Just four days later, on August 12, 2016, Matthew Axelrod, who, like other Justice Department officials, was still seething over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear announcement, called McCabe to express his concerns about another sensitive and secret matter—the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
By then, four separate FBI field offices were looking into the Clinton Foundation’s activities and donors—New York, Little Rock, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. The New York and Little Rock offices, in particular, were viewed by some within the Justice Department as hotbeds of anti-Clinton hostility, and agents there were agitating to ramp up their investigative activity, including issuing subpoenas, even as the presidential campaign was entering its final months. Axelrod warned McCabe that the FBI should ease off any overt investigative steps, like issuing subpoenas, until after the election, consistent with the department’s long-standing aversion to activities that might influence an election.
With the tarmac incident still fresh in his mind, McCabe was shocked. “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” McCabe replied, in his recollection of the conversation. He couldn’t remember ever getting such a call from a high-level official at Justice.*
That the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation was a closely guarded secret—like the Trump-Russia case, and nearly all investigations other than the anomalous Clinton email case. In congressional testimony in July defending his decisions in Midyear, Comey explicitly refused to say whether the FBI was examining the Clinton Foundation.
But there had been rampant speculation ever since the publication of the incendiary book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist with ties to the Trump adviser Steve Bannon and the billionaire Trump financial backers Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. Schweizer had worked on a film about Ronald Reagan with Bannon and was a senior editor at large for Bannon’s Breitbart News. The Mercer Family Foundation helped fund the book with a $1.7 million contribution.
Clinton Cash suggested that Clinton donors had essentially traded cash for favors and influence at the State Department while Clinton was secretary of state. Clinton had entered into an agreement providing for State Department vetting of any contributions to the foundation from foreign governments, and the Clinton campaign provided a detailed rebuttal when the book was published in the spring of 2015. It said there was “zero evidence to back up its outlandish claims.”
Still, the book was taken seriously by the mainstream press. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post got advance copies and, with the agreement of the publisher, pursued leads from the book. As Susan Milligan wrote in U.S. News & World Report, “When a source, no matter how agenda-driven, offers up actual, hard information, based on public records, the motivation becomes meaningless. And this is why Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton (along with their loyal team of defenders) must expect news outlets to scour and report out every accusation” in Clinton Cash.
Like the email controversy, the foundation issues were self-inflicted by the Clintons. Their insistence they could run a foundation accepting major contributions while Hillary was secretary of state and then a candidate for president all but guaranteed controversy. There was no denying the allure to donors of the possibility that a well-timed donation, much like campaign contributions, might yield future benefits. The foundation was staffed with Clinton campaign officials and loyal allies, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, two Hillary aides at the center of the email affair.
As The Boston Globe’s editorial board observed on August 16, “The foundation should remove a political—and actual—distraction and stop accepting funding. If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down.” While it praised the foundation’s “good causes,” it added, “As long as either of the Clintons are in public office, or actively seeking it, they should not operate a charity, too.”
Despite McCabe’s reaction to Axelrod, neither he nor anyone else at FBI headquarters was all that impressed by the foundation case. Although a formal investigation had commenced, agents had uncovered little beyond the highly circumstantial evidence and innuendo in Clinton Cash. It was common knowledge that Clinton had used her tenure as secretary of state to burnish her résumé for a presidential run and knew that her every move would be scrutinized. She was advised by highly competent lawyers. How likely was it that she’d risk yet another scandal, let alone criminal prosecution, by trading favors for contributions to the foundation?
Given that the election was less than two months away, McCabe and Comey agreed that the FBI would ease off for now, and also that the case should be consolidated in the field office in Little Rock, where the foundation was nominally headquartered. Both moves infuriated agents in New York, where the foundation conducted most of its work; the agents there felt McCabe had told them to “stand down,” as they later put it, and bowed to political pressure.
WITHIN THE FBI, there was also a spirited debate about how aggressively to pursue Crossfire Hurricane, because the more aggressive the investigation, the more likely it was to be discovered and publicized. Not only would that again plunge the FBI into the middle of an election, but it might also jeopardize a confidential source. As Strzok put it, “One of the debates on how to pursue this information was how much risk to put that sensitive source in because, in my experience, the more aggressive an investigation, the greater chance of burning or compromising that source.”
On the other hand, there was urgency about getting to the bottom of it, because if Trump really was illegally colluding with the Russians, that was a fact of vital importance.
Page and Strzok tended to fall on opposite sides of the issue: Strzok wanted to be aggressive; Page felt the FBI could take its time, in large part because all the polls suggested it was highly unlikely Trump would win.
“We don’t need to go at a total breakneck speed because so long as he doesn’t become president, there isn’t the same threat to national security,” Page argued. “I mean if he is not elected, then, to the extent that the Russians were colluding with members of his team, we’re still going to investigate that even without him being president, because any time the Russians do anything with a U.S. person, we care, and it’s very serious to us.”
“One school of thought, of which Lisa was a member,” Strzok later testified, was “saying the polls, everybody in America is saying Secretary Clinton is the prohibitive favorite to be the next President, and therefore, based on that, these allegations about the Trump campaign, we don’t need to risk that source. We can just take our time. We can run a traditional years-long counterintelligence operation, and we don’t really need to worry because he’s not going to be elected.”
But Strzok argued that the FBI needed to move quickly, no matter what the polls said. “If candidate Trump is elected, we have months, and we may find ourselves in a position where we have these allegations potentially about people who are being nominated for senior national security roles, and then we’re in a really bad spot because we don’t know whether these allegations are true or false; we don’t know the extent of these allegations and the truth and how extensive or not. So my advocacy was we need to pursue these cases in a way that will allow us to be responsible and protecting the national security of the United States.”
Strzok texted Page after a discussion of the issue in McCabe’s office. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected,” Strzok wrote, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
As Strzok explained the text, “The analogy I am drawing is, you know, you’re unlikely to die before you’re 40, but nevertheless, many people buy life insurance. The similarity is that, regardless of what the polls are saying, that Secretary Clinton is the favorite to win, however likely or not it is who’s going to win, just like life insurance, you have to take into account any potential possibility. You need to do your job regardless of whether it’s highly likely or not.”
COMEY USED THE occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks to remind all FBI employees that “Sunday marks 15 years since 3,000 innocent people were murdered in our country on a single, crystal-clear late summer morning. It somehow seems both yesterday, and a lifetime ago. Much has changed since then, but what matters most has not changed. We have shown the humility and agility to constantly improve, which is essential. But after 15 hard years, we have also stayed the same in the ways that matter most: our fidelity to doing things the right way; our bravery in the face of evil; and our integrity—the determination to always be honest and independent.”
He said nothing about the extraordinary fact that the FBI was simultaneously scrutinizing both candidates for president of the United States.
ON SEPTEMBER 19, the file Steele had handed over to Agent Gaeta in Rome finally showed up in Strzok’s email in-box. He read with mounting fascination what soon became known as the “Steele dossier,” though at this early stage it consisted of only a few files.
Marked “Confidential/Sensitive Source” and dated June 30, the memo began,
Summary
—Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.
—So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
—Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.
—A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on orders. However it has not as yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.
After this introduction, the dossier went into far more detail, especially regarding the “perverted” activities:
1. Source asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was seen as inimical to Russia’s interests.
2. The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
3. However, there were other aspects to TRUMP’s engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable “kompromat” (compromising material) on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSE control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
The Moscow Ritz-Carlton incident involving TRUMP reported above was confirmed by Source E who said that s/he and several of the Staff were aware of it at the time and subsequently. S/he believed it had happened in 2013. Source E provided an introduction for a company ethnic Russian operative to Source F, a female staffer at the hotel when TRUMP had stayed there, who also confirmed the story. Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer) asserted that unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.
In many ways, Strzok was confounded by what he read, and not because of the salacious details about the visit to the Ritz-Carlton. While he was concerned at the possibility Trump might have exposed himself to blackmail, direct ties between Russia and the Trump campaign intended to influence the election were far more worrisome. Trump had been divorced twice, and he was known to be a womanizer, so it was hardly shocking that he might have engaged in lewd conduct in a foreign capital. It wasn’t illegal or anything the FBI would ordinarily investigate. But it was so detailed and salacious that it seemed tailor-made to smear Trump and wreak havoc with his campaign. That was cause for concern.
So was the lack of what the FBI refers to as “actionable intelligence.” Much of what was in the dossier could have been divined after the fact by any close observer. There was little the FBI could act upon. The dossier did not, for example, give any clues to what Russian intelligence operatives were doing now or planned to do—such as details of upcoming meetings with members of the Trump campaign the FBI could monitor.
Strzok knew something about the origins of the dossier and who was paying for it—not that it had ties to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, but certainly that it was politically motivated to damage Trump. That didn’t mean its contents weren’t true, but when one assessed its veracity, motive needed to be considered.
More broadly, Strzok was well aware that Russia played a long-term intelligence game. Far more important than whether Trump won or lost was its goal of disrupting the American democratic process. The dossier seemed almost too well suited for that.
At the same time, much of it rang true. The FBI was already familiar with most of the names. The time frame appeared to be accurate. The FBI believed that the Russians were in fact trying to influence and disrupt the election.
And Strzok was convinced that Steele himself hadn’t fabricated the documents. While Strzok didn’t know Steele, others described him as cautious, with a long track record of valuable intelligence, a patriot who believed in the Western democracies.
Much like Ohr, Strzok didn’t really trust anything that came out of Russia. But the FBI had to see what could be proven or disproven while still keeping the entire investigation a secret.
And true or not, if Strzok and Page wanted to “stop” Trump, they had just been handed the perfect weapon.
TWO DAYS AFTER the FBI received the Steele dossier, on September 21, the London tabloid the Daily Mail ran a front-page “exclusive”:
Anthony Weiner carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl during which she claims he asked her to dress up in “school-girl” outfits for him on a video messaging application and pressed her to engage in “rape fantasies,” DailyMail.com can exclusively report.
The girl, whose name is being withheld by DailyMail.com because she is a minor, said the online relationship began last January while she was a high school sophomore and before Weiner’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, announced she was ending their marriage.
Weiner was aware that the girl was underage, according to DailyMail.com interviews with the girl and her father, as well as a cache of online messages.
In just three paragraphs, the British tabloid had laid out all the elements of a crime defined by New York Penal Law 235: disseminating indecent materials to minors.
Because it involved a minor, this incident was exponentially more threatening to Weiner than his prior much-publicized sexual escapades, which had ended his once-promising career in Congress, shattered his 2013 run for New York City mayor, and—after he sent lurid photos while in bed with his four-year-old son—finally caused Huma Abedin to leave him and file for divorce.
Through it all Clinton had loyally stood by her top aide. They were so close that Clinton referred to Abedin as a “second daughter.” Bill Clinton officiated at her 2010 marriage to Weiner, then an up-and-coming Democratic congressman. Clinton had firmly rebuffed suggestions to distance herself from Abedin as the Weiner scandals mounted and Abedin loyally and painfully stood by her husband. Abedin was vice-chair of Clinton’s campaign and by the candidate’s side at a Hamptons fund-raiser when the Daily Mail story broke.
As The New York Times noted, Weiner’s behavior “threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.”
In what would prove to be a spectacular miscalculation, the Times reported that Clinton’s advisers “were confident Mr. Weiner’s actions would not hurt Mrs. Clinton.”
FOLLOWING THE Daily Mail article, the New York field office and the Manhattan U.S. attorney, Preet Bharara, took the lead in the Weiner investigation. On September 26, the government asked for and was granted a search warrant and seized Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer the same day. One of the FBI’s digital extraction technicians noticed within hours that there were about 340,000 emails on the laptop. Among the domain addresses were yahoo.com, state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, clintonemail.com, and hillaryclinton.com. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” the technician wondered.
At the technician’s request, the computer was looked at by another agent, who described it as an “oh shit” moment and agreed they needed to report the discovery “up the chain” immediately. They also drafted an email that began, “Just putting this on the record because of the optics of the case.”
Two days later, on September 28, the New York FBI office’s assistant director, Bill Sweeney, relayed news of the discovery during a weekly teleconference with FBI headquarters in Washington. Ordinarily, Comey would have been presiding, but he was testifying that afternoon on Capitol Hill, so McCabe handled it. One participant said that Sweeney’s revelation was like “dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting” and stated that “everybody realized the significance of this, like, potential trove of information.” He said Sweeney “very much emphasized the significance of what he thought they had there.”
But McCabe later had only a hazy memory of Sweeney’s remarks. Later that day, he told Comey, in passing, “Hey, Boss, I just want you to know that the criminal squad in New York has got Anthony Weiner’s laptop and I think it may have some connect to Midyear,” or something to that effect, and he might have mentioned Abedin. But McCabe’s comments didn’t sink in. Comey didn’t make the connection that Weiner was married to Abedin or that Clinton’s emails had been found on his laptop.
Strzok texted Page that evening: “Got called up to Andy’s earlier . . . hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny, includes a ton of material from spouse. Sending team up tomorrow to review . . . this will never end.” Strzok even considered going himself: “So I kinda want to go up to NY tomorrow, coordinate this.”
A team was dispatched but didn’t get very far. The search warrant used to seize Weiner’s laptop covered only child pornography and disseminating indecent materials—not Hillary Clinton’s emails. The U.S. attorney’s office had told the agents they couldn’t open and read the Clinton-Abedin emails without another search warrant, though it was okay to read the headers.
At this juncture, the New York agents thought the Midyear team in Washington was going to ask for guidance about getting a search warrant and get back to them. Strzok and others on the Midyear team were under the impression that agents in the New York office would continue processing the laptop and get back to them with more information about what was on it, a task that could easily take months—in “January, February 2017, whenever it gets done,” according to Strzok. Others, too, thought the legal and technical issues involved in gaining access to the emails would take months to resolve, well after the upcoming election.
Any sense of urgency drained away. While sporadic discussions of the Weiner laptop continued within lower ranks at FBI headquarters, it wasn’t even on Comey’s radar. Strzok got back to the all-consuming task of the Russia investigation.
McCabe alerted the Justice Department about the Weiner laptop the first week in October and told a Justice Department lawyer he was sending an agent to review the emails. But both thought they would mostly be duplicates of what they’d already seen, given how thorough the investigation had been.
That was as far as it got. A few days later, on October 7, The Washington Post published a video showing Trump on his way to tape a 2005 episode of Access Hollywood in which Trump boasted to the host Billy Bush, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” In the midst of the resulting furor, WikiLeaks released another batch of thousands of emails hacked from a Gmail account belonging to John Podesta, chair of the Clinton campaign. The Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence issued a joint statement blaming the hack on Russia, noting that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Two days later, FBI agents contacted Podesta, who told reporters on Clinton’s campaign plane that he’d spoken to the FBI that weekend. “Russian interference in this election and apparently on behalf of Trump is, I think, of the utmost concern to all Americans, whether you’re a Democrat or independent or Republican,” Podesta said. And he suggested the Trump campaign might have been in on the leaks, noting that Trump’s campaign adviser Roger Stone had boasted about his ties to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “So I think it’s a reasonable assumption to—or at least a reasonable conclusion—that Mr. Stone had advance warning and the Trump campaign had advance warning about what Assange was going to do,” Podesta said. He also cited Trump’s perplexing “bromance” with Vladimir Putin and added that Trump’s foreign policy positions “are more consistent with Russian foreign policy than with U.S. foreign policy.”
Podesta had just publicly revealed, perhaps inadvertently, the closely guarded secret that the FBI was indeed investigating Russian election interference and ties to the Trump campaign.
TOP OFFICIALS AT FBI headquarters were close to being overwhelmed by Russia—which is likely the main reason the Weiner laptop discovery fell through the cracks. For just as the new trove of Clinton emails was discovered, Strzok was helping put together a top secret application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a court order authorizing electronic surveillance of Carter Page, the Trump campaign adviser with many suspicious ties to Russian officials. The application had to be reviewed and approved by Comey, and top FBI officials—McCabe, Priestap, and Baker among them—were all involved. Such FISA applications are also reviewed within the top ranks of the Justice Department.
The application for Page was submitted in October, sometime after October 7 (the most recent date mentioned in the application; the precise date the application was filed hasn’t been disclosed).
“This application targets Carter Page,” the application began. “The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government.”
The fifty-seven-page document reviewed in considerable detail the background of Operation Crossfire Hurricane and its origins. This included disclosures by Papadopoulos, as well as extensive material that remains classified. But Steele appears as a prominent source. “In July 2016, Page traveled to Russia and delivered the commencement address at the New Economic School,” the application stated. “In addition to giving this address, the FBI has learned that Page met with at least two Russian officials during this trip. First, according to information provided by an FBI confidential human source (Source #1)”—a reference to Steele—“Page had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, who is the President of Rosneft [a Russian energy company] and a close associate to Russian President Putin.”
The application went into extensive detail about “Source #1” and his potential motivations. After describing the FBI’s previous dealings with Steele and his reliability, the application stated that Steele was approached by an “identified U.S. person”—Glenn Simpson—“with whom Source #1 [had had] a long-standing business relationship.” Simpson “never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” (Throughout the application, Trump is described only as “Candidate #1.”) “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”
The application continued, “Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #l’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible.”
The application made no specific mention that the Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee was paying Fusion for the research, because neither Steele nor anyone at the FBI knew the identity of Simpson’s clients, which was confidential information. But the FBI did “speculate” that the motive was to harm Trump—and made that clear to the court.
The application was granted by the five-judge FISA court.
As Crossfire Hurricane entered a new, more intense phase, the Clinton emails faded in importance. “We were consumed by these ever-increasing allegations” about Russian interference, Strzok later testified. By comparison, the discovery of a new trove of Clinton emails was “another thing to worry about. And it’s important, and we need to do it,” Strzok said. But at the same time, he faced a much more urgent question: “Is the government of Russia trying to get somebody elected here in the United States?”
As Strzok’s boss, Bill Priestap, said, “My focus wasn’t on Midyear anymore.” He conceded, “Yes, we’ve got to review it. Yes, it may contain evidence we didn’t know, but I’d be shocked if it’s evidence that’s going to change the outcome of the case because, again, aside from this, did we see enough information previously in which I felt confident that we had gotten to the bottom of the issue? I did.” He continued, “As important as this was, in some ways it was water under the bridge. The issue of the day was what’s going to be done to possibly interfere with the election.”
For Comey himself, “it was Russia, Russia, Russia all the time.”
CLINTON’S EMAILS MIGHT have been supplanted as the primary focus at FBI headquarters, but hardly anywhere else. Quick to sense a political opening after Christie’s incendiary speech and the raucous chants of “lock her up” at the Republican convention, Trump rarely missed an opportunity to keep the issue alive. He brought it up repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the televised presidential debates.
“I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it,” Trump told Hillary Clinton at the second televised debate, held in St. Louis on October 9. “But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”
Trump continued, “In my opinion, the people that are the long-term workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this, where emails, and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 emails.” He continued, “You acid wash or bleach them, as you would say, a very expensive process.”
Clinton tried to deflect the charge onstage, admitting again that she’d made a mistake by using a private server. She also pointed out that most of what Trump said was “absolutely false.” (She was correct: she did not delete any emails after receiving a subpoena, nor did she or anyone else “acid wash” or “bleach” them.) “But I’m not surprised.” She added, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.”
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump shot back.
One line in particular leaped out at FBI headquarters: “The people that are the long-term workers at the FBI are furious.” Where had that come from? There had been no sign of widespread dissension within the FBI’s rank and file. Still, there was mounting concern among some in Comey’s inner circle that there was a germ of truth to Trump’s claim. Some of the most vocal critics of the case’s resolution and Comey’s announcement appeared to be within the extended FBI community, perhaps not so surprising given the FBI’s conservative leanings and some of the anti-Clinton remarks Page and Strzok had heard during the investigation. Retired agents, in particular—reflecting a generation that was even more white, male, and Republican than the current force—were stirring up dissent.
On October 7, the president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI sent an email to headquarters, “Controversy over the Director/Clinton Email Situation,” saying, “I continue to hear negative comments about the Bureau’s handling of the Clinton email controversy from former agents. This is after a period where things seemed to quiet and comments mellowed.”
As Lisa Page put it, the FBI had gotten “a ton of criticism from the formers about why we let her off the hook, and why she should have been prosecuted, and why if she had, if they had done this, they would have prosecuted, all those sorts of criticism.”
Addressing the FBI’s annual convention of special agents in charge in San Diego that month, Comey acknowledged, “I have gotten emails from some employees about this, who said if I did what Hillary Clinton did I’d be in huge trouble.” At the same time, “What I’m getting from the left is savage attacks for violating policy and law by talking publicly about somebody who wasn’t indicted, by revealing facts that you should’ve been prescribed from revealing by decades of tradition.” As he pointed out, “It is a uniquely difficult time.”
So Comey devoted a good part of his speech to explaining, yet again, his reasoning in the Midyear case. Back in Washington, at the behest of Michael Kortan, the FBI’s head of public affairs, Page put together some talking points for answering questions about Midyear, especially from retired agents. Strzok, too, discussed the case in a conference call with former agents.
Despite these efforts to tamp down the controversy, on October 17 it broke into public view. The Daily Caller, a conservative, pro-Trump website co-founded by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host and commentator, reported that “FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey urging the Justice Department to not prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information.” The story named no sources but said, “According to an interview transcript given to The Daily Caller, provided by an intermediary who spoke to two federal agents with the bureau last Friday, agents are frustrated by Comey’s leadership.”
The only person quoted by name in the story was Joseph diGenova, a fierce Trump partisan, a Washington lawyer with close ties to Rudolph Giuliani, and a frequent guest on Carlson’s TV show. “People inside the bureau are furious,” diGenova maintained. “They are embarrassed.” Then he turned his attack onto Comey personally. Comey was a “hack” and a “crook. They think he’s fundamentally dishonest. They have no confidence in him. The bureau inside right now is a mess.”
The whole story looked as if it were ginned up by diGenova and might easily have been dismissed as right-wing agitprop. But then Trump tweeted a link to the article, “EXCLUSIVE: FBI Agents Say Comey ‘Stood in the Way’ of Clinton Email Investigation,” and “‘Don’t know how Comey can keep going.’”
THE WEINER LAPTOP investigation might have languished indefinitely but for the determined efforts of the New York case agent who examined the laptop’s contents.* As the sole proprietor of what he now knew to be hundreds of thousands of emails with Clinton’s name on them, and the election just a month away, he was, as he later put it, “a little scared.” Even though “I’m not political” and “I don’t care who wins this election,” he feared the revelation that the bureau sat on such a trove “is going to make us look really, really horrible.”
As he put it, “Something was going to come crashing down.” Even though “I didn’t work the Hillary Clinton matter. My understanding at the time was I am telling you people I have private Hillary Clinton emails, number one, and BlackBerry messages, number two. I’m telling you that we have potentially ten times the volume that Director Comey said we had on the record. Why isn’t anybody here?” He also worried that Comey hadn’t been informed. “As a big admirer of the guy, and I think he’s a straight shooter, I felt like he needed to know that we got this. And I didn’t know if he did.”
Feeling he “had nowhere else to turn,” on October 19 he went outside the normal chain of command and met with two prosecutors from the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. He figured if they “got the attention of Preet Bharara, maybe they’d kick some of these lazy FBI folks in the butt and get them moving.”
The prosecutors got the sense that the agent was stressed and worried he’d be blamed if nothing more were done and the existence of the emails became public. He worried that “somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this.” Concerned that the agent might “act out,” they briefed Bharara. Although the Clinton email investigation lay outside the Southern District’s jurisdiction, Bharara had someone get in touch with Toscas at the Justice Department in case “something had fallen through the cracks.”
The news that his message had gotten through came as a relief to the agent. “Not to sound sappy, but I appreciate you guys understanding how uneasy I felt about the situation,” he said in an October 21 email to the Southern District prosecutors he’d met with. And he wrote to his boss and another agent in New York: The prosecutors “understood my concerns yesterday about the nature of the stuff I have on Weiner computer (ie, that I will be scapegoated if it comes out that the FBI had this stuff). They appreciated that I was in a tight spot and spoke to their chain of command who agreed.” He now felt reassured “I did the right thing by speaking up.”
TWO DAYS LATER, on October 23, the Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett broke the news that the Virginia governor McAuliffe’s political action committee had given $467,500 to Jill McCabe’s unsuccessful run for the state senate: “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife.”
That came as news to McCabe, who, by design, had known nothing about contributions to his wife’s campaign.
The FBI issued a statement, saying McCabe played no role in the campaign and at the time had no involvement in any Clinton investigations. The article also noted that McCabe had sought ethics guidance and had followed it.
Still, that McAuliffe had given such a large sum to Jill McCabe’s campaign made Comey uneasy about the appearance of any influence or conflicts. He wished McCabe had told him (unaware that McCabe hadn’t known). In that case, he would have assigned someone else to oversee the email investigation—not because he thought there was an actual conflict or that McCabe had done anything improper, but because it might be used “to undercut the credibility of the institution.”
Those concerns were immediately borne out: Trump promptly tweeted a link to the article, and the Republican National Committee chair, Reince Priebus, issued a statement: “Given all we know about how the corrupt Clinton machine operates, it’s hard not to see this as anything other than a down payment to influence the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.”
Rudy Giuliani jumped on the news, calling the Journal story a “shot to the solar plexus” in an appearance on Fox & Friends. He added, “We’ve got a couple of surprises left.”
THE DAY AFTER the Wall Street Journal story, Toscas asked McCabe about the status of the Weiner laptop, a subject that had largely slipped McCabe’s mind. McCabe asked Strzok and Priestap and realized with some dismay that the investigation had languished. As Jim Baker put it, “We took our collective eyes off the ball, didn’t pay attention to it, and when it came back and we were informed that it was not resolved, then it became a crisis.”
Prompted by McCabe’s questions, on October 26 Strzok and Toscas convened a conference call that included other Midyear team members, and they finally spoke directly to the New York case agent. He felt frustrated, as he put it, that they were “asking questions that I had already repeatedly answered in other calls.” The laptop contained as many as 650,000 emails, and as the agent told them, “We could have every email that Huma and Hillary ever sent each other.”
These appeared to include the emails from Clinton’s earliest days as secretary of state—the time period when she was most likely to have explained or commented on her decision to use private email—which the FBI had been unable to retrieve through other means.
That revelation rekindled the sense of urgency that had briefly prevailed back in September. For Strzok this was the “tipping point” that this might not be just another case of duplicate emails. Strzok briefed Page, who described the development as “good news, in a bad news way”—good news, she explained, in the sense that “more evidence is always good news. It might either change our decision or outcome or further substantiate the outcome we reached.” And bad news, because “I cannot believe we are, we are here. We are doing this again on October 26th. Like, oh, my goodness.”
That same day, The Wall Street Journal’s Barrett again contacted Kortan, indicating he wasn’t finished with the McCabe story. Now he was pursuing a lead that McCabe had tried to tamp down the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation before the election, which, if true, suggested that McCabe had favored Clinton in the wake of his wife’s McAuliffe-financed campaign.
In an email to Kortan, Barrett asked if it was “accurate” that, “in the summer, McCabe himself gave some instruction as to how to proceed with the Clinton Foundation probe, given that it was the height of election season and the FBI did not want to make a lot of overt moves that could be seen as going after her or drawing attention to the probe.” He asked, “Anything else I should know?”
Kortan conferred with Page and McCabe, who suggested Page talk to Barrett and find out more about the story.
That same day, Giuliani again teased an upcoming “surprise” that would propel Trump to victory. Appearing again on Fox News, he said to expect “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.
“I’m talking about some pretty big surprise,” he said.
Comey and McCabe wondered, what was Giuliani talking about? Was someone in the FBI, likely in New York, leaking?
Comey ordered the FBI’s inspection division to launch an investigation. “I was concerned that there appeared to be in the media a number of stories that might have been based on communications reporters or nonreporters like Rudy Giuliani were having with people in the New York field office,” Comey later explained. “In particular, in, I want to say mid-October, maybe a little bit later, Mr. Giuliani was making statements that appeared to be based on his knowledge of workings inside the FBI New York. And then my recollection is there were other stories that were in the same ballpark that gave me a general concern that we may have a leak problem—unauthorized disclosure problem out of New York.” The same day as Giuliani’s Fox appearance, McCabe hastily arranged a conference call with Lynch and the head of the FBI’s New York office, who got “ripped by the AG on leaks,” as he put it.
That same evening, Strzok and others briefed McCabe on the status of the Weiner laptop and their call with the New York case agent. Even though McCabe was going to be out of town the next day, they agreed it was urgent they brief Comey. Early the next morning—at 5:20—McCabe emailed: “Boss, The MYR team has come across some additional actions they believe they need to take. I think we should probably gather today to discuss implications if you have any space on your calendar. I am happy to join by phone. Will push to Lisa and Jim to coordinate if you are good.”
Comey responded at 7:13 a.m., “Copy.”
The Midyear team was waiting in Comey’s conference room when the director walked in at 10:00 a.m. with a grin on his face. He had no idea what the meeting was about but was amused to see the familiar faces of the Midyear team gathered together once again. “The band is back together,” he observed. The grin quickly faded as he saw the sober looks around the conference table.
McCabe had called in, but Baker suggested he hang up. Comey, too, told him to “drop off” the call and added, “I don’t need you on this call.” McCabe was taken aback and upset; he was the one who had pushed for the meeting, and was intimately involved in the issues, but he nonetheless hung up. Lisa Page also left the room. While Comey said nothing explicit, everyone realized their departures had something to do with the firestorm that had erupted after the Wall Street Journal article.
Strzok led the briefing, and briefly reviewed the bizarre sequence of events in which Anthony Weiner’s sexually explicit texts to a fifteen-year-old minor led to the discovery of hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton emails. It all seemed new to Comey. None of it jogged any memory of his having been told about it before.
Comey asked what they’d found in the emails. “We see evidence of many, many, many, thousands and thousands of emails from the period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State,” Comey recalled being told. “Two, we see Verizon.Blackberry.net email metadata. We don’t know what the content is, from the period of time when Secretary Clinton was using a BlackBerry, Verizon.BlackBerry.net account at the beginning of her tenure as Secretary of State. We think this may be the missing three months of emails.”
If so, it was a potent discovery, because Clinton’s motive—the elusive question of her intent—would have been most evident when she began using the private server. Comey asked if everyone felt they needed to review the contents of the emails to be sure they’d “turned over the necessary stones” and “be comfortable with the decision we made.”
“Yes,” Priestap replied. “We don’t know with certainty what’s in there. It could be information that we’ve not seen, you know, thus far, and so yes . . . in effect it’s dereliction of duty to not, you know this thing is out here to pass it over. So yes, we’ve got to, we have to do it.”
Strzok agreed, saying, “We have to pursue this material, because, you know, we would do it in any other case. And it is, you know, a pool of evidence that hypothetically, now understandably it’s very speculative, but there is that possibility that it could change our outcome.”
Priestap thought that unlikely. He felt that they’d already scoured so many emails that it was unlikely they’d discover any “smoking gun,” as he put it, and if they did, it “would have shocked me.” But “could it have been possible? Absolutely. That’s why we had to review it.”
Comey readily agreed that the FBI needed to get a search warrant and review the emails. As he later said, “We may be finding the golden missing emails that would change this case.”
“How fast can you review and assess this?” Comey asked. The answer was weeks—maybe months—and not until long after the election. “Do it as quickly as you can, but do it well,” Comey responded.
Going to court and applying for a warrant were overt investigative acts. Others would be aware or involved, including agents in New York and prosecutors in Preet Bharara’s office. There was the ever-present danger, even likelihood, of leaks. According to Page, there was “a substantial and legitimate fear that when we went to seek the warrant in order to get access to the Weiner laptop, that the fact of that would leak.”
More worrisome, with the decision to seek a warrant, Midyear “awoke from the dead,” as Comey later put it. It was again an active investigation. The presidential election was exactly twelve days away. Comey wondered, now what?