INTRODUCTION
Given his towering stature, the six-foot, eight-inch, fifty-six-year-old James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cut a striking figure in the Los Angeles FBI field office’s command center room. At the back, a bank of television monitors kept agents and employees apprised of the latest news developments around the globe that might impact them at any moment, from natural disasters to terrorist attacks.
Dozens of employees—mostly custodial and communications staff (Comey had already met in person with everyone with a desk or office)—were sitting in rapt attention as he began his talk about the FBI’s new, shorter, simpler mission statement. It was about 2:15 p.m. on May 9, 2017.
It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of a field visit to the FBI’s rank and file, especially one from Jim (as everyone knew him, though hardly anyone ever called him that, using “Sir” or “Director” instead). When Comey replaced the much-revered and exacting Robert Mueller as director in 2013, four years earlier, he’d aimed to bring greater warmth and a sense of camaraderie to the position and to an organization long dominated by authoritarian directors (all white males) who’d run it like a quasi-military organization.
The FBI was still disproportionately white and male, and politically conservative, for that matter, a state of affairs that was one of the reasons why Comey was in Los Angeles. That evening he was going to speak to more than seven hundred minority candidates for the bureau as part of a diversity recruiting event. Comey had flown in that morning on one of the Justice Department’s two Gulfstream G550 private jets, a perquisite of the FBI director (the attorney general has the use of the other).
When he arrived at the Los Angeles office that afternoon, Comey went from floor to floor and desk to desk, doing his best to greet and shake hands with each employee, as he did on every field visit. “Tell me your story” was one of his favorite conversational gambits, one that invariably drew revealing details and he thought helped establish a personal bond with employees. Comey deployed a natural charm, a genuine curiosity about the people who worked for the bureau, and a disarming manner that sometimes belied his keen intellect and demanding standards. Perhaps more than anything, he oozed rectitude, a quality that was both inspiring and, at times, intimidating.
The resulting loyalty, respect, and devotion from the vast majority of the rank and file had stood him in good stead over the past year, which had been one of the most difficult and controversial since the bureau was founded in 1908. In July 2015, Comey and the FBI had been thrust into a highly public investigation of Hillary Clinton, the future Democratic presidential nominee, on her use of a private email server. Comey’s decision to inform Congress that the investigation had been reopened—three months after announcing that Clinton wouldn’t be charged with a crime, and just days before the election—was seen by many as tilting the election to Donald J. Trump.
That controversial decision had already been overshadowed by far more serious allegations concerning Trump’s ties to Russia. Unknown to the public, that investigation had begun well before the election, meaning that Comey and the FBI were scrutinizing both parties’ nominees for president at the same time, something without precedent in American history. It was a role Comey neither sought nor relished, later saying the possibility that he’d influenced the outcome of the election made him “nauseous.”
Unlike the highly public Clinton proceedings, the Trump-Russia affair was shrouded in the bureau’s traditional investigative secrecy. Although there was widespread reporting and discussion of Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and it was common knowledge that Vladimir Putin had favored Trump over Clinton, it was only on January 10, 2017, that BuzzFeed News published a controversial “dossier” depicting scandalous ties between Trump and Russia, and it wasn’t until March 20, in an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, that Comey had publicly confirmed the existence of a formal FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Even then, he declined to say whether Trump himself was one of the individuals the FBI was examining. Comey’s refusal to clear him had infuriated Trump, because it left open the distinct possibility that he was a subject of the investigation.
By the time of his trip to Los Angeles, it was no secret, least of all to Comey himself, that his relationship with Trump was tense at best. Many were surprised that Trump had kept him on as FBI director, even though his ten-year term had nearly seven years remaining. Their personalities and characters were pretty much polar opposites. If Comey embodied rectitude, Trump would have to be described as louche, given his crude comments, propensity to exaggerate, indifference to factual accuracy, preening vanity, and friends and associates of dubious character. Comey found it hard to be in the same room with the man.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Comey didn’t want to be Trump’s friend or part of any White House inner circle. While his relationship with President Barack Obama had been cordial, their personal interactions had been infrequent.
There was much to be said for an FBI director keeping his distance from the president. The FBI director might have been a presidential appointee who reported to the attorney general, but the position had a long tradition of independence, solidified by the lengthy ten-year term.
As Comey began his speech in Los Angeles, he wasn’t the least bit worried about his job. Only one FBI director had ever been fired—William Sessions, by Bill Clinton in 1993, early in his first term, and only after the attorney general at the time, Janet Reno, asked for his resignation in the midst of a scandal involving the director’s alleged misuse of government resources for personal purposes. Sessions (no relation to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general) had hotly denied the charges and refused to resign, forcing Clinton to remove him. In his stead, Clinton named a former FBI agent of unimpeachable integrity, Louis Freeh, who within weeks of his appointment was investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in the Whitewater affair, the first of a series of scandals that culminated with Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. Clinton would surely have liked to fire Freeh—and their relationship was tense—but he was too politically astute to do so.
For similar reasons, the more Russian interference was in the news, the more secure Comey’s job seemed, because for Trump to fire Comey would look like interference in an independent investigation, perhaps even obstruction of justice. Richard Nixon had famously found a way to rid himself of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, his nemesis in the Watergate affair, in the mistaken belief it would quell the investigation. Instead, it had raised the public’s ire and cost him the presidency. Surely that lesson wasn’t lost on Trump and his advisers.
Comey was also getting along fine with the new attorney general, the former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who was Comey’s immediate boss at the Department of Justice. Comey had seen Sessions just the day before leaving for his trip to Los Angeles, and the meeting was perfectly cordial.
Comey was eager to talk about the new mission statement, which he’d personally labored over. It replaced a lengthy paragraph with numerous independent clauses with just twelve easily memorized words: to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” In its brevity, it underscored that the FBI’s mission was to protect the American people, not any one person, not even the president of the United States. It was the essence of government by the people and for the people, subject to the rule of law.
As he began his talk, he got through the mission statement and said he hoped they’d refer to it often, repeat it, and . . .
On one of the television screens at the back of the room, he saw a caption, in large capital letters, next to the Fox News logo:
JAMES COMEY RESIGNS
As his voice trailed off, others followed his gaze to the screens at the back of the room. “That’s pretty funny,” Comey said, laughing nervously. He figured someone in the office had rigged the announcement as a prank. He wondered how they’d managed to pull it off.
More people turned in their chairs.
They saw new captions, on three different channels at the same time, all with the same message. On CNN it was
Breaking News: TRUMP FIRES FBI DIRECTOR COMEY
Comey realized it wasn’t a joke.
IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was presiding over the FBI’s daily “wrap” meeting, a summation of the day’s developments, in his seventh-floor conference room in the fortresslike J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, when his secretary interrupted. Attorney General Sessions wanted to see him immediately at his office at the Justice Department.
McCabe, aged forty-nine, and slightly graying, was lean from years of triathlon competitions. It was highly unusual for an attorney general to request an in-person meeting with an FBI director, let alone the deputy. A few people at the meeting wondered if McCabe was about to be fired. McCabe had weathered a barrage of criticism after the media reported that his wife had waged an unsuccessful race as a Democratic candidate for state senate in Virginia and had taken money from a prominent Clinton supporter (even though McCabe himself, a lifelong Republican, had complied with the bureau’s ethics guidelines).
McCabe handed the meeting over to David Bowdich, the associate deputy director. McCabe and another agent, acting as his security detail, walked across Pennsylvania Avenue to the sprawling, neoclassical Robert F. Kennedy Building, the Justice Department headquarters named for President John F. Kennedy’s brother Bobby—the kind of “loyal” attorney general, Trump often said, he wished he had.
In contrast to the large but relatively austere FBI director’s office, the attorney general’s office has an elaborate entrance flanked by murals and portraits of previous attorneys general, elegant swag draperies, and gold-upholstered antique furniture. The office suite has its own bedroom and bathroom and comes with a chef and private dining room across a hallway.
McCabe waited for about ten minutes and then was ushered into Sessions’s inner office. The seventy-year-old, white-haired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a name redolent of the antebellum South, spoke with a distinct southern accent. He was an early and vocal supporter of candidate Donald Trump at a time when few senators took Trump seriously or wanted to be identified with him. Sessions was an ardent backer of many Trump policies, especially hard-line conservative positions on immigration and border security. Sessions had nonetheless alienated the president early in his tenure by removing himself from any involvement in the Russia investigation, handing oversight and control to his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.
As McCabe walked in, Sessions stood in front of his desk with his suit jacket on, flanked by Rosenstein and two staff members. They were also standing and wearing their suit jackets, conferring an air of grave formality that made McCabe apprehensive.
“Thanks for coming over,” Sessions said, unfailingly polite. Then he got to the point: “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve had to fire the director of the FBI.”
As McCabe’s mind raced, time seemed to stop. Ever the career FBI agent, he was determined to reveal nothing, to show no emotion.
“No, I hadn’t heard,” McCabe said.
Sessions said McCabe would need to serve as the bureau’s acting head until another interim director or replacement was named. McCabe readily agreed, saying he’d do anything necessary to ease the transition and assist his replacement. Unknowingly echoing Comey’s remarks a continent away, he grasped for the words of the FBI’s new mission statement, pledging to his Justice Department superiors that he’d do his utmost to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. He felt an awesome responsibility had just been placed on his shoulders at a potentially perilous moment.
Sessions thanked him and asked if he had any questions.
Of course he did, starting with “Why?”
But all he said was he’d need to make some kind of announcement to the bureau’s employees.
“No,” Rosenstein interjected. They all had to wait for guidance and a statement from the White House.
“I have to say something internally,” McCabe replied.
“Don’t do anything until you hear from us,” Rosenstein insisted. “Do not say anything about this to anyone, not even your wife, until we get back to you.”
The meeting ended, and McCabe walked out. Mobile news crews had already massed outside the building.
BOWDICH WAS STILL speaking in the conference room when someone opened the door: “The director’s been fired.” A TV was tuned to CNN just outside the room. Wolf Blitzer looked grave. Outside the White House, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny read a brief statement from the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer:
Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office. President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“The FBI is one of the Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” said President Trump.
A search for a new permanent FBI Director will begin immediately.
Spicer himself was nowhere to be seen (as the cameras rolled, he and some of his staff were spotted among some bushes near the White House, trying to avoid the horde of reporters that quickly gathered).
Michael Kortan, the FBI’s assistant director for public affairs, hurried to his office to draft a statement from the bureau.
Still at the Justice Department, unaware of the White House statement, McCabe called his special counsel, Lisa Page, despite the gag order. He had to tell someone. As the lawyer whose job was to advise and protect McCabe, Page had become his closest confidante. She managed to juggle an intense workload while raising two young children. McCabe admired her outspokenness and candor.
“The director has been fired,” McCabe told her.
Page said they’d already seen the news on television. (So much for the secrecy Rosenstein had seemed so intent on, McCabe thought.) She said Kortan was working on a statement. “You’ve got to stop him,” McCabe said. Any statement had to come from the attorney general. Page thought that was preposterous; they had to say something to the rank and file, all of whom now knew what had happened and were reacting with varying degrees of shock. McCabe said he understood but was adamant: no announcement.
McCabe got back to his office about 6:00 p.m. The wrap group participants had regrouped in the conference room and were waiting expectantly. McCabe told them what he knew, which wasn’t much. He tried to be calm and reassuring in his first moments as acting director. Together they’d take things one step at a time. They’d get through the next hour, and then the next, and the next day. They’d figure it out.
Just then Comey’s secretary arrived with a thick manila envelope. It had come from the White House that day, hand delivered and addressed to Comey. No one had opened it.
McCabe did. Inside were a memo from Rosenstein and a cover letter to Trump from Sessions. And there was the actual letter from Trump firing the director. Saying he’d received the attached letters from Rosenstein and Sessions, “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby removed from office, effective immediately,” the letter read.
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.
That was odd, McCabe thought. Why would Trump publicly link the firing to whether he was or was not under investigation?
It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement function.
The letter was signed in Trump’s unmistakable, bold, vertical handwriting.
McCabe’s secretary interrupted again. The White House was calling, asking that he be at the Oval Office at 6:30 p.m.
STILL AT THE FBI field office in Los Angeles, Comey had managed to finish his brief remarks and then shook hands with scores of shocked and bewildered employees as he moved through the audience.
Once outside, he fielded calls on his cell phone as the news spread. In his first call, he told his wife he still wasn’t sure if it were true. He was trying to learn more. It seemed so bizarre that he’d found out from news reports and had still received no official word.
He took a call from John F. Kelly, the former U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and now the director of Homeland Security. Kelly told Comey he hadn’t been consulted. He said he felt sickened by Trump’s decision to fire him and wanted to quit in protest. He didn’t want to work for someone so dishonorable. Comey urged Kelly to stay. The country needed people like him, Comey insisted, perhaps now more than ever.
Comey’s secretary in Washington was finally able to scan and email the contents of the White House envelope, and he saw the president’s language firing him. It made him feel “sick to my stomach and slightly dazed,” as he later put it.
As he left the office, he tried to reassure employees waiting outside, some in tears. It broke his heart to leave them, he said, but the FBI was bigger and stronger than any one person.
Part of him wanted to attend that evening’s diversity recruiting event, even as a private citizen. But he realized his appearance would likely cause a media frenzy and prove a distraction.
He suddenly had no job and no professional obligations. The notion was oddly liberating. He’d always wanted to rent a convertible and drive across the country, and now perhaps he could. He quickly dismissed the notion, but wondered, how was he going to get home?
He called McCabe as McCabe was about to leave for the White House. McCabe was surprised at how unruffled Comey sounded. “What did you do now?” McCabe asked.
Comey laughed. “I must have really hosed something up.”
McCabe said he didn’t see why Comey shouldn’t fly back on the FBI plane, given that the crew would be returning anyway. He said he’d check with the bureau’s lawyers.
JAMES BAKER, the FBI’s general counsel, had just landed at Washington’s Reagan National Airport that evening on a flight from Miami. As he and his fellow passengers turned on their cell phones after the three-hour flight, a chorus of buzzing news alerts filled the plane. Then he overheard people saying, “Oh, my God, Trump fired James Comey.”
Unanswered emails had piled up on his phone. “Where the hell are you?” “Please come to the office ASAP.” Baker went straight to FBI headquarters, still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Everyone had gathered in the chief of staff’s office to watch CNN, which was providing nonstop coverage of Comey’s drive to the airport. News helicopters were following his SUV, as if Comey were O. J. Simpson. McCabe already had a pressing legal issue for Baker: As a former government employee, could Comey return on the FBI plane? After some fast research, Baker ruled he could.
Although it was getting late, many lights on the seventh floor were still lit. By contrast, the director’s office and adjoining suite—normally the bustling center of activity, especially in emergencies—were dark and empty. To Baker, it felt as if someone had died.
IF MCCABE’S CONFIDANTE was Lisa Page, hers was Peter Strzok. The two communicated constantly, most often by text message, which over the period from August 2015 until the messages abruptly stopped in June 2017, numbered in the tens of thousands.
Few outside the FBI knew anything about Strzok, which was how he preferred it. But at the moment Comey was fired, Strzok was arguably the single most important agent in the bureau: he was the lead or co-lead investigator for both the Clinton email investigation and the Russian interference in the presidential election, a testament to the extraordinary confidence his superiors placed in him.
Since joining the FBI in 1996 after serving as an army field artillery officer, Strzok had emerged as one of the bureau’s top espionage and counterintelligence officers, someone who could be trusted with the most sensitive cases. It was Strzok who had located a rental car used by three of the September 11 terrorists. He embodied the clean-cut, fit ethos of the bureau, coupled with a keen intelligence and soft-spoken manner that belied a tough investigator.
No one was more steeped in the details of the Russia investigation than Strzok. Deeply suspicious of Russian intentions, Strzok considered Russia the greatest global threat to American security, implacably hostile to the democracy and freedom America stood for. Even the possibility that Russia had penetrated an American presidential campaign was a threat of the gravest magnitude.
Over the previous months, even as Comey reassured Trump that he wasn’t personally the subject of the investigation, Strzok had wavered over whether Trump should be. He knew that to open an official case file on the president of the United States should only be undertaken in extraordinary circumstances. Not that it was his decision to make. All the top FBI officials had discussed it, and ultimately it had been Comey’s decision not to do it.
But Trump’s decision to fire Comey had now put him over the edge. At 8:40 p.m., he texted Page: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting.”
He meant while McCabe was acting director—a state of affairs that might not last long. The whole thing was so sensitive that, even using secure FBI-issued cell phones, he didn’t mention any names—just “the case we’ve been waiting on.”
Page, of course, knew what case he meant—the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
THUS WERE JOINED in unprecedented and potentially mortal combat two vital institutions of American democracy: the presidency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the investigative arm of the Department of Justice.
On the president’s side were not just the vast powers of his office, which include the right to name and dismiss the attorney general, his top deputies, and the FBI director, but also his ability to communicate, to shape opinion, to attack, and to defend, especially through direct social media like Twitter—an art Trump had embraced with an abandon and virtuosity never before seen in American politics.
Far from ending Trump’s travails with law enforcement, as Trump had hoped and expected, his decision to fire Comey led directly to the appointment of Robert Mueller as an independent special counsel and caused the FBI to open a formal investigation into the president himself. Two years later, by mid-2019, seven people had pleaded guilty and twenty-seven had been indicted as a result of Mueller’s investigation, including Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer; Paul Manafort, his campaign chair; and Roger Stone, a campaign adviser.
What began as a Russia probe had expanded into many facets of Trump’s personal and business empires, with Trump himself squarely at the center. The investigation—with the attendant possibility that a combative and controversial president might be impeached, eventually indicted, and, if convicted, serve time in jail—became a national obsession further dividing an already bitterly polarized electorate.
Trump found himself beset on all sides by what he branded the “Deep State”—career bureaucrats and law enforcement officials concerned only with protecting their own power, even at the cost of undermining the democratic process, by bringing down a president who, however distasteful and threatening they might find him, had been duly elected by voters and the Electoral College pursuant to the Constitution. At the center of this supposedly dark conspiracy were Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok, whom Trump reviled obsessively in a stream of tweets.
With a near-constant flow of Twitter messages repeatedly decrying “Fake News” and the “Witch Hunt” of the Russia investigation, cheered on by his base of political supporters and a chorus of like-minded media figures, Trump and his allies set about exposing, attacking, and ultimately destroying this purported Deep State. In doing so, they provided a coherent and powerful narrative that they hoped would undermine any conclusions by Mueller or other investigators and reduced the contest to one of raw power. Richard Nixon, the last president to meddle in a federal investigation of himself, had never managed such a feat.
This intensely combative strategy came naturally to Trump, because he’d been locked in some kind of combat for virtually his entire career. Early on, advised by lawyers who urged him to cooperate rather than attack Mueller and his team, an uncharacteristically subdued Trump was on public display. That changed when he replaced them with the far more aggressive and outspoken Rudolph Giuliani, the former U.S. attorney and New York City mayor, who from the start described the investigation as “illegitimate” and spent as much time on cable news outlets attacking law enforcement as he did proclaiming Trump’s innocence.
On March 22, 2019, Mueller delivered his hotly anticipated and voluminous report to William Barr, Trump’s choice to succeed the battered Jeff Sessions as attorney general, whom Trump had forced out the previous year. Barr, who’d already been attorney general for two years under President George H. W. Bush, had sent a letter to Trump the prior year criticizing Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation of Trump as “fatally misconceived.”
Two days later, in a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing Mueller’s report, Barr wrote that the “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” which seemed to exonerate Trump. But on the separate question of whether Trump’s dealings with the FBI, Justice Department, and Mueller team—including his firing of Comey—amounted to obstruction of justice, Barr reported that Mueller reached no conclusion on those “difficult issues” of law and fact. “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
Nonetheless, Barr informed Congress that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” and hence no charges would be brought.
Trump was quick to declare total victory, telling reporters that Sunday as he boarded Air Force One for Mar-a-Lago that the report was “complete and total exoneration.”
And even though he’d just been vindicated, he took another jab at law enforcement: “This was an illegal takedown that failed.”
Other presidents might well have declared victory and called it a day. Not Trump. In the ensuing weeks, his thirst for vengeance against those who had investigated him seemed only to grow. “It was an illegal investigation,” Trump reiterated two weeks later, stressing that it might even have been criminal. “Everything about it was crooked—every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.”
On April 10, Barr told Congress that he’d be scrutinizing the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe, and specifically whether anyone there had spied on the Trump campaign. “I think spying did occur,” Barr told legislators. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.”
With Barr at the helm, the Trump investigation had come full circle, with the vast resources of the Department of Justice now poised to be turned against the FBI that had so vexed Trump, and specifically Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Page—now branded by Trump as the “dirty cops.”
With Trump fanning the flames, and his loyal and passionate base egging him on, the battle will no doubt rage through the next presidential campaign and beyond.
At the same time, in their quest for total victory Trump and his allies risk undermining America’s long tradition of independent law enforcement and, at the broadest level, the very notion that the United States has a government of laws, not men—that no man is above the law. That concept is the foundation of the American Constitution and dates at least to the Magna Carta of 1215, when King John was forced to acknowledge the primacy of English law over royal writ.
In this epic battle, there can only be winners and losers, to invoke a distinctly Trumpian view of the world. There is no room for compromise. But there is plenty of room for collateral damage. The reputations of both sides have already been harmed, perhaps irrevocably, and at potentially great cost to American democracy and its institutions.
Trump and the people and institutions he views as his enemies inspire great passion. Perceptions and judgments have hardened on both sides of the political divide, often based on suspicion, assumptions, and inferences.
How have we reached this juncture? Does Trump’s insistence on an antidemocratic Deep State have merit? Or is it a cynical and destructive effort to mask his own potentially illegal conduct by casting aspersions on the character and motives of those investigating him? Do his attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department and his attempts to undermine their investigation of him amount to legitimate criticism, or are they obstruction of justice—the very question that Mueller failed to answer?