement to hold a briefing for the Gang of Eight about the Russia investigation. He had also made the decision to appoint a special counsel and taken steps to do so. The FBI team had already set up the briefing, for five o’clock that day, so it was a good thing he was on board. At the Capitol, on the House side, they walked me down to the SCIF, in a basement floor. Some of the Russia team was waiting for me there. The senators and congressmen started straggling in, each with one or two aides—mostly staff directors—and then Rod showed up with a couple of his people. Now that the Gang of Eight was a crowd of two dozen in the room, I thought, the chance of this not getting back to the president was basically zero. Then Devin Nunes walked in, and the chance was less than zero.
Nunes, a congressman from California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had publicly stepped away from that committee’s Russia investigation. In April, just before the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating Nunes for speaking with the media about classified information relating to the Trump campaign and Russia, Nunes effectively recused himself—although he did not use the word “recuse.” Nunes was suspected of having surreptitiously been given intelligence by presidential aides during a nighttime rendezvous at the White House, information that he then publicized. Look who’s here, I said to Rod. Rosenstein understood. He went to talk to Nunes, pulled him aside. Came back, told me, Nunes is staying, he says he’s not recused from this, he refuses to leave.
I looked at Rod. Rod said, At the end of the day it’s his recusal, it’s his choice, I can’t enforce it. We can’t kick him out of the room.
Rod and I sat at the end of the long conference table in the middle of the room. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, was to my right, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky and the Senate majority leader, was to my left. I took out the outline I had prepared. As a rule, I don’t work off talking points, I brief off the top of my head. Not this time.
To start the briefing I went back to July 2016, when we began investigating the possibility of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government. We opened cases on four individuals. The question determining those actions was simple: Which individuals associated with the campaign had had significant or historical ties to Russia?
One was Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign; he was known to have met with with Russian foreign-intelligence officers in New York, and he had recently been to Russia. Another foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, had told a foreign diplomat that the Russians had offered to help Trump’s campaign by providing information on Hillary Clinton. Michael Flynn, the campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser and, later, for a brief period, the president’s national security adviser, was known to have had multiple, high-level contacts with the Russian government and he had been seated next to Vladimir Putin at a Moscow gala dinner in late 2015. Paul Manafort was known to have had business dealings of many kinds, all of them on the shady side, with Ukrainians and Russians.
After reminding the committee of how this investigation began, I told them of additional steps we had taken. No one interrupted. No one pushed back. The mood in the room was sober. Schumer had been nodding his head and looking at me very directly throughout the brief. On McConnell’s side of the table, I sensed a great deal of resignation.
At this point Rod took over the briefing and announced that he had appointed a special counsel to pursue the Russia investigation, and that the special counsel was Robert Mueller. The Gang of Eight had a lot of questions for him. What was the scope of the inquiry? Who oversees the special counsel? How could the special counsel get fired? No one was gunning to fire the special counsel, they just wanted to understand the Justice Department rules around the appointment. Rod answered every question, and then we were done. In and out in half an hour.
Nunes had stayed and listened throughout the entire meeting. Within the next few days, aides to Representative Mike Conaway, the acting chair of the House Intelligence Committee after Nunes stepped aside, contacted the Justice Department to ask if we would give the brief again, to Conaway alone. As it was explained to me, the aide said, after the Gang of Eight briefing, Nunes realized he probably should not have been there. Conaway would handle all committee business pertaining to this matter. So Conaway came to the command center at Justice, and Rod and I ran through the whole thing for him again. He took the news the same way the rest had seemed to take it. As a reality to accept.
When I came out of the Capitol in the early evening of May 17, it felt like crossing a finish line. It felt as if I’d been sprinting since the night of May 9. Now, finally, I could stop sprinting. If I got nothing else done as acting director, I had done, now, the one thing I needed to do. The Russia investigation was on solid ground. Everybody who needed to know about it knew about it. If the investigation ever got wiped away, that would involve forces beyond my control. It could not be struck from the record. All the steps we took were fully documented. If anyone tried to close it down, it could not be done in secret.
I came home and stood by the island in the kitchen, drinking a beer. The family wound down from all the things we had done that day. My own future, I knew, was probably set now. I was correct about that. In late July, the president would begin using Twitter to continue the barrage of false and scathing statements about me and my wife.
Later, when things got tough, on the days when I went down the rabbit hole, Jill would remind me of that night with the family in the kitchen. Center me and bring me back: Remember what you did and why you did it, she would say. You played your role, you did your job, your kids know it. That’s what matters.