The Caucus Room restaurant on Ninth Street N.W. in Washington, D.C., has always billed itself as a “nonpartisan” restaurant, if such a thing is possible in the nation’s capital. Perhaps bipartisan would be a better description: it was partly owned by a prominent Democrat (the power lobbyist Tommy Boggs) and a Republican (the Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour).
Its somewhat clubby atmosphere, wood-paneled walls, and steak-and-American fare made it the ideal venue for the studiously nonpartisan FBI director, Robert Mueller, and the former deputy attorney general James Comey when the two met there for lunch in the spring of 2011.
It had been nearly ten years since the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center had transformed the FBI from a sometimes overly methodical organization focused on crimes that had already occurred into a potent antiterrorist and counterintelligence organization that tried to anticipate and prevent them. Mueller had taken up his post just a week before 9/11, and he and Comey, who was then at the Justice Department, had met twice daily for the so-called threat briefing, a rundown on every conceivable terrorist threat, until Comey left the Justice Department in 2005.
Mueller’s office had recently called Comey to suggest a lunch with the director the next time Comey was in D.C. Comey was now living in Connecticut, working for one of the world’s most prominent and successful hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates. After years of almost uninterrupted government service, he was finally making some money (his annual salary at Bridgewater was $6.6 million in 2012, according to his financial disclosures), more than enough to put his five children through college.
Before joining the Justice Department, Comey had been the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and before that had worked as a federal prosecutor. Rudolph Giuliani had hired him as a young assistant in 1987, when the future New York City mayor was seizing headlines and magazine covers and cracking down on Ivan Boesky and other Wall Street criminals.
Comey and Mueller hadn’t seen each other for several years, and Mueller was now nearing the end of the FBI director’s ten-year tenure. “Who’s going to replace you?” Comey asked, mostly out of idle curiosity. (Mueller couldn’t be renominated; Congress had restricted the FBI director’s term to ten years.)
“You know, maybe you should,” Mueller replied.
Comey wasn’t sure he was serious. “Why would I want to do that, when I was already your supervisor?”
“When was that?”
“When I was deputy attorney general, you reported to me,” Comey reminded him.
“Noooo . . . ,” Mueller answered, drawing out the one syllable.
“Yes, you did,” Comey said. He drew an organization chart on the paper table cover, with a dotted line connecting the FBI to its superiors at the Department of Justice.
“Well, maybe on paper, but this is a much better job,” Mueller said, smiling. “You should consider it.”
Comey was flattered, but firmly declined. He wasn’t about to move his family again after disrupting their lives and moving them to Connecticut.
That didn’t stop the press from speculating that Comey might succeed Mueller (also mentioned were Comey’s good friend Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, and Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner).
Attorney General Eric Holder told The New York Times that President Obama basically wanted a clone of Mueller, whom the president described as “the gold standard.” In May, Obama said he’d seek Congress’s approval to extend Mueller’s tenure by two years, through the 2012 presidential election.
Comey wasn’t exactly a clone of Mueller: Robert Swan Mueller III came from a far more affluent background, born in New York City in 1944 into the East Coast establishment. His father captained a navy submarine chaser in World War II before becoming a successful DuPont executive and stressed the importance of honor, principle, and public service to his son. As Mueller told the author Garrett Graff, “You did not shade or even consider shading with him” when it came to the truth. Mueller followed his father to St. Paul’s for boarding school and then Princeton, where he played varsity lacrosse.
By contrast, Comey’s grandfather was a patrolman in Yonkers, New York. His father sold oilcans to gas station operators and later scouted gas station locations for an oil company. Money was tight. After the family moved to suburban Allendale, New Jersey, when Comey was in fifth grade, he was bullied and felt like an outsider at his new school.
When he was a senior in high school, an armed intruder broke into their house while he and his younger brother were home alone. The man held them at gunpoint while ransacking closets and drawers and then locked them in a bathroom. The boys managed to escape through a window, only to be captured again outdoors. Fortunately, the sounds attracted a neighbor and his dog, and Comey fled back into the house and called the police.
The gunman was never found, and the terrifying incident haunted Comey for years. But his survival instilled an appreciation for what mattered in life—not wealth or recognition, but “standing for something. Making a difference,” as he later put it.
In this regard, he and Mueller were closely aligned. In what Mueller has repeatedly described as a formative experience in his life, a lacrosse teammate, David Hackett, a year older than Mueller and someone he admired intensely, volunteered to serve in the U.S. Marines following graduation. Hackett was killed in Vietnam in 1967 during a heroic effort to rescue fellow marines trapped by an ambush, which only intensified Mueller’s resolve to follow his example by enlisting.
Mueller underwent intensive training in Ranger School and was deployed to Vietnam in 1968. Even in the jungle, he shaved every day and made his bed. He was wounded by a gunshot to the thigh; after recovering, he returned to combat duty before being transferred to the Pentagon. He received numerous awards, including a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
“Perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute,” Mueller told Graff, much as Comey’s brush with death inspired a similar ambition.
For both men, the importance of integrity has been a recurring theme. As Mueller told graduates of the College of William & Mary, Comey’s alma mater, in 2013, “As the saying goes, ‘If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.’”
He continued, “The FBI’s motto is Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. For the men and women of the Bureau, uncompromising integrity—both personal and institutional—is the core value.”
That Mueller himself had tried to recruit Comey to run the FBI spoke to the deep bonds they’d forged while Comey was at the Justice Department. They weren’t especially friends and never socialized together (it wasn’t clear to Comey that Mueller socialized with anyone apart from his family). But they shared something deeper, something Mueller had witnessed firsthand at the bedside of an ailing attorney general, John Ashcroft. It was the same quality that Comey had almost instantly perceived in Mueller, and why it was Mueller whom Comey had summoned to Ashcroft’s hospital room on a fateful night seven years earlier.
Nothing had done more to solidify Comey’s reputation for a willingness to do what he believed was the right thing pursuant to the law, no matter what the political consequences, than his swift and decisive actions as acting attorney general in March 2004, less than three years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks had led to a drastic revision of antiterrorist tactics, including warrantless government surveillance of the phone and email records of countless U.S. citizens.
Comey was U.S. attorney in Manhattan soon after the attacks, and he’d often walked by the ruins, watching firefighters and cleanup crews hard at work under dangerous conditions. He knew the importance of the government’s antiterrorist efforts. At the same time, he understood the importance of civil liberties.
After Comey was appointed by President George W. Bush as deputy attorney general in 2003, Justice Department lawyers convinced him that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, code-named Stellar Wind, had no lawful justification. It plainly violated a law passed by Congress that strictly limited electronic surveillance within the United States. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, called Stellar Wind “the biggest legal mess I’d seen in my life.”
The program was so sensitive that it had to be renewed every forty-five days, with the latest deadline, March 11, fast approaching. Even though it had routinely been authorized, Comey concluded that the program had to be stopped, or at least substantially modified, to comply with existing law.
On March 1, Comey discussed his concerns with Mueller, someone cleared to discuss top secret national security information and in whom he had developed a deep sense of trust. In Mueller, Comey had found a kindred spirit, someone whose reverence for the law—the primacy of the law—matched his own.
At his confirmation hearings to become deputy attorney general, Comey had been asked how he would handle politically sensitive or controversial investigations. Comey had responded, “I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about expediency. I don’t care about friendship. I care about doing the right thing. And I would never be part of something that I believe to be fundamentally wrong. I mean, obviously we all make policy judgments where people disagree, but I will do the right thing.”
Comey’s wife, Patrice, had taped that excerpt to their refrigerator door.
Not caring about politics didn’t mean that Comey held no political views. He’d been a lifelong registered Republican, he’d been appointed by a Republican president, and he’d donated to John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns (though he never publicly revealed how he voted).
Mueller had made similar statements on numerous occasions. As he said in a speech to the American Civil Liberties Union—a frequent critic of the FBI generally and Mueller in particular—in 2003, “Like those before us, we will be judged by future generations on how we react to this crisis. And by that, I mean not just whether we win the war on terrorism, because I believe we will, but also whether, as we fight that war, we safeguard for our citizens the very liberties for which we are fighting.”
As Comey saw it, Mueller’s “whole life was about doing things the right way.” Mueller was immediately sympathetic to Comey’s concerns.
Comey briefed Ashcroft on the same issues on March 4 over lunch in Ashcroft’s office. Ashcroft agreed the program needed to be fixed before it could be extended. But that afternoon Ashcroft collapsed in pain, suffering from acute pancreatitis, and was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where he was placed in intensive care. Comey was named acting attorney general and was now responsible for approving any extension of Stellar Wind.
Comey’s position had stirred intense opposition within the White House, especially among defense hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies, who seemed determined to keep the program intact and operational at any cost. In one discussion at the White House, Cheney had looked directly at Comey and said, “Thousands of people are going to die because of what you are doing.”
On the evening of March 10, Ashcroft’s chief of staff called Comey to report that President Bush had just called Ashcroft’s hospital room, where his wife, Janet, told the president he was too ill to speak; he’d just had emergency gallbladder surgery. In that case, Bush told her, he’d send the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card, to the hospital room to discuss a matter of vital national security.
Everyone knew what that must be about—the extension of Stellar Wind. Bush was doing an end run around Comey.
Comey told his driver to get him to George Washington University Hospital as fast as possible, and the two raced through Washington traffic with emergency lights flashing. While still in the car, Comey called Mueller, who was at a restaurant with his family. Comey wanted Mueller there as a witness.
Comey reached Ashcroft’s room before the White House delegation. Janet Ashcroft was holding her husband’s limp hand. His skin looked gray, and he didn’t seem to recognize Comey. Comey nonetheless told him what was happening and why he was there.
Outside the room were half a dozen FBI agents, there to protect Ashcroft. Comey suddenly worried that the White House might have him forcefully ejected. He called Mueller, still en route to the hospital, and asked him to tell his agents that Comey should not leave the room under any circumstances. Comey handed the phone over to one of the agents, and Mueller spoke to him. When he finished, the agent assured Comey, “You will not leave that room, sir. This is our scene.”
Card and Gonzales arrived soon after, with Gonzales holding a manila envelope.
If the pair were surprised to see Comey and other Justice Department lawyers already assembled, they didn’t show it. “How are you, General?” Card greeted Ashcroft.
“Not well,” Ashcroft answered.
Card said they were there to discuss a vital national security program. It was essential that it be continued.
Ashcroft managed to push himself up onto his elbows. Clearly angry, he said he’d been misled about the program and, now that he understood it, had serious concerns about its legal justification. He paused, his breathing labored. “But that doesn’t matter now, because I’m not the attorney general.” His hand shaking, he pointed to Comey. “He’s the attorney general.”
There was silence. Then Gonzales said, “Be well,” and he and Card left without looking in Comey’s direction.
Mueller arrived a few minutes later, at 7:40 p.m. He found Ashcroft “feeble,” “barely articulate,” and “clearly stressed,” according to his notes. Comey briefed him on what had happened.
Mueller leaned over to speak closely to Ashcroft. “In every man’s life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him,” he said. “You passed your test tonight.”
Comey’s heart was racing, and he felt slightly dizzy. But Mueller’s words made clear, as Comey later expressed it, that “the law had held.”
Comey was so deeply moved he felt like crying.
THE NEXT DAY, Comey learned the White House planned to go ahead with Stellar Wind over the objections of the Justice Department, notwithstanding the aborted visit to Ashcroft’s hospital room. Instead of the attorney general, it would be authorized by the White House counsel. Comey didn’t believe that people should threaten to resign to get their way. If things became intolerable, if asked to do something they believed was wrong, they should simply resign.
So that night, Comey drafted a resignation letter. So did a slew of Justice Department lawyers involved in the situation. Mueller, too, told Comey he was prepared to resign. It would likely be a mass exodus unseen since the Watergate era—and a political disaster for a president launching a reelection campaign.
The next morning, Comey joined Mueller for an antiterrorism briefing at FBI headquarters, and then the two went to the White House for their regular threat briefing with the president. Afterward, President Bush asked to speak to Comey alone.
Comey didn’t always agree with him, but he liked Bush. He wanted him to succeed. He told him he couldn’t find a legal justification for the NSA surveillance program. Bush countered that it was he as president who determined the law for the executive branch. “Only I can say what the Justice Department can certify as lawful,” Comey responded, and quoting Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, cast his position as a matter of deep conviction and principle: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
Comey thought he might be overstepping when he added, “The American people are going to freak out when they find out what we’ve been doing.”
Bush seemed irritated by the suggestion. “Let me worry about that,” he said.
Bush seemed oblivious to the impending wave of resignations by the Justice Department leadership, including the FBI director. Comey didn’t want to threaten to quit himself, but he thought Bush needed some warning. “You should know that Bob Mueller is going to resign this morning.”
“Thank you for telling me that.”
Mueller was waiting when Comey left the West Wing. Moments later, a Secret Service agent said the president wanted to see him, too, and he went back upstairs.
Ten minutes later, Mueller returned, and he and Comey got into the FBI director’s black armored SUV. Mueller told Comey that he’d confirmed to the president that he couldn’t continue as director if the White House ignored the Justice Department’s legal objections. “Tell Jim to do what needs to be done to get this to a place where Justice is comfortable,” Bush had responded.
Comey and his team worked all weekend to modify the surveillance program, submitting the results on Sunday night. Two days later, White House lawyers responded with what amounted to a curt dismissal. Exasperated, Comey pulled out his letter of resignation.
But he never sent it. Comey didn’t know what happened inside the White House, but that week, when Bush signed an order extending Stellar Wind, it incorporated all the changes Comey and his team had asked for.
PRESIDENT BUSH WAS reelected in November 2004, and after his inauguration he replaced Ashcroft, who had fully recovered from his surgery, with his loyal White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales—one of Comey’s principal nemeses in the Stellar Wind affair.
Over the past year, Comey had become increasingly dismayed at White House attempts to insert political loyalists into the Justice Department hierarchy and undermine the independence of the department, no doubt partly to fend off the kind of principled opposition Comey had mounted. Like many presidents, Bush seemed to want someone running the department whose first loyalty was to the president rather than to the Constitution or rule of law. Politicizing the department by installing loyalists, in Comey’s judgment, was invariably a grave mistake. It was the department’s independence that protected the executive branch.
Despite their differences, Gonzales had phoned Comey right after his appointment, saying he was looking forward to working with him as deputy attorney general. But Comey didn’t have the stomach for more Stellar Wind battles. That spring he announced his resignation and left the department in August 2005, just as Bush’s second term became embroiled in controversy.
Comey’s warning to President Bush that the American people would “freak out” once they learned the details of the government’s domestic surveillance program proved prescient. Over the national security objections of the Bush White House, The New York Times broke the story in December that President Bush had approved a broad program of domestic eavesdropping without benefit of court-approved warrants shortly after 9/11, and reported that “some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.”
A firestorm erupted in the media and Congress, which only intensified after further shocking revelations of torture of al-Qaeda captives by CIA interrogators. Controversy was still raging when Gonzales fired a raft of U.S. attorneys, in what looked like a purge of prosecutors who failed some kind of administration loyalty test. The hallowed independence of the Justice Department seemed under dire threat.
In 2007, the Senate Judiciary Committee launched hearings into the U.S. attorney firings, as well as Justice Department complicity in the surveillance and torture programs. Comey was subpoenaed and testified on May 3 before the House Judiciary Committee and on May 15 before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Under questioning from the New York senator Charles Schumer, Comey gave a dramatic and detailed account of the Stellar Wind affair and his interactions with Bush, Gonzales, and others at the White House. While some aspects of the affair had appeared previously in the press, Comey’s principled stand, and his and Mueller’s threats to quit, were big news.
Gonzales tried to counter Comey’s narrative, arguing in testimony and a book that “contrary to Hollywood-style myth, there simply was no confrontation” at Ashcroft’s bedside; that extending the Stellar Wind program wasn’t on the agenda; that Ashcroft had never pointed his finger at Comey; and that he and Card would never have gone there had they known that Ashcroft had relinquished the powers of the attorney general to Comey.
But later testimony by others in the room, including Mueller, who produced detailed notes of the incident, corroborated Comey’s account. Schumer demanded that Gonzales be investigated for perjury and called for his ouster.
Gonzales never recovered politically from the controversies involving the U.S. attorney firings, the torture of prisoners, surveillance, and ultimately his own credibility. Increasingly viewed as a political liability by the White House, he submitted his resignation on August 26, 2007. In accepting it, President Bush complained Gonzales’s name had been “dragged through the mud.”
Comey’s reputation, by contrast, soared to new heights. The notion that he’d defied the Bush administration, and stood up against government spying on its own citizens, gained him national publicity and praise beyond anything he’d done before, even in his highest-profile cases.
When Senator Schumer introduced Comey at the 2007 hearings, he called him “almost a man who needs no introduction.” He continued, “As far as I’m concerned, when the Justice Department lost Jim Comey, it lost a towering figure. And I don’t say that because he stands 6’8” tall. When Jim left the Department, we lost a public servant of the first order, a man of unimpeachable integrity, honesty, character and independence.”
What few were willing to say, at least publicly, is that a man of unimpeachable integrity is not necessarily what a president or any other political figure really wants. Someone who quotes Martin Luther and whose political philosophy was forged while reading the works of the theologian and philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, as Comey’s was, may not be the most reliable political partner.*
Comey’s comments about doing the right thing, which his wife so proudly placed on the family refrigerator, struck others as displaying “a near contempt for partisan politics,” as Daniel Klaidman wrote in Newsweek in 2013. Politics, in this view, requires often messy compromises, even of moral principles.
“There is also an undercurrent of persistent dissent about Comey,” Klaidman continued. While conceding they are a minority, albeit a powerful one, his detractors “see a gunslinging prosecutor who is cocksure and possesses an overweening sense of his own righteousness. They contend, further, that Comey took a narrow legal dispute and imbued it with high drama and grave portent in an effort to burnish his reputation. These critics say his actions reflect an unyielding, black-and-white approach to morality.”
As a former (unnamed) Bush White House official put it, “Jim has a flair for the dramatic and a desire to be the moral savior of mankind.”
This aspect of Comey seemed to become a near obsession with members of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who never missed an opportunity to excoriate Comey for, as they put in a 2013 editorial, “prosecutorial excess and bad judgment.” They harshly attacked his role in the Ashcroft affair: “The biggest of Mr. Comey’s misjudgments are the ones for which he gets the highest accolades from his media admirers.”
The Journal editorial page went so far as to compare Comey to Javert, the dogged pursuer of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. But such criticism of Comey was drowned out by the chorus of praise, both for his actions at Ashcroft’s bedside and more broadly for his efforts to keep government spying and torture within the bounds of the law.
When Mueller’s extension as FBI director finally ran out in 2013, Comey’s name remained on a short list of candidates to replace him. This time Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, called Comey himself, asking him to interview for the post. Comey told him he’d sleep on it, but the answer was likely to be no.
Comey was still cool to the idea, but several things had changed since his last discussion with Mueller: after three years at Bridgewater, he was more financially secure. He’d left the firm earlier that year and had recently joined the faculty of Columbia Law School. But his family was still living in Connecticut, and his wife was in graduate school. And surely, with his Republican résumé, he had to be considered a long shot for the post.
Comey told his wife about the call from Holder, and the next morning he found her at the computer studying real estate listings in the Washington area. “This is who you are, this is what you love,” she said of the FBI job. “So go down there and do your best.”
Comey arrived at the White House for his job interview in May. He’d never met Obama, who was physically leaner and intellectually more focused than Comey had expected. Obama told him that naming an FBI director and nominating Supreme Court justices are the most important personnel decisions a president makes, because their terms extend beyond the president’s. He said he felt there was great value in such a long tenure, in part because it helped ensure the FBI’s independence. And the FBI director would still be on hand to give Obama’s successor as president seasoned advice, something Obama would have appreciated when he was still a new and relatively untested president. What Obama said he wanted most at the FBI was “competence and independence.”
By independence, Obama meant he expected not that Comey would have no political views but rather that Comey would never let those views affect an investigation or any other aspect of his work. As Obama put it, “I need to sleep at night knowing the place is well run and the American people protected.”
That aligned perfectly with Comey’s views, so much so that maybe his Republican credentials wouldn’t bother Obama. Mueller, after all, was also a registered Republican. Comey’s being a Republican could even be seen as an advantage. If Comey were Obama’s choice, no one could accuse the president of naming a partisan loyalist.
Obama invited Comey back to the Oval Office to confirm that he was indeed his choice. “Once you are director we won’t be able to talk like this,” the president said. A president and the FBI director couldn’t be friends and confidants, but needed to keep a distance. The two had a wide-ranging conversation about thorny legal and military issues, like the propriety of drone strikes against suspected terrorists. Comey was impressed by what he considered the suppleness of Obama’s mind and his grasp of the issues.
Perhaps Obama was using the occasion to assess Comey one last time. If so, he passed muster. The president announced his appointment on a sunny June 21, 2013, in the Rose Garden, flanked by Mueller and Comey. President Obama began by lavishing praise on Mueller:
I know that everyone here joins me in saying that you will be remembered as one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, and one of the most admired public servants of our time. And I have to say just personally not only has it been a pleasure to work with Bob, but I know very few people in public life who have shown more integrity more consistently under more pressure than Bob Mueller.
I think Bob will agree with me when I say that we have the perfect person to carry on this work in Jim Comey—a man who stands very tall for justice and the rule of law.
Obama stressed Comey’s experience and character, placing special emphasis on his integrity and independence and citing the Ashcroft incident:
To know Jim Comey is also to know his fierce independence and his deep integrity. Like Bob, he’s that rarity in Washington sometimes—he doesn’t care about politics, he only cares about getting the job done. At key moments, when it’s mattered most, he joined Bob in standing up for what he believed was right. He was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong. As Jim has said, “We know that the rule of law sets this nation apart and is its foundation.”
Jim understands that in time of crisis, we aren’t judged solely by how many plots we disrupt or how many criminals we bring to justice—we’re also judged by our commitment to the Constitution that we’ve sworn to defend, and to the values and civil liberties that we’ve pledged to protect. And as we’ve seen in recent days, this work of striking a balance between our security, but also making sure we are maintaining fidelity to those values that we cherish is a constant mission. That’s who we are.
Comey breezed through Senate confirmation hearings, attracting praise from both sides of the aisle. He was approved by a vote of 93 to 1; only the maverick Kentucky Republican Rand Paul voted against him.
Comey was sworn in as FBI director on September 4, 2013, twelve years to the day after Mueller’s ceremony.
FROM HIS FIRST day as director, Comey put his own more relaxed stamp on the office, a distinct contrast from Mueller’s more formal, hierarchical approach. Despite their shared values, Comey was far more extroverted and open than Mueller, who was known inside the bureau as Bob “Say Nothing” Mueller.
Comey gave his attire considerable thought: Mueller had worn a white shirt every day of his twelve-year tenure. Mueller was never seen in public without his suit jacket on. For his first address to the thousands of FBI employees around the world, Comey wore a blue shirt and tie but no jacket, and sat on a stool.
At his first meeting with his senior staff, Comey pushed aside his bulky briefing books, leaned far back in his chair, and “stretched like a big cat,” as Andrew McCabe recalled. Comey worried that FBI employees worked too hard under too much stress, which could undermine sound judgment—something essential for people who had been given so much power over the lives of their fellow citizens.
At one of his first staff meetings, Comey began by asking each person to tell everyone something about themselves that would surprise the others—a personal approach that was highly unorthodox at the straitlaced FBI, where most people knew little or nothing about their colleagues’ lives outside FBI headquarters. One said he loved Disney characters; another was a passionate fan of abstract art. McCabe disclosed nothing so offbeat, but revealed he’d once been a criminal defense lawyer. The ice was broken.
At subsequent meetings, Comey asked more personal questions, often pegged to the season: What was your favorite Halloween candy as a child? What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food? Your favorite holiday gift? Comey didn’t care that the questions might come across as childish. He thought children were often more honest and less guarded than adults.
McCabe appreciated Comey’s informality and felt his charm; Comey was the kind of person, as McCabe put it, who in conversation would listen so closely you felt “there were only the two of you in the whole world.” But most important to McCabe was that Comey shared Mueller’s “larger-than-life sense of rectitude.” The Ashcroft story had preceded Comey’s nomination and arrival.
When Comey took the director’s job, McCabe was working in the National Security Division after a career at the bureau that had begun in New York in 1996. A graduate of Duke and Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, McCabe had prominent roles in the FBI’s investigation of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombings and, the year before, the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Then forty-five, he was exceptionally lean (even by the standards of a fitness-crazed FBI) from frequent triathlons; he often biked the thirty-five miles from his Virginia home to FBI headquarters. He wore glasses and kept his slightly graying hair cropped short.
During his first fifteen months as director, Comey visited all fifty-six domestic FBI field offices and a dozen overseas. He rarely wore a suit jacket. He asked his top staff members to abandon theirs, too. He mingled with the staff and often ate lunch in the cafeteria. He encouraged casual conversations and asked for candor from everyone who worked for him. “Tell me what you really think” was a constant request.
The effort met with mixed success. Suit jackets and ties would disappear from staff meetings, only to creep back as weeks passed, until Comey brought the issue up again. However much he talked about openness and transparency—two management attributes he had absorbed when he was at Bridgewater—the near-military hierarchy and deference to authority that were ingrained in the FBI’s culture couldn’t be changed overnight, if ever.
Still, by 2015 it could safely be said that the transition from Mueller to Comey had been a success, certainly by the most conspicuous measure, which was that there hadn’t been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. That isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of threats to monitor and investigate, including the rise of ISIS, and controversies, like the FBI’s access to private data on cell phones—one of the thorny issues Obama had raised in his talk with Comey.
Still, in his end-of-year message, Comey warned that the FBI couldn’t become complacent. “The coming year will be difficult,” he wrote. “The threats we face are moving faster and becoming harder to see. The threat from terrorism, in particular, will likely continue to challenge us. But we are up for that challenge. In a way, it is the reason we joined the FBI. We could do easy stuff for better money elsewhere. But who wants that? We get to do hard and good.
“I also think the American people will increasingly look to us as a centering and calming force in a time of anxiety. In the midst of this, our wonderful, sometimes messy, democracy will elect a new president. We, of course, will stay out of politics and remain what the American people count on us to be—competent, honest, and independent.
“Thank you for a year of service and accomplishment. Take a deep breath and hug your families. Hard lies ahead.”
Little did he know.
THE FBI HAD already had a taste of how “messy,” as Comey put it, American politics had become. To the frustration of many in the FBI, especially McCabe, nothing was more controversial than the bureau’s investigation of the Benghazi attacks, which, after painstaking and difficult work in a notoriously inhospitable country, Libya, had resulted in the successful conviction of the militia leader who masterminded the attack. It was McCabe’s first involvement in an intensely politicized affair, seized upon by Republicans eager to lay responsibility for the death of the U.S. ambassador and three others at the feet of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The Obama administration had fueled the fires by first claiming, erroneously, that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an anti-Muslim video, rather than the planned terrorist assault it turned out to be. But in November, soon after Comey became director, the House Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report after an “exhaustive” investigation largely absolving President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the intelligence agencies of any misconduct.
That didn’t deter conspiracy theorists and their sympathizers in Congress. The South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy made Benghazi a signature issue. House Speaker John Boehner had named him the head of a new select committee to investigate Benghazi even before the Intelligence Committee finished its work. (Gowdy’s was the sixth House committee to take on the task, which was all but guaranteed to keep Hillary Clinton on the defensive.)
In July 2014, Gowdy demanded that Clinton produce all her emails related to Benghazi, and his committee subpoenaed the former secretary. State Department lawyers discovered then that Clinton hadn’t used government servers for her email correspondence. She had instead used a single private device and a server located in the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, home. The lawyers did obtain three hundred emails that referenced Benghazi from Clinton’s lawyers and turned them over to the committee.
The State Department, now being run by Secretary of State John Kerry, launched a broader investigation and reached out to Clinton as well as other former secretaries of state, asking for the return of all correspondence. Clinton’s lawyers reviewed more than sixty thousand emails. They deleted about thirty-two thousand they deemed personal and turned over about thirty thousand to the State Department, which they delivered in twelve boxes.
Two months later, in late February, State Department lawyers disclosed to the House Committee that Clinton hadn’t even had a State Department email account, and all her email correspondence as secretary of state had moved through her personal account and the Clinton server.
At this juncture, it was an open secret that Clinton was mounting a campaign for the presidency, the culmination of a decades-long ambition. In that context, the revelation that she was using a private email account and server for her State Department correspondence proved far more significant than anything the committee unearthed about Benghazi. (After two years of work and $7.8 million in expenses, the House committee produced an eight-hundred-page report that essentially reached the same conclusion as had the other investigations, which exonerated Clinton.)
It’s not clear House committee members realized at the time what a potential bombshell they had uncovered. No one on the committee made any public statements or drew attention to it. But someone with access to the information clearly realized the implications and leaked it.
On March 2, 2015, just days after the Clinton disclosures to the committee, the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt broke the news that “Hillary Clinton used personal email account at State Dept., possibly breaking rules.”
The story revealed the startling fact that Clinton had no official State Department account and that her lawyers had reviewed thirty thousand emails before choosing those that, in their view, related to Benghazi. The story raised questions about whether Clinton’s failure to archive official communications might have violated various regulations requiring the retention of official records.
Much of that might have been dismissed as technicalities, and the Clinton response, initially, was to brush it off as no big deal. But the revelation hit Clinton in her Achilles’ heel. As the Times article pointed out, “The revelation about the private email account echoes long-standing criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.”
Still, there was nothing in the Times article to suggest anything criminal about Clinton’s use of personal email. The piece noted that the former secretary of state Colin Powell used a personal email account as well as an official one.
Though they’d known for weeks about the issue, Clinton and her entourage seemed ill-prepared for the publicity and compounded the matter by failing to explain why she would have relied only on a personal email account. Her spokesman insisted she had complied with both “the letter and spirit” of the rules, even though it seemed patently obvious she hadn’t.
As a public furor grew, fanned by a well-organized anti-Clinton faction that had been honing their tactics at least since the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, Clinton answered reporters’ questions after a speech at the United Nations originally intended to showcase her record on women’s rights but drowned out by the focus on her emails.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” Whether classified information had been communicated was a far more ominous issue for Clinton than whether she’d deprived the archives of potentially historical material, because disseminating classified information was potentially a crime.
As far as why she did it, “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she maintained. (At the time, the BlackBerry phone used by Clinton didn’t accommodate multiple email accounts.)
This did little to satisfy skeptics, who wasted little time in pointing out that Clinton had been seen publicly juggling multiple devices, including an iPad. And the explanation came too late, days after conspiracy theories were already taking root. As one Clinton staff member told the website Politico, “It took eight days to provide a pretty straightforward simple answer. All of us thought, why didn’t you give that [answer] a day and a half after?”
The bad publicity did nothing to deter Clinton. A month later, on April 12, she made official what had been obvious: she was running for president, again. She had few serious challengers. (Bernie Sanders was widely dismissed as a socialist crank.) But ominously, nearly every article about her announcement mentioned the email affair.
By comparison, the field of Republican contenders was packed, with the former Florida governor Jeb Bush seen as the likely front-runner. Donald J. Trump announced his campaign from the marble steps of Trump Tower on June 16. Few took the real estate mogul, self-proclaimed billionaire, and reality TV star all that seriously. The Times called his bid an “improbable quest” and his winning the nomination a “remote prospect.” The Washington Post said he faced “an uphill battle to be taken seriously.”
The next day, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, attended a swearing-in ceremony as attorney general, the first African American woman to hold the position. Unlike Eric Holder, whom she replaced, Lynch wasn’t a close friend or confidante to Obama. Both she and Comey spoke on June 17 at a packed ceremony in the Great Hall of Justice honoring David Margolis’s fifty years in the department.
Margolis, at seventy-five the longest-serving lawyer in the department, was a deputy attorney general who had long served as the conscience of the department and guardian of its independence, under both Democratic and Republican appointees. He bristled at any hint of political interference while often taking the political heat for difficult decisions. He was equally well known for his keen intelligence, garish attire, and sense of humor. Asked once by a congressman how many people worked at the Justice Department, he’d replied, “About 60%.”
Comey had spoken at Margolis’s fortieth anniversary, too, and this time he dressed up for the occasion, wearing a bold magenta checked shirt, a mismatched striped tie, and a rumpled jacket. While he lampooned Margolis for his sartorial taste and table manners, he said he always threw Margolis the “hairballs,” the most vexing problems, and praised him as the guardian of the department’s reservoir of public trust.
Meanwhile, the Clinton email affair had attracted the interest of numerous congressional committees overseeing national security, all concerned that classified information might have been transmitted and compromised by Clinton. They referred the issue to the inspector general for the intelligence community, Charles McCullough III. On July 6, he made a formal referral to the FBI, citing the possibility that Clinton had mishandled classified information in violation of federal law.
Four days later, the FBI formally opened a case file on Clinton. Like all FBI investigations, it had a code name: “Midyear Exam.” All FBI investigations, by their very nature, are criminal, whether or not they result in any charges.
Most FBI investigations are run out of the bureau’s field offices, which in this case would have been Washington, D.C. But some, including investigations of political candidates, are classified as SIM—for “sensitive investigative matter,” “because of the possibility of public notoriety,” as the FBI operating manual puts it. FBI agents have traditionally referred to these cases as “specials.”
Several days later, Randy Coleman, the FBI’s assistant director in charge of counterintelligence, called Peter Strzok and asked him to join the Midyear team as one of two lead investigators. Coleman had two basic but potentially inconsistent commands: be thorough and be fast. The investigation needed to be completed well before the next presidential election, which was just sixteen months away.
To be tapped to run Midyear was the ultimate sign that Strzok had earned the trust and confidence of the FBI’s top officials, and he was proud to be chosen. Strzok was the product of a military family and Catholic schools. His father was in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and an uncle was a Jesuit missionary serving in East Africa. An army veteran and Georgetown graduate, Strzok had already made a name for himself in counterintelligence operations, especially those involving Russia.
As Edward William “Bill” Priestap, who succeeded Coleman as the FBI’s head of counterintelligence in late 2015, described him, Strzok “was considered one of, if not the foremost, counterintelligence expert on the agent end at the FBI.”
At the same time, the assignment was daunting: Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. She might well be the next president.
Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state had already caused a political firestorm. Now, to a degree unprecedented in FBI history, the bureau had been thrust into the middle of it. There would be no easy way out.
“You know you are totally screwed, right?” Comey’s deputy director, Mark Giuliano, told him.
“Nobody gets out alive,” Comey replied.