COLLECTIVE INSANITY AND THE CLINTON INVESTIGATION
About two weeks after the FBI’s first-ever crowdsourced manhunt, in Boston, the FBI launched a second crowdsourced manhunt. We released photos of three men from the Benghazi attack site, and we asked for the public’s help in identifying them. Also that spring, in Syria, a new name began emerging into prominence from the shuffle of schisms among extremist groups: ISIS, which is an acronym for “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” Keeping track of ISIS would be part of my new job, as executive assistant director of the National Security Branch, overseeing all FBI work on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, and the HIG. The month I accepted that position, Edward Snowden, a onetime contractor for the National Security Agency—the agency primarily responsible for collecting and monitoring electronic communications—began to leak the vast trove of information he had stolen. For the better part of a year, as Snowden fled the country and sought safe haven elsewhere, the biggest part of my work would be managing the fallout from those leaks.
The FBI’s Snowden problem had two dimensions: exposure and spoilage. His leaked documents brought counterintelligence under intense public scrutiny—not a situation in which counterintelligence thrives. Before Snowden, counterintelligence had always existed in a netherworld, right where it belongs. As a field of endeavor, it favors sheltered, quiet conditions and was rarely much discussed even internally. In presentations of the President’s Daily Brief and the director’s briefings, where the counterterrorism division was always under the gun, the counterintelligence division was almost never under the gun. Now, all of a sudden, because of Snowden, Mueller could not get enough counterintelligence. He brought out a twelve-gauge full of questions: Where is Snowden now? What is he telling the Chinese? What is he telling the Russians? What are we doing to get him charged? Have we figured out the full extent of what he took? How deep are we into the damage assessment? The assistant director of counterintelligence had never before looked down the barrel of Mueller’s questioning. He is the only person I ever saw come near to telling Mueller where to go.
External exposure of those leaks caused more damage. For a year afterward, our division fought to defend capabilities we had relied on. The NSA made a desperate effort to save its bulk-data collection program under section 215 of the Patriot Act. Its ability to create a pool of metadata—not communications content—that could be queried with an individual search term upon a finding of reasonable suspicion was an important tool; we had just used it to analyze Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s phone records. The post-Snowden environment killed that capability and cast suspicion on all of the government’s lawful surveillance efforts. The White House ordered a full review of the intelligence community’s surveillance and national-security activities, and because the FBI is the most public and most outward-facing of those agencies—the broadest target in the intelligence community—we took more than our share of the criticism. It seemed as if our ability to pursue the mission of protecting national security, which requires us to be able to investigate terrorists and spies, was under assault not just by our most vocal critics but also by our most dependable supporters.
The FBI’s biggest Snowden problem, though, had less to do with the information he took than with the way his actions reframed the relationships we had with technology companies and the work those relationships made possible. Overnight, the business model changed. Suddenly, everybody using the internet was newly focused on the security of their communications. Tech companies competed to position themselves as market leaders in terms of privacy. Marketing campaigns projected new images of these companies as defenders of liberty who would no longer freely support government intelligence or law-enforcement work. Tech companies framed their choice as moral or ethical. I saw the choice, frankly, as a bottom-line business decision. The cooperative relationships we had with these companies in the pre-Snowden world were suddenly a thing of the past.
This was in the background during the year when ISIS entered the vanguard of violent extremism. ISIS produced the most seductively packaged, ostentatiously violent, technologically savvy terrorist propaganda I had ever seen. Their work made the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire look as if it had been run off a ditto machine. They created videos with Hollywood production values, appealing to the range of audience demographics about as well as any mainstream media company. For believing strivers, there were jihadi-lifestyle-oriented infomercials, as enticing as the Home Shopping Network—It’s Always Sunny in the Caliphate. For isolated, unstable loners, there were splatter and snuff films—as gory as the most explicit scenes of violence in a big-studio action movie, but real. ISIS even had its own version of a breakout star: “Jihadi John,” an actual executioner, who gained a following in some quarters for his beheading videos. On the distribution side, ISIS was even more adept. The first group to make full use of social media, ISIS pushed propaganda to countless phones on the platforms of mainstream apps. Eventually the group learned how to monitor users’ interaction with content, assess an individual’s vulnerability to their message, and then contact them directly with IMs that dinged like any others: Hey, brother, reach out to me at this WhatsApp handle … From there, conversations would continue under end-to-end encryption that law enforcement has no power to surveil.
In this period, the percentage of communications that law enforcement could not see began to grow. It has kept on growing. Widespread use of encrypted connections has been unambiguously good for online banking and consumer purchases on the web, but it has also created a danger, by staking out large swaths of the digital world that exist beyond the reach of any lawful court order. In the United States, that situation is unprecedented. In the U.S., there is no physical space that is beyond the reach of law enforcement. Americans have always acknowledged that if a judge determines there is probable cause, law enforcement can access any person or place in this country with the proper legal authorities: warrants issued under court oversight and executed with Fourth Amendment rights observed and respected.
Now we cannot always do that with cyberspace. The makers of the encryption technology have brought about a state of affairs that they themselves cannot control. Or will not control. In 2016, after the San Bernardino shooting—when an American couple, inspired by ISIS, killed fourteen people and injured twenty-two at a public-health training event and Christmas party in California—I hoped that the FBI and Silicon Valley would negotiate a truce. I hoped that we would all be able to agree that, yes, it was important that law enforcement be able to have access to a phone that was carried by the man who helped to kill all these people. This was someone who had sufficient connections overseas that we couldn’t be sure he was not directed by a terrorist organization, and we wouldn’t be sure until we took a look at his communications devices. Apple, the maker of his phone, did not agree. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, made provocative statements: “The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers.” As if Apple were the only reliable guarantor of public safety. Really? But that’s the position the company took, and still takes.
Law enforcement should never be allowed to unilaterally decide what sort of access we should have. But democratically elected representatives need to engage in a thorough and meaningful debate over questions like these: How are we going to balance privacy and security? Under what conditions should the government have access to private communications? What kinds of laws should we apply to data in motion (as it traverses our networks and lands on our devices) and what kinds should we apply to data at rest (in the server farms and data centers of the world)? We need to start having this conversation in some organized fashion. After San Bernardino, nobody on the Hill wanted to take the lead, though, because any choice might alienate some constituency.
And also because people on the Hill were consumed by other distractions, such as Benghazi. Yes, still. Benghazi. Over a period of four years there were eight separate full-scale congressional investigations of the attack. The last one was conducted by the House Select Committee on Benghazi, chaired by Representative Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina. That committee’s appointment and hearings made big news for a long time; the next month, when the FBI collaborated with Defense on the capture of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, a ringleader of the Benghazi attack, the news seemed to come and go in a week. (In 2018, Khatallah was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for his role in the attack.) The first Benghazi investigation, by the House Intelligence Committee, was just ending its second year of work when Jim Comey was sworn in as the new FBI director. That first committee’s report found no evidence of a cover-up, no evidence of wrongdoing by the president or the secretary of state, and no evidence that the Obama administration’s conflicting statements about the cause of the attack had been intentional. The findings of the next seven investigations of Benghazi revealed little more. I continued to be called to testify and brief Congress on Benghazi throughout those four long years. There were weeks when ISIS was posting videos to YouTube of Americans being beheaded, and I was being called to the Hill to testify about Benghazi yet again.
Americans have freer access to more information than at any other time in the history of our country. What happened when we were let loose on that landscape of possibility? People raised their voices, louder all the time, and the boundaries of the landscape we had known wore down as volumes rose. The country started seeming like a village in a folktale under a spell, where the more the people see, the less they know.
September 2013: Entering his first morning staff meeting as FBI director, Jim Comey loped to the head of the table, put down his briefing books, and lowered his six-foot-eight-inch, shirtsleeved self into a huge leather chair. He leaned the chair so far back on its hind legs that he lay practically flat, testing gravity. Then he sat up, stretched like a big cat, pushed the briefing books to the side, and said, as if he were talking to a friend, I don’t want to talk about these today. I’d rather talk about some other things first. He talked about how effective leaders immediately make their expectations clear and proceeded to do just that for us. Said he would expect us to love our jobs, expect us to take care of ourselves … I remember less of what he said than the easygoing way he spoke and the absolute clarity of his day-one priority: building relationships with each member of his senior team.
Comey continually reminded the FBI leadership that strong relationships with one another were critical to the institution’s functioning. One day, after we reviewed the briefing books, he said, Okay, now I want to go around the room, and I want you all to say one thing about yourselves that no one else here knows about you. One hard-ass from the criminal division stunned the room to silence when he said, My wife and I, we really love Disney characters, and all our vacation time we spend in the Magic Kingdom. Another guy, formerly a member of the hostage-rescue team, who carefully tended his persona as a dead-eyed meathead—I thought his aesthetic tastes ran the gamut from YouTube videos of snipers in Afghanistan to YouTube videos of Bigfoot sightings—turned out to be an art lover. I really like the old masters, he said, but my favorite is abstract expressionism.
This hokey parlor game had the effect Comey intended. It gave people an opportunity to be interesting and funny with colleagues in a way that most had rarely been before. Years later, I remember it like yesterday.
That was Jim’s effect on almost everyone he worked with. I observed how he treated people. Tell me your story, he would say, then listen as if there were only the two of you in the whole world. You were, of course, being carefully assessed at the same time that you were being appreciated and accepted. He once told me that people’s responses to that opening helped him gauge their ability to communicate. Over the next few years I would sit in on hundreds of meetings with him. All kinds of individuals and organizations would come to Comey with their issues. No matter how hostile they were when they walked in the door, they would always walk out on a cloud of Comey goodness. Sometimes, after the door had closed, he would look at me and say, That was a mess. Jim has the same judgmental impulse that everyone has. He is complicated, with many different sides, and he is so good at showing his best side—which is better than most people’s—that his bad side, which is not as bad as most people’s, can seem more shocking on the rare moments when it flashes to the surface.
That does not mean he is two-faced. No one’s words or actions are perfectly consistent over time. No one moves through life in a state of complete “transparency.” Anyone who believes that unfaltering transparency goes with the job of director of the FBI knows nothing about how power is exercised, much less how institutions of government function. Comey does have charm, and it is sincere. Upon arriving at the FBI, he used that quality to build a deeply affectionate sense of camaraderie, which was especially pronounced in his relationship with the deputy director, Sean Joyce. The relationship between the director and his deputy—the appointed head of the institution and the most senior special agent in the Bureau’s ranks—is complementary, and in the case of Comey and Joyce it was also very close. The director is like a CEO, managing external relationships and internal strategy, laying out the FBI’s ten-year plan, and inspiring the entire workforce to think about what happens to the Bureau over the long term. The deputy director is the action arm of the partnership, the executor, managing the FBI’s day-to-day operations and intelligence collection. From the time Comey arrived, there was no apparent barrier between him and Joyce. The director was always seeking authentic, almost raw, feedback. The deputy responded with what seemed like total candor. Comey thrived on that—with Joyce most of all, but with many others, too. Tell me what you really think, Comey would say in meetings, trying to tease out opinions and insights from everyone in the room, not just the same three people over and over again.
Though his manners were more informal than Mueller’s, Comey shared the previous director’s larger-than-life sense of rectitude. In their own times and their own ways, each had shown true courage in protecting the rule of law against the encroachment of politics. We all knew the story from 2004, during Comey’s time as deputy attorney general, when the White House tried to force Justice to sign off on a surveillance program despite the department’s concerns about legality and oversight. It was Comey who refused and held the line. He did so during a dramatic showdown in the hospital room where John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, was recovering from surgery.
In September 2013, when Comey took the helm at the Hoover building, many of us believed his uprightness and open mind could serve as antidotes to the poisonous atmosphere that had engulfed Capitol Hill in particular. We needed antidotes urgently. The town, and maybe soon the country, seemed to have gone halfway berserk. In Congress, almost no one seemed capable of hearing any story, or accepting any shred of information, that in any way departed from preexisting notions of what the truth was or of how things ought to be.
For law enforcement, a sufficiently fractured public conversation can pose a mortal threat. When a population loses any sense of a shared story—when each segment of a population believes that only its own perceptions are valid—then that population can become ungovernable.
I was the head of the Washington field office now, responsible for FBI operations not only in D.C. and northern Virginia but also in Central Asia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Through that spring and summer, ISIS occupied a lot of my energy. And we had a big spike in counterterrorism arrests: more in 2015 than in any year since 9/11.
In the beginning, the Clinton email case had nothing to do with my job. The case started for me the way it did for everyone else. I was just a guy reading the news. The New York Times, Tuesday, March 3, 2015: CLINTON USED PERSONAL EMAIL AT STATE DEPT., POSSIBLY BREAKING RULES. Next day, same newspaper: USING PRIVATE EMAIL, CLINTON THWARTED RECORDS REQUESTS.
Day by day, the story emerged in pieces. Hillary Clinton, during her four years as secretary of state, had never used a government email account, relying exclusively on her own private email account. This became public knowledge when the House Benghazi Committee contacted the State Department to ask for some of Clinton’s emails, and State found that it had no Clinton emails at all. That was a head-scratcher. The idea that Clinton would use a personal email account to do government business for any reason—she herself cited convenience—didn’t seem plausible.
But I did not spend much time thinking about Hillary Clinton that week. I spent a lot of time thinking about my wife and our future. I did not anticipate that anyone would ever think the first topic was related to the second.
On March 5, a giant snowstorm walloped Washington, unseasonably late, as Jill and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. We were in a hotel in Washington, watching the snow fly and talking about what we imagined our life might look like in another twenty years. Out of the blue, about ten days earlier, Jill had been asked if she would consider entering the race for one of Virginia’s forty state senate seats. At a stage of life when circumstances can seem very settled, the call was a reminder that life is full of possibilities.
The year before, in February 2014, Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, had paid a very public visit to the hospital where Jill worked. The next day, The Washington Post published a story about the visit. IN VA, FIGHT OVER MEDICAID EXPANSION CONTINUES, was the headline. The piece described McAuliffe’s push to expand access to medical care in our state. The Affordable Care Act had expanded Medicaid, the partnership between state and federal governments that provides health insurance to poor people, the elderly, and the disabled—and then the Supreme Court ruled that each state had to choose whether to participate in that Medicaid expansion. In Virginia, Medicaid expansion would have extended health-insurance coverage to four hundred thousand people who had none, but the Virginia General Assembly’s Republican majority blocked it. McAuliffe fought back. His visit to the hospital where Jill worked was part of a road trip of press events intended to persuade the public. As head of the hospital’s pediatric emergency room—where the impact of Medicaid expansion would be especially dramatic—Jill helped to show the governor around. A Post reporter covering the event asked for Jill’s professional opinion about Medicaid expansion, and her answer was so good—clear, precise, nonpartisan, persuasive—that it showed up as the story’s closer in the paper the next day. Jill’s main point was that regardless of the complicated politics of health-care reform—these are her words—“I think expanding care for the folks who need it has to be part of the solution.… I’m faced with patients every day who are struggling because they don’t have that access.” If Medicaid were expanded, she added, more patients could seek primary care, the emergency room would not be so crowded, and children would be healthier. “They’d be on medication to manage their asthma. They would have good preventative care. They would get their immunizations.… They would address their obesity. All of the epidemics that are coming along, primary care wants to try to address that.… But if they don’t have access, how are they going to get that taken care of?”
In the kitchen the next day, we read the story out loud as a family. It was the first time Jill had been quoted in a big-city newspaper. She blushed. The kids cheered: So cool! And that was that—or so we thought.
Twelve months later, in early February 2015, Governor McAuliffe, Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, and the Virginia Democratic Party were still working to expand Medicaid in our state. This was their number-one legislative goal, and to realize it they were developing a strategy to flip the state senate—focusing their efforts on a handful of districts, including the one where we lived. In the thirteenth district, our state senator was Dick Black. A staunch McAuliffe enemy, Black led the Republican effort to block Medicaid expansion in our state. Black is also known for his stances on many other issues, including abortion, which he has described as “a greater evil than segregation or slavery.” When Virginia’s General Assembly voted on bills relating to abortion, Dick Black handed out plastic fetuses to his colleagues. McAuliffe and the Democrats decided that their dream candidate for this district in the 2015 election would be the diametric opposite of Dick Black: a woman, preferably a medical professional. Their brainstorming process led them back to Jill’s quote in the 2014 Post story about the governor’s hospital visit.
When the lieutenant governor’s chief of staff asked Jill to consider running for the state senate in order to help expand Medicaid in Virginia, she was intrigued. I was in a work meeting when she emailed to say that she’d been invited to run. I thought she was joking, but I played along. Then came the next message: I said Yes.
She had not yet said yes, but she was interested, so she investigated the prospect. The first week of March, Jill met with a couple of state senators. She learned that, if elected, she would not have to give up her medical practice, since Virginia’s General Assembly is in session for no more than a month and a half per year. The next step, as Jill weighed her options—and the Democrats weighed whether they wanted her to run—would be for her to meet the governor. She wanted me to go with her.
If Jill wanted to run for office, my support for her would be as solid as hers had always been for me, since the day that I told her I wanted to join the FBI. If Jill wanted to run for office, I would also respect absolutely all legal and ethical limits that her service might place on my own. I called Adam Lee, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond field office, to tell him that Jill was considering running for office and to let him know that I would accompany Jill on her trip to Richmond to meet McAuliffe on Saturday, March 7.
Concerning any politician with the history and connections that McAuliffe has, I am always cautious. I certainly knew about his long and sometimes controversial career. But I had absolute faith in Jill. She would never compromise herself or do anything inappropriate. When we met with him at the governor’s mansion, McAuliffe told Jill he saw her as the best person to run against Dick Black and a potential leader of the fight to expand Medicaid. She acknowledged their agreement on that issue, and she asked how he might handle disagreements that might come up on other issues. McAuliffe said he would always expect her to vote her conscience. Jill’s interest was rising.
I was excited for her, but I could not help worrying about her, too. On the way home from Richmond, I remember saying, This is politics—you have to be prepared for people saying horrible things about you. How are you going to feel, to wake up in the morning and see despicable things in the newspapers or online? She said, I’m not going to be afraid of name-calling.
From the beginning, Jill had been clear that she would run only if the FBI leadership was satisfied that her campaign would create no problem for the Bureau or for my work there. Now that she was seriously interested in running, I made every effort to learn about the full range of implications her campaign might have. Over the next few days, I spoke with many people who provided guidance and encouragement, and who advised me on the requirements of laws and regulations that would allow me to avoid conflicts of interest. I spoke with, among others, Patrick Kelley, the assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance—the chief ethics officer; with my direct supervisor Mark Giuliano, deputy director of the FBI; with James Baker, general counsel of the FBI; and with Director Comey’s chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg, who spoke with Comey on my behalf and reported back to say the director had no concerns. No one said the campaign would be a bad idea. The day I talked to Rosenberg, I told Jill the FBI had no objections. Jill decided to run.
I removed myself from any involvement in cases that had anything to do with Virginia politicians. Jill’s campaign went into high gear when the summer began. To avoid any potential issues, I decided not to be involved in the campaign in any way. Instead, I spent practically all of my spare time working toward a big personal goal of my own: I trained for an Ironman triathlon. “Patience,” I wrote with a Sharpie on one of my forearms. “Discipline,” I wrote on the other. Leaning forward on my bike, in the aero position, with my forearms together, I looked down and saw those words, day after day.
During the summer and fall of 2015, in Washington, patience and discipline were countercultural values. The Benghazi investigations were spinning their wheels. The Clinton email story was gaining traction. Congress was riled. The intelligence community inspector general became concerned—had classified material spilled into Clinton’s private email server?—and referred the matter to the FBI for investigation. In July, the FBI opened a case to see if such a spill had occurred, and, if so, whether it occurred accidentally or on purpose.
Then, in September, I took a new job and headed back to headquarters as associate deputy director—the Bureau’s version of chief operating officer and chief financial officer combined—overseeing beans, bullets, buildings, computers, and people. The next month I finished the triathlon in a respectable time, and the month after that Jill lost the election for state senate. With both our races run, life at home started returning to normal—until three months later, when I switched jobs again, to the Bureau’s number-two position—deputy director. Among the many duties that were a part of my new job, I assumed oversight of the Clinton email investigation. Only then—three full months after Jill lost her election—did I gain substantive knowledge about that case. It was a headquarters “special”—I had learned that fact before it hit the news. Sometimes, for a particularly sensitive case, for reasons of discretion, the FBI runs its investigation out of headquarters instead of the relevant field office, to limit the numbers of eyes and ears and mouths involved. A case like that is called a special. The Bureau has run specials since the 1930s. Calling a case a special does not give the subject special treatment. It just means the case is handled in the one distinctive way I have described: from headquarters, not from a field office.
“Midyear Exam” was the code name of the case. I don’t know how the name was chosen, and it was an occasional source of confusion because the regular assessments of the fifty-six field offices were marked on my calendar as “Midyear Reviews.” The only worse code name would have been “Lunch.” The Midyear team took over a small room down in the center of SIOC. We called that room the Bubble, and the team worked there seven days a week for months and months. Midyear was a classic FBI muscling effort. The team muscled through mountains of data, including even mountains that had crumbled into the void.
The setup for Midyear was simple. As noted, the Benghazi committee had asked the State Department for Clinton’s emails. State quickly discovered that Clinton’s emails were kept on a private server. In order to comply with the committee’s request, Clinton’s staff downloaded her emails—some sixty thousand of them—onto a couple of laptops. Then the staff members performed the Sisyphean task that, in due course, drove America bonkers. The Midyear team called this task “the sort.”
The sort divided Clinton’s emails into two batches: personal emails here, work emails there. The two batches were roughly equal in size, about thirty thousand each. Personal emails were kept back. Work emails were sent to State to send on to the committee. Then the thirty thousand emails Clinton’s staff deemed personal were deleted—destroyed.
Those thirty thousand emails, by their absence, became an inescapable presence in American life. A mystery of mysteries, a terra incognita. The missing emails were a blank space on which many people projected dark fantasies about government secrets and illegal activity. From the week the missing emails became publicly known, those fantasies dominated all other news about Hillary Clinton. They still do.
Leaving fantasies aside, there were two basic aspects to the Midyear investigation: technological and human. On the technology side, the Midyear team had to review every work email that was saved and to recover or reconstruct as many of the deleted personal emails as possible, in order to find out which emails contained classified information. In the course of that search, the team had to reconstruct Clinton’s private computer network. The team did both of these things, in spectacularly meticulous feats of computer forensics and data recovery.
On the human side, the team had to assess the motives of scores of Clinton’s associates and correspondents—to evaluate the intentions behind their actions and determine whether these people meant to do anything illegal. The legal standard for a criminal charge involving the compromise of highly sensitive classified information is intent. If there is no criminal intent, there is no crime.
The tech side of the case revolved around Clinton’s private email server. That makes it sound like a little plastic box. But to call Clinton’s computer network a private server is an oversimplification. The network started as an old Apple computer in the basement of the Clintons’ house in Chappaqua, New York. The family’s computing needs quickly outstripped what that machine could provide. They replaced it, but before long found themselves again needing more capacity. The Clintons eventually outsourced responsibility for their computing situation to a server farm in Secaucus, New Jersey.
None of this was known at the beginning of the Midyear investigation. Painstakingly, the Midyear team pieced together the whole timeline of what constituted Clinton’s “private email server” at every moment from 2008 through March 2015. It seemed as if every time the investigators turned over another rock, they found yet another laptop that was used to fix or process or transfer Hillary Clinton’s data and yet another place where some of Clinton’s emails, which could have contained classified information, might have been.
And because there were persistent questions about the missing thirty thousand emails, the team had to shed light on every dark corner of that network—had to find every machine and thumb drive and phone, and do whatever it took to reconstruct every piece of gear that had ever been a part of that network.
That was hard. But it was easy compared to other things the Midyear team did. When you press Send, the email that goes out no longer belongs only to you. It also belongs to the person you’ve sent it to. So if I come to you and say, I want to see all the emails in your account, and you say, I already deleted half of them, I can still retrieve those emails if I know which other accounts you were corresponding with. Clinton’s surviving emails provided a target list of her correspondents. So the team pulled email records from the time in question for every person on that list, searching for additional emails that had been thrown out—emails from the missing thirty thousand—and trying to slowly chip away at that number of the missing and amass a collection that would come close to the total number.
The most extreme feats of data recovery were barely distinguishable from magic. Clinton used one machine that was subsequently taken out of service and reformatted. But wiping emails from a machine does not make them go away. It just sweeps them into the so-called slack space of the server. The content of the emails is not lost. What is lost is the structure that organizes the emails into content that you can read. Imagine pulling the frame and the foundation out of a house, and everything inside that house falling into the pit where the basement used to be. Computer servers have a pit like that—the slack space. The team spent weeks and months analyzing the slack space of one particular server in an effort to piece together, word by word and letter by letter, emails that had been jumbled into this cyber pit full of other, unrelated code. I half wondered if we’d find an email from the California Brothers in there somewhere.
Every email we recovered from all these different processes was reviewed to make an initial determination as to whether we thought it contained material that could be classified. Once that was done, the material we thought might be classified was sorted out by owner. Some of it belonged to the FBI, some to the CIA, some to the NSA, some to State, some to others. We then farmed all that material out to its origins—called its classification authority—and said, Please review and let us know if any of this stuff is classified.
That, in and of itself, became a massive endeavor: sending information out, following up, constantly asking, requesting, demanding. Responding to our requests required a significant amount of effort on the part of these other entities. They had to go back and review the old emails to try to figure out if the information was, in fact, theirs, and if it was, what was its classification status. As it turned out, none of the emails bore clear classification markings—headers, footers, or paragraph markings indicating confidential, secret, or top secret content. According to the inspector general’s report on Midyear, only a handful of emails bore paragraph markings indicating confidential content.
The human side of the case revolved around the question, What were they thinking? We had to find out each person’s intentions. Did people know they were discussing classified matters in their unclassified email exchanges with Secretary Clinton? What was the tech guy thinking when he took the data off one device, put it on another one, and then went back to the original device and reformatted it? What was some senior staffer thinking when she told the junior aide to hit Delete, Delete, Delete? What was Hillary Clinton thinking by not using her government email like every other cabinet secretary? Were people simply careless or stupid about how they handled information? Or were they trying to cover things up so Congress or anyone else couldn’t get to it—or processing and storing information in a way that was specifically designed to evade federal records-retention laws? The only way to answer such questions was by conducting interviews with people, to try to determine intent—which, again, was the key to any possible criminal charges.
Assessing intent, I would argue, is a feat just as indistinguishable from magic as drawing ones and zeroes out of the digital void and reassembling them into whole emails. And assessing intent is an FBI specialty. For more than a century, agents have been performing this feat. Sitting in rooms with witnesses, talking with them about things they’ve done and not done. Tuning out the noise. Tuning into lines of truth in people’s stories. Tracking the tells of behavior that was bad or careless, devious or dumb. Probing for statements that reveal what someone is thinking. Searching for evidence that corroborates or disproves those statements.
At least once a week, the Midyear team had a standing meeting with the FBI’s senior leadership—Comey, his chief of staff, the Bureau’s chief counsel, and me. Midyear’s lead analyst would start by walking us through the numbers. Here’s what we’ve viewed so far. Here’s the new stuff we found in the slack space. Here’s how the agencies have responded. Here’s how many thousand emails are still out with the agencies. Here’s how many classified emails we have found on this server, here’s how many classified email strings. Here’s how many of those strings were not classified when they were written but now have been up-classified—classified in retrospect. Of those classified emails, here’s how many are confidential, how many secret, how many top secret. The level of detail was extreme.
Then Peter Strzok, the lead agent, briefed us on the interviews. Here’s who we talked to, what we expected to find, what we actually found. Here’s who’s next. But here’s the roadblock coming into view on that one. Here’s the problem we’re having with prosecutors as we try to schedule these next two witnesses.
From the time I joined the meetings on this investigation, in February 2016, the Midyear team was bridling at what they perceived to be a lack of aggression on the case among their partners at Justice. Bridling was in this team’s nature. It was a group of aggressive, determined people—typical FBI investigators. They knocked heads with Justice on many points of procedure.
Point of conflict number one: gathering evidence. In a different sort of investigation—in what some might call a normal investigation—if investigators wanted access to a device or if they wanted to seize evidence, they might serve a subpoena: You have to produce this evidence by Tuesday. In this investigation—of a candidate for president, lawyered up to here, in the middle of a campaign—Justice was mindful of the risks and wary of the tensions that might be activated by ordinary investigative techniques. The department didn’t want to risk subpoenas getting tied up in long litigation battles. It also wanted to have friendly conversations: Hey, we need to look at your client’s laptop—can we work this out? In the department’s view, negotiation would be better than compulsion in this case.
Point of conflict number two: interview techniques. In an ideal FBI world, as has been the case since long before my first partner and I went out for our very first interviews in Brighton Beach, an interview means two agents, one subject. For a big, important interview, a case under the spotlight, or in the homestretch of nailing down a prosecution strategy, it would not be unreasonable to have the assistant U.S. attorney sit in. But three’s a crowd. Midyear case interviews, in contrast, had become extravaganzas, with Barnum, Bailey, and every Ringling brother invited: two FBI agents, five attorneys, the witness, the witness’s attorney. My people would come to see me and complain—all these lawyers chill the witnesses—and then we would push back on Justice, and they would say, It’s been negotiated: They’re bringing six attorneys so we’re bringing six attorneys.
Lots of people, lots of feelings. In May, the issue came to a head over the interview with Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. Mills was the one who had supervised the sort on two computers that, at one point, each contained all sixty thousand emails. The interview with her was a big deal. We thought she was uniquely positioned to shed light on how the sort was done, where it was done, under what guidance and direction it was done, and steered by what intent. Was the intention simply to weed out Clinton’s private emails from the cache being turned over to Congress, or was a more nefarious purpose involved?
We had many questions for Mills. Our team was concerned about how to communicate that fact to her. From the get-go, they wanted Mills to know this was just the first of what might be several interviews. If the team had follow-up questions, it was going to require her to come back and sit down again. At the start of the interview, the team wanted to read a statement explaining that.
A day or two before the interview, the team showed me the statement. They said they were afraid to tell Justice they wanted to read it. They thought Justice would go off the deep end and force them to spend the next two weeks changing periods to commas and “happys” to “glads.” I saw their point, and I took their side. FBI agents know how to do interviews—know how to build rapport and have a conversation. FBI agents do not need to confer with lawyers to clear the language they intend to use when they introduce themselves to a witness. But that’s how pedantic Justice had gotten. Overwrought review, constant comment, six more meetings convened to converse about conversing. At the same time, the Midyear team was starting to overread Justice’s overreading, spinning it up into suspicion: Why are they doing this to us? Are they trying to slow us down?
Just do it, I told the agents—just read the statement. Get it done. If you feel you need to tell the witness you might have to talk to her again, it’s your interview, you’re conducting it, tell the witness what you need her to know.
So they did, and brought the interview to a screeching halt before it even started. Mills and her attorney had to leave the room and take a break. Consultation. Attorney came back, yelled at Justice: What is this? They all survived. Got through the interview. But the Justice team was so angry that the FBI team had done this, the next week we all had to have a follow-up meeting so everyone could air their grievances and apologize. That’s how fraught this thing was now. That’s how much pressure had built up on this case. At every step, everyone was aware that everything that happened could have potentially huge implications for God knew what.
The Midyear conflict between Justice and the Bureau went deeper than tactics. It was grounded in a difference between their natures. This conflict has existed for a long time. Though the Bureau represents the instrumental aspects of law enforcement, while Justice represents the ideal, both institutions are more complex than that. Each contains elements of the other’s defining characteristics. This raises the tension between them. Agents often unfairly read a Justice prosecutor’s caution as political. Similarly, prosecutors often view an agent’s intentions as overly aggressive or even reckless. And the tolerance among agents for any whiff of politics in prosecutions runs from low to zero. Politically appointed officials are not a big part of the internal FBI world. The Bureau’s only political appointee is the director, and few agents interact with that person day to day. A lot of the leadership at Justice, on the other hand, is politically appointed. Early on in Midyear, the politically appointed leadership—Attorney General Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates—had decided not to recuse themselves. Somehow, they saw the investigation of Hillary Clinton—former First Lady and former secretary of state, current candidate for the presidency, likely nominee of the Democratic Party, who was being supported by the president of the United States, to whom they owed their jobs—as a case they could handle without prejudice. Recusal would have been a reasonable and, I would argue, better decision for those political appointees to have made. A special prosecutor could have been appointed to oversee the case, to work with the career professionals at Justice or other attorneys. It would have been an extreme choice but also a safe one. I don’t know why they didn’t do that.
Instead, they made a feckless compromise. They designated career professionals in the National Security Division as decision makers in this case but didn’t unambiguously commit to abide by those people’s decisions. The leadership at Justice chose not to be involved but also not to be recused—the worst possible choice afforded by the situation. They were not far enough removed to eliminate suspicion of partisan motivation, and not closely enough involved to exercise the active discernment that such a sensitive case demanded.
It was a fatal choice. Had there been a competent, credible special counsel running Midyear Exam independently—the way Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation has been run—I think circumstances might have been very different, and we would not have been where we ended up in July.
Investigation involves constant evaluation. What do I have? How does this case look? Is it getting stronger? Is it languishing? What sort of evidence do I need to build this charge or that one? The investigator steadily asks these kinds of questions. As does the prosecutor. Individually and together. On Midyear, we were having these conversations all along. With every update on the emails and the interviews. What were we seeing, what were we hearing? Were we learning anything that indicated to us a guilty state of mind—a level of intent that we could prove?
Consistently, time and time again, what the team was finding was, No, we’re not finding much of anything here. No smoking gun. No sign of any vast conspiracy to trick the House committee, the State Department, or the American people. By March or April, we all knew in what direction the investigation was heading. It was clear to the whole team.
Comey and I started having general conversations about how to proceed. The investigation had two possible outcomes. Option A would be the easy path. At the last minute, we would find evidence that, the FBI and DOJ would agree, should be put in front of a grand jury, and a charge would be pursued. An indictment would speak for itself. Option B would be the thorny path. What if we found no more evidence? After we’d looked under every rock and found nothing, what would we do? Typically, the case would be closed. Everyone would walk away quietly. Typically, out of fairness, we don’t make a public statement about not charging people. We try not to draw attention to that outcome. We keep silent, to avoid further damage to the reputations of people we’ve been investigating.
This case was different. It was public before we got it. The inspector general’s referral had been public. The world knew we had this investigation. There was nothing private about it. The attorney general and the director had publicly acknowledged it. A front-page refrain had repeated itself all through the spring: What’s the FBI finding? When will the FBI be done? So if we concluded there was no criminal case to bring, we could not just put the genie back in the bottle. We would have to somehow publicly acknowledge our decision.
How would we do that? Would we push a two-sentence press release out into the world, give no answers to the questions people would ask, let them screech and howl? Or would we do something more? Should we issue a long statement, reviewing details and spelling out a rationale for the choice not to go forward? Should it be a written memo? Should it be a speech? Who would make a speech like that? The attorney general? The FBI director? Would they do it as a duet?
A leader on the Justice team, John Carlin, pushed for Comey to be out front on this. Nobody has Director Comey’s credibility, Carlin said. Nobody can deliver a speech like Comey can. In a general way, I agreed with that logic. But I didn’t want to sign the Bureau up for all the dirty work. The signal was clear, though. Justice wanted the director to be prominently involved in the announcement, whatever form it took. Comey and I had been talking about the same thing. With his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, and the general counsel, Jim Baker, we’d been having these same sorts of theoretical conversations about the forms that Option B could take.
Then one day, when the four of us were talking, Comey said, I’ve been thinking, I had this kind of crazy idea: What if I just went out there and did it? What if I just spelled out our conclusion for people? What if I just told them? What if I did it solo? When Comey said this, I was sitting to his right, Rybicki to his left. Our normal seating arrangement. I looked over at Rybicki and could tell without a word his reaction, which was the same as mine. Oh, my God, I thought. We don’t do that. That is not what we do. I remember looking at Comey and just kind of shaking my head, and saying, Ooofff, I don’t know, that seems like really putting us out there. That’s really abandoning tradition and practice, and could set a bad precedent. I don’t know that there’s a specific policy about that, but that’s not who we are most of the time.
Comey reacted: I know, I know, I feel the same way about it, it seems crazy—but just think about it.… He argued that we were in a situation and a fact pattern that, with even a small amount of luck, would never, ever happen to this agency again: investigating a candidate for president in the middle of the campaign for using a private email server. Umpteen investigative efforts had rendered zero prosecutable results. Comey acknowledged that announcing the null result would break with precedent. But he believed that his announcement could be a singular event.
He also doubted the Department of Justice’s credibility to make this sort of an announcement because of its half-in, half-out posture of involvement in the case. And because the attorney general had said odd things about it from the start. In September 2015, the first time Lynch and Comey discussed how they would publicly acknowledge the case, she told him not to call it an investigation. She told him to refer to it as a “matter.” This became a running joke whenever anyone at the FBI felt like Justice was dragging its feet. If someone on our side of the street felt slowed down by someone on their side of the street, someone would ask, What have we become, the Federal Bureau of Matters? The matter of the “matter” did have a serious effect on the director. It planted the question, Was the attorney general trying to minimize what we were doing? The question festered. He’d heard that the Clinton campaign was trying to avoid the word “investigation,” too.
I want to be clear. Neither Attorney General Lynch nor Deputy Attorney General Yates at any time during the course of this investigation ever said or did anything that caused me to believe that they were sandbagging, obstructing, slowing down, or influencing the investigation in any way. Much less in any way based on politics. Those two officials didn’t talk about it with us. We didn’t talk about it with them. We never briefed them. Maybe they were getting information on the case from the Justice team—I don’t know. As far as we knew, they were totally hands-off.
As tends to happen, thought became action. One weekend, Comey wrote a draft statement to work up an idea of what he might say if he were to make the close-out announcement solo. On Monday, May 2, he sent it to Rybicki, Baker, and me. I read it and talked to him about it. The more I thought about the situation, the more I also believed, as Comey did, that Justice couldn’t make a statement like this—but somebody needed to. I thought it would be important that the country knew three things. What we had done, what we had found, and what we thought about it.
What we had done—people needed to know the scope and the significance of the investigative effort. What we had found—people needed to know the result of all that effort, literally the numbers of emails, numbers of classified emails. What we thought about it—people needed to know not just our conclusion, but how much study and consideration went into drawing that conclusion. We had asked Justice to go back through more than half a century of records and produce for us the results of every single prosecution for mishandling classified information. We made a comprehensive review of who had been charged, be it misdemeanor or felony; whether prosecution resulted; whether cases were dropped; whether pleas were guilty or not guilty; and what the sentences were. We knew with great specificity what it took to go forward with a case. Comey asked for all this. Justice sent a huge spreadsheet, thirty or forty pages long, with all the details on those sorts of cases over a long period of time. It showed how weak this case was compared to cases that had actually been prosecuted.
Comey’s draft went to a few more people. Some readers noticed that the draft called Clinton “grossly negligent.” That was statutory language—the language you’d use to indict someone for mishandling classified information—and the statutory meaning did not match Comey’s intended meaning, which was simply to use the words the way ordinary people would to characterize an action in a nonlegal way. In a meeting involving five people, a lawyer on the Midyear team said “extremely careless” would more accurately describe the behavior Comey’s first draft had called “grossly negligent.” The lawyer’s argument was, If we’re saying we shouldn’t charge her, then you shouldn’t describe her using those charged words.
That change, like the rest of the group’s edits to the draft at that meeting, was entered on Peter Strzok’s computer. More than a year later, I would learn—and six months after that, it would be widely reported—that during and after the investigation, Strzok had had an affair with another member of the Midyear team, Lisa Page, who, as the deputy director’s chief counsel, was my lawyer. The two conducted their relationship in secret, sending thousands of text messages to each other on their work phones. Some of their text messages expressed dread, shock, fear, and disgust concerning Donald Trump’s behavior during the presidential campaign. Although their personal views did not affect the investigation—I know that, because I was their boss—and this assessment has been corroborated by the inspector general’s Midyear investigation—the mere fact that the change from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” was typed on Strzok’s machine was used to eviscerate Strzok, Midyear, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. The suggestion was that Strzok tampered with Jim’s statement, that Strzok wanted to save Hillary Clinton from a felony charge and therefore took out the language consistent with a felony charge. As if this proved the fix was in.
The truth is, it was Comey’s statement. The statement he delivered personally on July 5 at that podium in the William H. Webster Conference Room of the Hoover building was one he pored over a million times. There’s not a letter, not a comma, not a change of any kind to that document that Comey did not read, reread, ponder, weigh, and approve. Comey agreed with and approved the suggestion to change “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” He accepted the suggestion because it clarified his statement. Comey had drafted the statement to explain that no prosecutor would seek a charge based on the evidence we had. We knew that because we had looked at every single case that had ever been charged. Clinton’s conduct did not demand that a charge be sought. That was not an empty statement or a dramatic statement. It was a statement of fact. Meanwhile, the Midyear team still had one more interview to do, with Hillary Clinton herself.
A month passed. Five days before the final interview, at the end of June, on a hundred-degree afternoon, two small planes were parked on the tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona. A man got off one of those planes, walked over to the other, and climbed the steps into the cabin. He met for half an hour with the woman inside. The man was Bill Clinton, the woman Loretta Lynch. The two had never met before. The conversation may have been completely innocent. Lynch and Clinton would both recall that they mostly talked about their grandchildren. Even granting that, the tarmac meeting was a horrible lapse in judgment by Loretta Lynch. She should have recused herself from Midyear at that point. She did not—she made things worse. Three days into the furor over the meeting, which had quickly become public, Lynch announced that she would accept the FBI’s recommendations in the Midyear case. On the same day, Lynch’s spokeswoman reasserted the attorney general’s authority over the final decision. Half-in, half-out, and all confused. That was the last straw for Comey.
In the end, the Hillary Clinton interview revealed nothing new. It did not change the way we saw the strengths and weaknesses of the case. The Midyear team concluded formally that no charges should be pursued. Justice could not credibly announce that conclusion because its credibility had been compromised. On the morning of July 5, we invited the media to come in at eleven. We placed some courtesy calls to Justice and said we were making an announcement about the case but did not reveal the conclusion. Justice watched the statement on TV like everybody else. We did it that way for this reason: Comey wanted to stand up there and say, I have not coordinated this with the Department of Justice in any way. What I am giving you is the raw, pure FBI perspective—what we did, what we found, what we thought about this case.
The Department of Justice was not happy. No one said thank you until the next day, when they came to appreciate what the FBI had done. We took all the risk and all the criticism for delivering the result we thought was fair and just. To do this, we leveraged the Bureau’s credibility, because by this point Justice had none. If we had it to do over again, would I want it done the same way? We do not have it to do over again. In the moment, we made the best decision we could with the facts and analysis and circumstances we had.
We gambled heavily on Comey’s status as a great communicator. We had, and he had, considerable confidence in his ability to lay out the situation in a way that was convincing. We hoped people would listen with an open mind and that the general reaction would be one of understanding. Of course, that makes total sense: We believed in our own good intentions. We believed that the American people believed in us. The FBI is not political. The FBI did not pursue this investigation with any sort of political intention in mind. Our confidence in Comey’s ability to convince people that we had done the right thing turned out to be excessive. No question about that.
Leading up to the speech, Comey and I had also talked about people in the Bureau who were not going to be happy about the approach he was taking—and how to communicate internally about the decision and help people understand. Afterward, there were a few people who talked to reporters. Or talked to other people who then talked to reporters. Or passed information to third parties such as Rudy Giuliani, if he can be believed; people who then spun rumors into full-blown conspiracy theories.
I look back now and see how far the FBI was stretching, how completely we were leveraging our own credibility. Had I imagined how polarized and vicious the reaction to Comey’s statement would be—had I foreseen how his statement would erode the credibility of the FBI, and specifically that of the FBI director, in a way that could do long-term damage to the institution—I want to believe I would have assessed our chances for success very differently. Made different arguments. Listened differently. Had I thought this whole thing through more skeptically, had I been more resistant to Comey’s idea that he could make this statement in a way that connected with people both inside and outside the organization, had I made a more realistic appraisal of how many of those people would not have accepted anything short of seeing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs being dragged off to the Metropolitan Detention Center, then perhaps I would have said to Comey, Don’t do it. Let’s be the normal Bob Mueller, say-nothing FBI of old. Let’s stand there on the dais with them and say nothing, and let DOJ step into the spotlight and take the hit. I think that was an option—but I’m aware that I think this only in retrospect.
After working the Benghazi cases, I of all people should have seen this coming. The Benghazi investigation—the seed that gave rise to the Clinton investigation in the first place—revealed the surreal extremes to which craven political posturing had gone. I should have thought more about that. Should not have seen it as an anomaly. Should have realized it was a microcosm of the new reality. Should have understood that whatever we concluded about Midyear was not going to be thoughtfully considered but rather ground to powder for political warfare.
Or should I have known that? When is the right time to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with? When do you declare that the political process, or the press, no longer has the power to facilitate comprehension? When is the right time to act from skepticism and cynicism, rather than from faith in a society you have always believed in?
Midyear ended. Midyear’s afterlife began. For the rest of our lifetimes, everyone involved will be asked questions about Midyear, the zombie apocalypse of counterintelligence cases. After Comey’s July 5 announcement, the Bureau was pounded by FOIAs and requests from Congress for more information—everyone wanted to know everything. Satisfying those requests, in addition to completing normal end-of-case housekeeping tasks, such as preparing a comprehensive letterhead memo describing everything we did on the case, took up the rest of the summer. At the same time, unfolding events called for our attention, too.
In July, three days after the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its candidate and three days before the Democratic Party nominated Clinton as its candidate, WikiLeaks released more than nineteen thousand emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee, in a hack for which twelve intelligence officers of the Russian government would later be indicted. On the last day of that month, the FBI began investigating a variety of links between the Russian government (or people close to it) and Trump’s campaign. Also during this period, the FBI’s New York field office was pursuing an ongoing investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which in August provoked a confrontation with the Justice Department. In a phone call, the principal associate deputy attorney general expressed concern about FBI agents working on this investigation during the presidential election. The tone sounded a lot like pressure. I asked straight out, Are you telling me I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation? The answer was no. We all went back to work.
September threw a wrench. The New York field office and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York opened a criminal investigation of a disgraced former congressman, Anthony Weiner, for transmitting obscene material to a minor, sexual exploitation of children, and activities related to child pornography. When the case agent obtained Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer and began searching for evidence on the devices, he realized that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime senior aide to Hillary Clinton, had also used the laptop, and that the laptop contained emails that might be relevant to the Clinton email investigation. New York’s assistant director in charge told me about the emails in late September. I spoke with counterintelligence about it the same day, and I understood that someone would go up to New York right away to put eyes on the situation—to figure out what we had, and what, if anything, we should do about it.
The laptop was a find, but finding the laptop was not self-evidently a six-alarm situation. During Midyear, each of the many, many times we got a new tranche of emails, a first order of business was having them “de-duplicated”—that is, compared with the ones we already had to see what might be new. This time, we would do the same thing. I tasked the job of looking into this to the counterintelligence division, and I expected to receive reports as things developed. I mentioned it to Comey—maybe in person, maybe by phone, I don’t remember which—and I mentioned it to Justice; and the world turned. I hit the road for a couple of weeks of work trips. When I came back to the Hoover building, much was afoot. I’d been home for two days when the Bureau applied for and received a FISA warrant to surveil a subject in connection with the Russia investigation. This investigation into possible collusion between Russia and people associated with the Trump campaign had begun during the summer and was continually expanding. On the same day, FBI public affairs mentioned that The Wall Street Journal planned to run an article about Jill’s state senate campaign a year earlier and my involvement with Midyear. In an email, I mentioned it to Comey. The story was published on the Journal’s website on October 23 and in the print edition the next morning. It focused on large donations, totaling approximately six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars, that Jill received from the state Democratic Party and a political action committee controlled by Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe—donations that, the story insinuated, created a conflict of interest for me in Midyear because McAuliffe was a longtime friend and ally of, and fund-raiser for, the Clintons. The headline innuendo was not subtle: CLINTON ALLY AIDED CAMPAIGN OF FBI OFFICIAL’S WIFE.
As noted, I had nothing to do with Jill’s campaign. And Jill’s campaign had nothing to do with the Clinton email investigation. The Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits certain kinds of political activity by federal employees. When Jill ran for state senate, as I’ve explained, I sought ethics advice and followed it, observed all of these prohibitions and more, avoiding even activities that might have been permitted. I was not aware of the donation reported by the Journal until I read about it in the newspaper. The donations were entirely lawful, reported as required, and consistent with similar donations to other candidates. And even if McAuliffe had wanted to curry favor with me on Hillary Clinton’s behalf, he would have had to be clairvoyant. Jill’s campaign was over—and she lost—in November 2015, months before I had any knowledge of, or involvement in, the Clinton case.
Donald Trump immediately picked up on the story. First he tweeted it. Then, in a Florida campaign rally that same day, he built the innuendo into a full-blown conspiracy theory. Yelling and waving his arms, he touted “shocking new revelations which you’ve seen—front page of The Wall Street Journal—about how the Clinton campaign has corrupted our government.” He said that Hillary Clinton knew about the money—which the article did not assert, and which no evidence suggests. Trump’s speech was not a misinterpretation of the article. It was a fabrication. His hatred was palpable. The crowd’s angry response was chilling.
But a lot was happening that day. George Toscas, in the National Security Division, told me that the Weiner laptop had still not been searched, because the legal authority to read the emails had not been arranged. The search warrant in the Weiner case allowed searches for images of child pornography, but opinion was divided as to whether that warrant also gave us the right to look at the Clinton emails. The New York field office and prosecutors briefed most of the Midyear team on what limited information concerning those messages they could legally view—the number of messages and the range of dates that might potentially be covered. The day after that, October 26, when the team briefed me on this, it seemed clear that we had to get a warrant. Obtaining a warrant would change the status of the Midyear case. It would mean that Midyear wasn’t closed—it was still open. It would mean the FBI was still investigating Hillary Clinton. Before sunrise the next day, as I got ready to leave town to visit family, I emailed Comey to say the Midyear team had to brief him on an important issue.
When they did, Comey decided to seek the warrant and ultimately to notify Congress. I was not present for that meeting. When Comey and I spoke by phone after the meeting was finished, he said, I don’t need you to weigh in on this decision. I already know what I’m going to do. It’s going to be easier to keep you out of it, because it avoids putting you in the position of having to answer any questions about it. I later learned that Comey was uncomfortable with the insinuations of impropriety that had been stirred up by the Journal article.
He was about to steer the FBI into the boiling rapids of one of the most acrimonious presidential campaigns in American history. The next day, in his October 28 letter to FBI employees explaining his decision, Comey wrote, “Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”
I think it was a mistake to send that letter. I did not believe we knew enough about what we had to make any kind of statement to anyone about it. I believed that we should get the warrant and review the material to see whether there was anything new in there. Or at least figure out how long it would take to review, or even just de-duplicate, these hundreds of thousands of emails. Taking that level of action, in my view, would not have violated the assurance the FBI had given the Hill that the investigation was finished and that we would let them know if anything changed.
I know Jim saw it differently. Later, he publicly stated that it would have been more dangerous to keep silent, but I disagree. My way would have taken on a fair degree of risk to the organization. Taking the aerial view: Sometimes the riskier choice is the more responsible one.
Had I been in his shoes, I think I would have taken that chance. People have criticized him by saying that he was more concerned with his own reputation than the reputation of the organization. I do not know that to be the case. But I do believe it weighed heavily on him that he thought he might be perceived as taking action that was inconsistent with what he told the Hill and the American people—that the investigation was concluded. He has said he felt he had a choice between going through a door marked “Terrible” and a door marked “Even Worse” to explain why he chose Terrible. That makes sense to me. I understand how he viewed the situation at the time and how he made his decision.
That weekend The Wall Street Journal prepared to publish another article about the FBI. This one alleged an intersection between the Clinton Foundation case and Midyear. As with the previous story, I kept Comey and his chief of staff in the loop as this story developed. Published under the headline FBI IN INTERNAL FEUD OVER HILLARY CLINTON PROBE, this article, like the previous week’s, strongly implied that the FBI gave Hillary Clinton preferential treatment and also implied that I was responsible for this. No facts supported that hypothesis. And my attempts, with help from colleagues in my office, to provide the Journal reporter with facts for the story had not succeeded in changing its tone. We had even told the Journal about my telephone confrontation with the official at Justice the previous August, but the reporter supplemented that, perhaps for reasons of “balance,” with false information—about an episode in which I supposedly told agents on the Clinton Foundation case to stand down. That incident never occurred.
Some people began to question whether I should recuse myself from matters involving the Clintons. The standard for recusal is whether a person with knowledge of the facts would assume there to be a conflict. No one with knowledge of the facts would conclude that there was a conflict. If I recused, many would see the decision as an admission that the insinuations were true—and more important, would cast retrospective doubt on Midyear. None of that was true.
On October 31, Comey and I had a quick chat about the second Wall Street Journal story, which clearly bugged him. He was concerned about falsehoods in the article that seemed to be coming from within the Bureau—the same ones that had compelled us to push back on the article. We were both frustrated with how the story had turned out. I also wanted to talk to Comey about the recusal issue. He advised me to discuss it with Baker and let him know what we thought. I later learned that he was more concerned about the donations to Jill’s campaign than he had let on. A couple of days later, I went to Comey’s office to make the case against recusal. Comey said that my legal argument was sound, but in light of the controversy he asked me to recuse. I did not think it was the right decision, but I did as he asked.
On November 6, Comey sent Congress a second letter, saying that the FBI did not find anything new on Weiner’s laptop. November 8 was Election Day. As a matter of policy, the FBI does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.
Everyone was surprised by the results of the election, starting with the president-elect. It would be months before we understood how utterly different the new team was going to be, if “team” is even the word. Many of the officials in the new administration had little or no familiarity with national government and were deeply distrustful of everything about Washington. They were wary of the FBI, though I believed that once they experienced firsthand our capabilities and professionalism, they would come to rely on us in the same way that the last team had, and the team before that. What I remember most vividly from the days immediately after the election is how quickly we in the Bureau just got on with it. We all suspected that what lay ahead was going to be more like a roller-coaster ride than a walk in the park, but I don’t think any of us anticipated that the cars would go off the rails. Looking back, I don’t know whether the best word to describe my attitude is hopeful or naïve.
In any case, there was work to do. After the election, President Obama tasked the intelligence community—specifically, the CIA, FBI, and NSA—with synthesizing everything we knew about the possibility of Russian involvement in the 2016 election and putting it all together into one product. We referred to this internally as the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment.
By this point, we already knew a lot. The Russia investigation had been initiated in the summer of 2016 and was conducted scrupulously, according to long-established procedures. Unlike the Clinton email investigation, which was inevitably public from the very start, and in that sense out of the ordinary for the FBI, the Russia investigation was pursued quietly, as virtually all Bureau cases are, for principled reasons. There would have been little the Bureau could say even if saying little were not Bureau policy: Much of what we knew was based on intelligence that could not be revealed without damaging sources or alerting unfriendly actors to their existence. Going public would have impeded the investigation itself. There was also a political issue, which President Obama and his advisers had to wrestle with. Sounding the alert in the middle of a national election, when the full picture was not yet known, could be perceived as an attempt to sway the electorate. At the very least, it would cause widespread confusion and dismay—doing the Russians’ work for them. The administration eventually did release an official statement, in October, explicitly fingering Russia for computer hacks and other forms of interference. The president spoke to Vladimir Putin. A few journalists received confidential briefings. Some in the White House, after the election, lamented that they had not done more, and done more sooner. But even in hindsight, it is hard to conclude with confidence that doing more would have been wise or effective. President Obama faced his own version of the choice between Terrible and Even Worse.
But now the election was over. The unclassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment was eventually published as “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” We spent a lot of time on this during November and December. Near the end of December, the administration and the National Security Council prepared sanctions on Russia as punishment for their involvement in the election, and for some extremely aggressive surveillance and intimidation that Russia’s intelligence services had directed at American diplomats in that country. The sanctions were announced on December 29.
The next day, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, issued an unusual and uncharacteristic statement, saying that he would take no action against the United States in retaliation for those sanctions. The PDB staff decided to write an intelligence assessment as to why Putin made the choice he did. They issued a request to the intelligence community: Anyone who had information on the topic was invited to offer it for consideration. In response to that request, the FBI queried our own holdings. We came across information indicating that General Mike Flynn, the president-elect’s nominee for the post of national security adviser, had held several conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in which the sanctions were discussed. This information was something we had from December 29. I had not been aware of it. My impression was that higher-level officials within the FBI’s counterintelligence division had not been aware of it. The PDB request brought it to our attention.
An analyst shared it with me; I shared it with Comey; Comey shared it with the director of national intelligence, James Clapper; and Clapper verbally briefed it to President Obama. Many people were trying to figure out what to make of this. After high-level discussion at the relevant agencies and at Justice, the question arose: Was this a violation of the Logan Act? The Logan Act, passed by Congress in 1799, prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments that have disputes with the U.S. The FBI’s position was that we should consider this possible violation in addition to our continuing inquiries into General Flynn. We felt we needed time to do more work to understand the context of what had been found—we don’t just run out and charge someone based on a single piece of intelligence. We use intelligence as the basis for investigation.
Justice was more concerned about doing something immediately. The department began pressing us to brief the president-elect’s team about Flynn. We were concerned that this might make it back to Flynn and destroy our ability to continue vetting the information quietly. I also had some concern about how open the president-elect would be to hearing what we had learned. In early January, when the unclassified version of the ICA was released, Trump called it “fake news” and suggested that the work of the U.S. government’s intelligence community was comparable to the way things were done in Nazi Germany. He made that comparison to Nazis more than once. On January 12, news of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak leaked out. In TV interviews, Vice President Elect Mike Pence vouched for Flynn. Pence said Flynn had told him that the contact was “not in any way related to the new U.S. sanctions.”
At that point, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates felt very strongly that we should inform the new administration about what we had. She and I discussed it at length before the inauguration. She felt, based on the information in our possession, that there was good reason to believe General Flynn had lied to the vice president, which created a national-security vulnerability. The mere fact of a lie, Yates believed, made Flynn vulnerable to blackmail by Russians. This vulnerability seemed plausible, but it did not seem imminent enough to warrant disrupting the ongoing investigative work. We did respond to Justice’s sense of urgency by hastening the FBI’s own work. Four days after Trump’s inauguration, and after conferring with Comey, I called Flynn on the telephone. I remarked on how many people were curious about his contact with Kislyak, and I asked if he would mind sitting down with two agents that day to answer a few questions. He said, No problem at all—happy to. I said, Okay, let me know if you feel compelled to have attorneys there, whether White House counsel or your own attorney, that’s perfectly fine with us, but if you do, then I will have to ask someone from Justice to come down with the agents. He said, No, no, no, I don’t need to do that, it’s fine, just send your guys down here. I’m happy to talk to your guys. Okay, great, I said. We agreed on a time. The tone was as friendly, and as detached, as if we were planning a playdate for our kids.
One thing he said stands out in my memory. When I told him that people were curious about his conversations with Kislyak, Flynn replied, You know what I said, because you guys were probably listening. To Flynn’s specific point, I had and have no comment. But I had to wonder, as events played out: If you thought we were listening, why would you lie?
The two people we sent to see Flynn were accomplished, seasoned agents. After the interview, they came back to my office and described it to a small group of us. They said that Flynn had a very good recollection of events, which he related chronologically and lucidly. They did not feel he showed any outward behavioral signs of deception. He did not appear to be nervous or sweating. Not looking side to side. Displayed none of the mannerisms commonly associated with dissembling or lying. They said he related his comments in what appeared to be a very credible fashion.
However, what he said was in absolute, direct conflict with the information that we had.
It was a very odd conversation. The agents kept saying, It seemed like he was telling the truth. The rest of us kept saying, Yes, and it completely contradicts the information that we have. And their response was, Yeah, we know, it’s weird. They weren’t saying they believed him, and they weren’t saying they didn’t believe him. They struck me as being mainly surprised by the encounter. Surprised at the difficulty of resolving their observations. As if they had just met a man who seemed completely normal, even when he glanced out the window and remarked, at noon, and then again an hour later, and a third time shortly after that, What a beautiful black sky.
After Sally Yates was briefed on this interview, she decided the time had come for the White House to know everything we knew about Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak. She went to see Don McGahn, and then McGahn asked her to come back to see him a second time. On Monday, January 30, she and Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for national security, pulled Comey and me aside after the morning meeting on the President’s Daily Brief. McCord told us how they had walked through the Flynn details with McGahn and other White House staff members. Yates explained to McGahn how the Russians’ awareness of Flynn’s deception could make Flynn vulnerable. I was shocked to learn that McGahn hadn’t known Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI until Yates told him—apparently Flynn did not mention it to the White House counsel.
Later that same day, Yates was fired, ostensibly because she found the president’s executive order banning entry to travelers from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations to be unlawful. Yates disagreed with the legality of the order. The disagreement could have been aired, and in some fashion resolved, if the order had gone through a customary interagency process before it was issued. Her dismissal stood out for another reason. She had spoken her mind, done her job, and stood by her principles—a fatal trifecta in the eyes of this White House.
When a new president and vice president take office, everyone who works for them becomes a potential surveillance target for foreign intelligence services. To help those people protect themselves, the FBI provides defensive briefings. On February 10, I helped give a defensive briefing to a fairly large group of the vice president’s staff—between twenty and thirty people. As I was leaving, a call came in from the White House counsel’s office. McGahn wanted to see me. I found my way to his office, and his secretary said, They want to see you now in the vice president’s office. Someone walked me down there. The vice president’s office is not an oval—more of a square. The walls are blue. I was shown to a seat. Vice President Pence sat in a chair to my left. McGahn, Reince Priebus, and some other staffers sat on two large sofas. News played on a TV. Pence was courteous but reserved. After saying hello, he barely spoke. He has a very controlled presence. I sat down, and Priebus asked me about our information concerning General Flynn. We want to see it, he said in a very demanding tone, and then they all got distracted by something that was on a television news program. Everyone turned toward the screen, and they all began to talk about the story, which they said had been leaked. I don’t remember what the story was, only how much it upset them. They had a heated conversation. I waited for that to finish. When it was done, attention returned to the topic of General Flynn. Priebus said, again, that they wanted to see the information. I said, That’s fine, I can arrange that for you whenever you want. Priebus said, We want it now—we want to see it right now. I said, I don’t carry it around with me, so I don’t have it at the moment, but I can get it for you. Priebus said, How soon can you get it? I said, It’s in my office, so just as long as it takes to get to my office and back. Priebus said, Where’s your office? I said, the Hoover building. He said, Where’s that? I thought, Are you kidding me? I said, It’s five blocks away.
I stepped out of the office and called Jim Baker to get clearance for the briefing. He said, As long as you observe classification restrictions, and everybody has clearances, you’re fine. A colleague retrieved the material for me, and we met in the West Wing and walked down to the Situation Room, next to the White House mess. We waited for the vice president and the others to arrive. I took out the information, and I explained it to the vice president, the details around it, and he started reading. The opening passages were not very interesting or germane, and Pence was saying things like, Oh, this is fine. No problem with this. Fine, fine, fine. I said, Keep reading. He reached the part that we had been focused on, and immediately his face changed. His expression turned very cold. It hardened. His reading became very focused. His head shook, but barely—tiny shakes of no. He spoke very little. He said a few things along the lines of I can’t believe this, and This is totally opposite, and It’s not what he said to me.
Moments later, Pence and the others returned what I had brought them, they stood, and then Mike Pence composed himself, ever the gentleman, and shook my hand and thanked me. Three days later, Flynn resigned.
The day after Flynn’s resignation, President Trump asked Comey to drop the Flynn investigation. Since Election Day, Trump and his associates had, on an almost daily basis, made decisions and statements that raised serious questions about his desire to faithfully execute the duties of president of the United States. Each interaction between the FBI and the president seemed stranger and more inappropriate than the last. Now that he had asked the FBI to drop the case against Flynn, his friend and associate, he was demonstrating an intention to apply a standard in unqualified contradiction to what the Bureau stood for. After Comey’s conversation with the president, he called me on the phone to tell me what Trump said. This was the moment when I realized that the president and his administration were not just inexperienced, not just unfamiliar with the established norms of democratic government. They wished to manipulate the functions of government mainly for their own interests.
Through the winter into spring there proceeded a series of odd interactions with the White House. I was invited to brief Jared Kushner one day, and then was suddenly uninvited; the official who had invited me explained the change of plans by saying that Kushner is “a private person.” The day after I briefed Vice President Pence about General Flynn, I heard—thirdhand—that Ezra Cohen-Watnick, at the time an official at the National Security Council, had questioned my “commitment to the Trump administration,” as well he might—the commitment of an FBI agent is to the Constitution and the American people, not to one administration. (Cohen-Watnick later became the national security adviser to Attorney General Sessions.) The week after my commitment was questioned, Reince Priebus asked me to speak with reporters to refute a story in The New York Times. When I told him I could not, because doing so would violate the FBI’s policy of not confirming or denying FISA coverage, he told me that I, personally, and the FBI as a whole, were “not being good partners.”
In March, during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey made the first public acknowledgment that the FBI had been investigating the Russian government’s sustained efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the White House, in the FBI, and elsewhere, the problem of leaks had been growing, and so the issues of surveillance and information security seemed to be on everyone’s minds. Trump’s accusation that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” had jacked up the drama.
On March 17, the FBI press office got a call from a reporter at Circa News, which is owned by the right-wing media powerhouse Sinclair Broadcast Group. The reporter said that sources had told her that I had announced in staff meetings that I hated the president. Said I was out to get Michael Flynn. Said that when Flynn got fired, I slapped high fives with everyone in the room. The reporter made my staff meeting sound like the towel-snapping scene in Top Gun.
There was no truth to any of this and we flatly denied it. In any normal, reasonable world, that would be the end of it. But we’re not in that world. We lost that world at some point. Instead, our denial touched off a new standard cycle of story development. The FBI press office would receive inquiries about fictional scenarios from right-wing news outlets; we would shoot them down; the news outlets were unable to go forward. Then the story would appear on some fringe, alt-right website, without a byline. Once it was picked up by the blogosphere and on social media, an outlet such as Sinclair would have cover to repeat it, which would enable Fox News to get on board, and then Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham would talk about it for weeks. This is a practiced, intentional strategy of news circulation. The stories may be fictional and the information false, but the consequences of this strategy are real.
The afternoon of May 9, FBI’s inspection division—the INSD—dropped by to talk with me about the Circa News leak, which I had asked them to investigate. They also had a few questions about the October 30 Wall Street Journal article. The conversation was short, and my memory of it would be all but obliterated by the blindsiding turn of events that began later that day, when I was summoned to meet with Jeff Sessions and told that Jim Comey had been fired.