With the discovery of the Weiner laptop and its contents, Comey now faced what he saw as a binary decision: “to speak or to conceal.” Comey’s own reputation for candor was on the line: he had represented to the American people that the Clinton email investigation was closed, something he deemed a “material fact.” That was no longer true. To now remain silent would be “an affirmative act of concealment.”
Once the information came out, because it was either announced or leaked, Comey’s reputation for probity would be shredded, and his job as FBI director might well be in jeopardy. “I think he may have said, like, I could be impeached,” Baker recalled.
Comey was well aware that Department of Justice policy discouraged (though didn’t explicitly forbid) actions that might have an impact on elections, whether “that’s a dogcatcher election or president of the United States.”
As Comey told members of his staff, “Those are the doors. One says speak, the other says conceal. Let’s see what’s behind the speak door. It’s really bad. We’re eleven days from a presidential election.”
“Okay, close that one, really bad,” Comey said.
“Open the second one. Catastrophic.” To conceal would be “catastrophic, not just to the Bureau, but beyond the Bureau.” Comey elaborated: to conceal would subject the FBI and the Justice Department “to a corrosive doubt that you had engineered a cover up to protect a particular political candidate.”
Given Comey’s public commitment to unusual transparency in the email case, if he now concealed that the investigation had been reopened, he felt the consequence would be “generations-long damage to the credibility of the FBI and the Justice Department.”
Comey was well aware Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to be the next president in every major poll. While he consciously tried to ignore that, he acknowledged, “I was operating in an environment where she was going to be the next president.”
The likelihood of Clinton’s election had obvious implications: if she was so far ahead, then announcing that the email investigation had been reopened was unlikely to affect the outcome. And if she were elected, and the FBI discovered incriminating evidence, “the moment she took office, the FBI is dead, the Department of Justice is dead and she’s dead as president,” Comey said.
There was also the ever-present danger of leaks. If Comey decided to remain silent, “we were quite confident that somebody is going to leak,” Baker recalled. And then there would be “claims that we tried to play games with the election, and we tried to steer it in a certain way to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump.”
Posed in those terms, Comey’s choice was between “really bad” and “catastrophic.” Though discussions continued throughout the afternoon and evening, it was pretty clear where Comey was headed. As he’d said at the end of their meeting, “Welcome to the world of really bad.”
Though excluded from the meetings, Page and McCabe both expressed strong reservations about Comey’s plan. “Please, let’s figure out what it is we HAVE first,” Page texted Strzok that afternoon, noting the FBI might not even get the search warrant. “Then we have no further investigative step.”
“Agreed,” Strzok replied.
McCabe wrote to Page at 9:57 p.m. saying Baker had told him “about the notification and statement which the boss wants to send tomorrow. I do not agree with the timing but he is insistent.”
“I also wildly disagree that we need to notify before we even know what the plan is,” Page responded, adding, “I hope you can get some rest tonight.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Trisha Anderson, the FBI’s deputy general counsel, told Baker that after thinking about it overnight, “I have serious reservations about going down this road. I’m very concerned about this, Jim. Why? Well, because I’m concerned that we are going to interject ourselves into this process. We’re going to interject ourselves into the election in a way that’s, that potentially or almost certainly will change the outcome. And I am, I, Trisha, am quite concerned about that. And I’m concerned about us being responsible for getting Donald Trump elected.”
Anderson, who like nearly everyone else at FBI headquarters was somewhat in awe of Comey, was reluctant to broach the subject with the director present. So Baker brought it up at that morning’s discussion, and Anderson said, “I’m not so certain that this is the right thing to do.”
While she didn’t explicitly name Trump, and felt the mention of any candidate’s name would be inappropriate, she expressed her concerns about affecting the outcome of an election. Everyone knew what she was talking about.
Anderson was also concerned that no one yet knew what was in the emails and whether they would have any impact on the conclusion. As she later explained, “It was unclear—and perhaps even unlikely—that the emails would be material to the investigation.” And “no matter how carefully we wrote such a letter, the importance of the emails would be overinflated and misunderstood. So, in my mind, and what I believe I argued in the meeting, was that we were about to do something that could have a very significant impact on the outside world even though what we had might not be material, yet people would very likely view it as such.”
Comey firmly rejected her concerns. “I cannot consider that at all,” he said. “Down that path lies the death of the FBI because if I ever start thinking about whose political ox will be gored by this or that, who will be hurt or helped, then we are done as an independent force in American life.” He said he appreciated her raising the issue, which was likely on everyone’s mind. But “I cannot consider it.”
Anderson said she came around to Comey’s view that disclosure was the better of two bad alternatives. Strzok, too, overcame any reservations he’d expressed to Page. McCabe, though excluded from the meeting, was firmly opposed—at least until the FBI knew what was in the emails—but when he spoke to Comey by phone after the meeting, Comey said, “I don’t need you to weigh in on this decision.”
By now Comey’s mind was largely made up, and he asked Strzok to draft a letter notifying Congress. Comey felt so strongly that if he failed to inform Congress, “I ought to be fired, I ought to be hung out, I would be run out of town.”
AFTER THE MEETING, Kortan and Page called The Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett, who insisted that he had sources who had told him that McCabe told them to “stand down” on the Clinton Foundation investigation until after the election, implying that McCabe was trying to protect Clinton from any adverse publicity.
The agents had been barred from overt steps until after the election, but by the Justice Department, not by McCabe. On the contrary. McCabe had stood up to Axelrod when the subject came up in August. McCabe reminded Page about the Axelrod call and authorized her to tell Barrett about it. Surely, he reasoned, Barrett would drop that part of his story once he heard the anecdote, because it completely undercut the premise that McCabe was going easy on Clinton because of his wife’s campaign donations.
Along with Comey, McCabe had the authority to approve press disclosures when it was in the public interest, though he’d never exercised it before. But Comey was mired in the Weiner laptop issues. So Kortan and Page spoke again to Barrett late that afternoon and told him about McCabe’s response to Axelrod’s call. Neither Page nor McCabe focused on the fact that they had just implicitly confirmed that there was a Clinton Foundation investigation.
COMEY HANDED THE unenviable task of conveying his decision to notify Congress about the Weiner laptop discovery to Rybicki, his chief of staff, who called Axelrod that same afternoon, October 27. Although Comey didn’t call Lynch or Yates himself (in order, he said, to let them distance themselves), at least he was giving his nominal superiors advance notice and a chance to weigh in, in contrast to the July 5 announcement.
On the face of it, this was inconsistent. The risk that Justice Department involvement would be perceived as partisan was no less now than it had been in July. Comey himself was at something of a loss to explain it. He might have been subliminally troubled by the anger and distrust that his earlier decision had caused at the Justice Department. He might even have hoped that Lynch and Yates, his superiors in the government hierarchy, would give him a direct order not to send the letter. The burden of the Clinton investigation he’d donned in July now seemed incredibly heavy. On some level, it would be a relief to have someone lift it from his shoulders.
Rybicki told Axelrod that Comey planned to send a letter notifying Congress that the Clinton email investigation had been reopened. He stressed that Comey felt an ethical obligation. “The Director has testified. The Director believes that Congress has, now has a misimpression and so it’s the Director’s butt on the line,” he told Axelrod. “He needs to do this. If he doesn’t,” he added, “it’s not survivable for him.”*
Axelrod was shocked and dismayed. This ran squarely counter to the department’s long-standing policy of not interfering in an election, which was now only days away. He told Rybicki he’d have to discuss it with Yates and Lynch, but said it was “a bad idea.”
Axelrod immediately briefed Lynch and Yates. As Lynch recalled it, “The Director’s view was that he had to provide this information to Congress, that he was concerned about the information being leaked from the New York office.” And “he also was concerned that if, if in fact he did not provide this information to Congress, and either it was leaked or later on we discussed it in some Department-approved way, that it was not survivable.” Lynch asked Axelrod what he meant by “survivable,” and Axelrod said “that was just the phrase that Rybicki had used. It was not survivable,” either for Comey or for the FBI as an institution.
Wittingly or not, Comey had put his superiors at Justice in what they considered an untenable situation.
All three thought notifying Congress at this juncture was a terrible idea, especially because no one yet knew what was in the emails. But as in July, they had no sense that Comey was seeking their advice. Rybicki had framed the issue as one of Comey’s moral and ethical duty. A call from Lynch or Yates was unlikely to change his mind.
They recognized that Yates and Lynch had the authority to stop him, or at least order him not to make the disclosure. But then what?
In one scenario, Comey would defy them and send the notice to Congress. As Yates put it, we “weren’t at all convinced that he would follow such an order not to do it.” Lynch would then have to fire Comey or demand his resignation for insubordination. Nothing would have been gained, and the ensuing furor would only raise more questions about whether the Justice Department had tried to tip the scales in favor of Clinton.
Another scenario was that if Lynch ordered him not to notify Congress, he’d resign. Such was Comey’s reputation stemming from the Ashcroft episode that this seemed highly likely. “That seemed like a very real possibility to us, particularly against the backdrop of the situation with John Ashcroft in the hospital room where he had the resignation letter drafted,” Yates said. “That wasn’t even an ethical obligation. That was something where he disagreed with them about the statutory authority there.”
The reasons for Comey’s resignation would surely become public, again placing Lynch and the Justice Department in the untenable position of trying to prevent an FBI director from discharging his perceived moral and ethical duty in what would appear to be an effort to protect the Democratic candidate for president.
A third scenario was that Comey obeyed the order. (Comey later said that he would have followed such a direct order.) Even this was highly problematic: as Axelrod put it, that “tees up an obstruction of Congress investigation” of Lynch, who might be accused of blocking Comey from correcting a statement—that the Midyear investigation was closed—that was no longer valid.
For Axelrod, none of those scenarios were “good for the policies and the procedures or the goals of keeping DOJ and FBI out of politics. None of those are good for the AG personally,” or for the institutions.
There was another possible scenario, which was that Lynch could call Comey, feel out his intentions, and test his resolve to go through with the notice. But the two were never that close or had much rapport, certainly not after the discussion of the Clinton “matter” or the July 5 announcement.
As Yates put it, she’d witnessed Comey’s reactions in many meetings with Justice Department officials, and his tendency “was very defensive of his agency and he would push back hard. I didn’t think there was any way in the world he was going to go back to his people and say, I just got off the phone with the AG or I just got off the phone with the DAG and they convinced me that I really don’t have this personal ethical obligation I’ve told all of you that I have.” She felt the best strategy was to convince Rybicki, who might in turn be in a position to persuade Comey.
Axelrod conveyed in no uncertain terms “our building’s view” that “the Director should not do this.” It was “not only a really bad idea” that “violates our policies and procedures and traditions,” but “it’s contrary to how we do business. And actually, I used those exact words as well. It was contrary to how we do business.”
The argument that notifying Congress violated department policy—the linchpin of Justice’s opposition—didn’t carry much weight with Comey, because the policy was always qualified by an “overriding public interest” in disclosure, which Comey deemed this to be.
A few rungs below Comey and Lynch, Strzok and Toscas also had a heated discussion, in which Toscas said, “This is BS. We don’t talk about our stuff publicly. We don’t announce things. We do things quietly.” He was also able to articulate more broadly the virtue in adhering to established principles—especially in extraordinary circumstances. He explained, “The institution has principles and there’s always an urge when something important or different pops up to say, we might want to deviate because this is so different. But the comfort that we get as people, as lawyers, as representatives, as employees and as an institution, the comfort we get from those institutional policies, protocols, has, is an unbelievable thing through whatever storm, you know whatever storm hits us, when you are within the norm of the way the institution behaves, you can weather any of it because you stand on the principle.”
But Toscas’s reasoning didn’t reach Comey, and even if it had, it’s unlikely it would have tipped the scale between “really bad” and “catastrophic.” What really struck Comey was that no one at Justice was telling him not to do it, or even reaching out to engage on the issue. Department officials could oppose his decision but bear no responsibility for the consequences, which Comey thought was a “cowardly way out.” As in July, he realized, “it became my responsibility to take the hit.”
Comey’s letter reached Congress just before noon on October 28:
In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony. In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation. Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.
Unlike in July, there would be no press conference and no further public statement, because the investigation was ongoing.
Seven minutes later, the news broke. The Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz tweeted, “FBI Dir just informed me, ‘The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.’ Case reopened.” Within fifteen minutes, Fox reported “breaking news.” The story immediately dominated the airwaves and internet.
So confident was Hillary Clinton of victory that at 12:37 p.m., even as the news was breaking, her campaign announced that during the final days of the campaign she’d be traveling to a traditional Republican stronghold, Arizona, and would be pouring money into another, Texas. National polls showed her rising on the trustworthiness scale and pulling even further ahead of Trump.
Clinton herself, and Democrats generally, seemed somewhat bewildered by the laptop discovery, not knowing what if anything was in the emails. Clinton didn’t respond at all until that night. “We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes,” she said in Des Moines. “The American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately.”
In a perceptive assessment, the former Democratic congressman Barney Frank told the Times, “It sounds like Comey is being supercareful and superthorough. He wanted to alert Congress quickly because he is being careful that nothing about these new emails would otherwise leak out. He usually wouldn’t talk about things so early, but he wants to be careful.”
Frank’s main point—that no actual facts had emerged to change the outcome of the investigation—was lost in the furor that the case had been reopened, which many people assumed meant something damaging to Clinton had been discovered.
Trump, of course, pounced on the revelation, making no effort to conceal his glee. When he opened a rally that day in New Hampshire with an announcement that he had “breaking news,” raucous cheers and chants of “Lock her up!” all but drowned him out. Once the crowd had quieted slightly, he continued, “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.” More cheers erupted. Then Trump softened his tone on the FBI and an investigation he had repeatedly insisted was “rigged.”
“I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made,” Trump said. “This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood.”
Comey’s letter and the resurrected email scandal were the lead news story for six out of the crucial seven days between October 29 (when the Times’s lead headline was “New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign in Race’s Last Days”) and November 4, the Friday before the election, according to the media analysis website Memeorandum.
OVER THE WEEKEND, anonymous Justice Department sources vented their frustrations with Comey to The Washington Post in unusually blunt terms, with one saying, “Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it.”
In the article, Matt Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman, said, “Jim Comey forgets that he works for the attorney general. I think he has a lot of regard for his own integrity. And he lets that regard cross lines into self-righteousness. He has come to believe that his own ethics are so superior to anyone else’s that his judgment can replace existing rules and regulations. That is a dangerous belief for an FBI director to have.”
This line of criticism really got under Comey’s skin, because it transformed what he considered two important virtues—being truthful and transparent—into moral failings, being “in love with my own righteousness.” While he did worry about his ego, he was also proud he tried to do the right thing.
A colleague sent a copy of the article to Page, with the notation, “This is all Axelrod.”
“Yeah. I saw it,” Page replied. “Makes me feel WAY less bad about throwing him under the bus in the forthcoming CF article,” referring to Barrett’s forthcoming Wall Street Journal article on McCabe and the Clinton Foundation.
“FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe” was the headline on the Wall Street Journal website on October 30. It was hardly what Page was hoping for, especially after she’d spent so much time with Barrett. Her efforts hadn’t persuaded the reporter to leave out the allegations about McCabe, although he included what she told him about Axelrod, who wasn’t named in the story: “The Justice Department official [Axelrod] was ‘very pissed off,’ according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant. Others said the Justice Department was simply trying to make sure FBI agents were following longstanding policy not to make overt investigative moves that could be seen as trying to influence an election.” But, the article continued, agents had been told to “stand down” on the Clinton Foundation investigation and “were told the order had come from the deputy director—Mr. McCabe.”
The article hit a raw nerve with Comey. Reporting on the conversation with Axelrod, which cast Axelrod in an especially unflattering light, would only exacerbate tensions with the Justice Department. Moreover, no one had publicly confirmed the existence of a Clinton Foundation investigation; Comey himself had refused to do so in Congress. And who was the “source close to” McCabe? Obviously, there was another leak, already one of Comey’s major worries. He suspected—but didn’t know—it was Page.
Comey brought up the article at Monday morning’s staff meeting. Page was taking notes. “Need to figure out how to get our folks to understand why leaks hurt our organization,” she wrote. Afterward, he discussed the Journal article with McCabe. “Can you believe this crap? How does this stuff get out?” he said, or words to that effect, in Comey’s recollection.
At that moment, McCabe could have clarified that Page was indeed the source “close” to McCabe, and he’d authorized her to speak to rebut the flagrantly false claim that McCabe had tried to suppress the foundation case. Doing so, of course, might have risked Comey’s ire and, even worse, disappointment. McCabe hesitated, and then the moment passed.
A few days later, Comey asked McCabe to recuse himself from the email case and anything else having to do with Clinton, “in light of the controversy” over McAuliffe’s donations to his wife’s campaign. Although McCabe strenuously disagreed, he agreed to step aside.
NOT ALL THE media coverage of Comey’s letter to Congress was critical. William Barr, a former attorney general under George H. W. Bush and a Trump supporter, wrote a spirited defense of Comey in The Washington Post, “James Comey Did the Right Thing.” “Comey had no choice but to issue the statement he did,” Barr wrote. “Indeed, it would have violated policy had he not done so.”
Trump himself softened his tone on Comey. “I have to tell you, I respect the fact that Director Comey was able to come back after what he did,” he said at a rally in Phoenix. “I respect that very much.”
But all that week, Comey felt like a pariah, at least in Democratic precincts. In the House, Nancy Pelosi compared his letter to a “Molotov cocktail” and said Comey had become “the leading Republican political operative in the country—wittingly or unwittingly.” At Comey’s next meeting in the White House Situation Room, everyone avoided eye contact with him (except his friends John Brennan, CIA director, and James Clapper, director of national security).
So when Loretta Lynch asked Comey to stay behind for a private meeting after their weekly intelligence briefing, he wondered, how angry was she? Was she going to yell at him? Threaten him?
Lynch had indeed been angry. But she’d softened that morning when she saw him. Lynch thought Comey looked terrible, like he’d been run over by a truck.
Once they were alone, she asked, “How are you?”
“Well . . .” he began, his voice trailing off.
Lynch went to him and put her arms around him. “I thought you needed a hug.”
“You knew I didn’t want you to send that letter,” Lynch said when they resumed their conversation.
Comey murmured his assent.
“Well, it’s done now,” she said. “The question is, how do we go forward?”
“I don’t know,” Comey said.
“Just tell me what was going on with you,” Lynch said. “What were you thinking?”
Comey said it had been a “nightmare” and reviewed the unpalatable choice he faced between “really bad” and “catastrophic.”
“Would they feel better if it leaked on November 4?” she asked.
“Exactly,” Comey said. “I feel a little bit better. You’re one of the few people who get it.”
“I get it but I don’t agree with it,” Lynch replied.
“It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton,” Comey said. And, “It is deep.”
“I’m aware of that,” Lynch said. “I wasn’t aware it was to this level and this depth that you’re talking about, but I’m sad to say that that does not surprise me. I am just troubled that this issue has put us where we are today with respect to this laptop.”
“I hear you,” Comey answered.
Lynch was sad Comey felt he had to shoulder the burden of the decision alone. She would gladly have taken some of the heat. They’d been friends for over twenty years.
As they left, Lynch smiled and said, “Try to look beat up.”
It was the last time they spoke.
AS THE PRESIDENTIAL election neared, Christopher Steele, apparently frustrated by the FBI’s inaction on his dossier, spoke to a reporter from Mother Jones, the progressive San Francisco–based magazine. On October 31, the Washington bureau chief and investigative reporter David Corn reported that “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.”
The former intelligence officer was obviously Steele, and speaking to the press about a confidential FBI investigation was a blatant violation of FBI rules for confidential intelligence sources. The next day, the FBI terminated its formal relationship with Steele and filed a memo to that effect, saying the cause was “confidentiality revealed.”
But Steele was still a potential loose cannon. He had the dossier, and he knew the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. In terms of disrupting the election, Steele was a ticking time bomb.
Even as the FBI was distancing itself from Steele, on October 30 a Russian businessman involved in the Trump Tower Moscow sent Michael Cohen a text message alluding to potentially damaging tapes—presumably the ones described in the Steele dossier. “Stopped flow of some tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else. Just so you know,” wrote Giorgi Rtskhiladze, who had been discussing the proposed Trump project with high-ranking officials, including the mayor of Moscow.
“Tapes of what?” Cohen asked.
“Not sure of the content but person in Moscow was bragging had tapes from Russia trip,” Rtskhiladze responded. “Will try to dial you tomorrow but wanted to be aware. I’m sure it’s not a big deal but there are lots of stupid people.”
“You have no idea,” Cohen replied.
Cohen relayed the conversation to Trump—meaning the Republican nominee knew about possibly embarrassing tapes a full week before the election.*
THE FBI OBTAINED a search warrant for Weiner’s laptop on October 30, and the computer was physically transferred from New York to the bureau’s operational technology division in Quantico, Virginia. The laptop contained 1,355,980 items and approximately 650,000 emails. While that seemed a daunting and time-consuming task, technicians were able to narrow the Clinton-related emails to under 50,000. The FBI reviewed 6,827 emails that were either to or from Clinton and deemed 3,077 of those emails “potentially work-related.” Strzok led the team that pored over each of these, working near twenty-four-hour days. They found thirteen email chains containing confidential information, though none were marked as classified. All were duplicates of emails that had already been examined.
On Friday, they told Comey they might finish before the election and made a final push to finish their review the next day. There was little disagreement that Comey should send another letter to Congress addressing the findings, although some worried that it was too close to the election to say anything. Strzok, for one, worried that anytime the FBI made an announcement, it only “reinvigorated” the news cycle, thrusting the FBI into the partisan wrangling. But there was no opposition at the Justice Department, which wanted Comey to correct any misimpressions that Clinton might still be charged, and lawyers there reviewed and signed off on a draft of the proposed letter.
The letter reached Congress on Sunday afternoon, November 6:
I write to supplement my October 28, 2016 letter that notified you the FBI would be taking additional investigative steps with respect to former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a personal email server. Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton. I am very grateful to the professionals at the FBI for doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.
As the Times put it, Comey’s letter—his third public statement on the Midyear investigation—“swept away her largest and most immediate problem” but came “at the end of a rocky week for Mrs. Clinton that included wild, false speculation about looming indictments and shocking discoveries in the emails.”
Trump immediately reverted to form—that Clinton “is being protected by a rigged system. It’s a totally rigged system,” as he said in Michigan on November 6 and at every subsequent rally.
Comey wanted nothing more to do with the election. He was, in his words, “too tired to care.” He’d dedicated his career to the Department of Justice and the FBI in large part because they were institutions that stood apart from and above partisan politics. He had no plans to vote.
Comey had nonetheless achieved the dubious status of celebrity, or perhaps notoriety. That night he, his wife, and one of their daughters went out for dinner, where “Comey was spotted with a giant margarita at El Tio Tex Mex Grill,” The Washington Post duly noted.
Perhaps because it drained the suspense from the Clinton email story rather than added to it, and had none of the “wild speculation” that had provided such good tabloid fare, Comey’s November 6 letter got far less media attention. It wasn’t even the lead news story that day; it was overshadowed by reports that a swarm of secret service agents had rushed Trump at a Nevada rally after someone in the crowd yelled, “Gun.” (The man turned out to be unarmed.) The next day’s news was dominated by the latest polls (which showed Clinton in a slight uptick, with a lead of 3.5 percentage points over Trump).
Strzok and Page never discussed any of their own work in terms of how it might affect the election. Strzok and Page had often advocated a tougher investigative approach toward Clinton and had even questioned issuing the November 6 letter exonerating her. None of their colleagues detected any hint of the political sentiments they expressed in what they assumed were confidential text messages.
Despite her lead in the polls, Page and Strzok weren’t at all sure Clinton would win.
“The nyt probability numbers are dropping every day,” a worried Page texted Strzok on November 3, referring to the Times’s online forecast. “I’m scared for our organization.”
“Stein and moron are F’ing everything up, too,” Strzok replied, referring to the Green candidate, Jill Stein, and the Libertarian Gary Johnson.
Four days later, the Times gave Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning, but added, “A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible.”
“OMG this is F*CKING TERRIFYING,” Strzok texted.
For the first time since he was old enough, McCabe decided not to cast a vote.
AT 2:35 ON the morning of November 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede the election. The New York Times put aside the front-page headline it had mocked up, “Madam President.”
“Trump Triumphs” was the headline that morning in both the Times and The Washington Post. Both USA Today and the Los Angeles Times referred to Trump’s victory as a “stunning” upset.
Remarkably, nothing about the Russia investigation—including its very existence—had leaked. For those at the FBI privy to Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the result meant that in the worst-case scenario they were investigating, the Russian plot to undermine American democracy had succeeded beyond Putin’s wildest dreams.
Comey was stunned by the election result. He felt numb. His wife was in tears. Comey desperately hoped he’d had nothing to do with the outcome. He consoled himself with the hope that the gravitas of the office would make Trump more presidential, and he’d shift toward governing from the center rather than cater to his base.
McCabe, too, was shocked. But he thought Clinton might have been more hostile toward the FBI, given the email investigation and Comey’s letter reopening the case. Comey would surely have been replaced, and a new director would replace McCabe. But he also thought Trump and his campaign staff knew little about the role of the FBI and its tradition of independence. It would be a steep learning curve, especially with Crossfire Hurricane in progress.
Page and Strzok thought less about the consequences for the FBI.
“OMG I am so depressed,” Page texted Strzok. “And honestly, I don’t know if I can eat. I am very nauseous. I’m extremely depressed. Though today it’s mostly not about work.”
Two days later she wasn’t feeling any better: “God, I’m really f-ing depressed. Bill [Priestap] just called to talk about the sentiment of everyone he was talking to.”
“Sentiment about what?” Strzok asked.
“Thinks we had something to do with the outcome. I bought All the President’s Men. Figure I needed to brush up on Watergate.”*
COMEY WAS FEELING at a low point in late November, when he was in the Oval Office again with Obama, now a lame-duck president, and other national security leaders. After the meeting, Obama asked Comey to stay behind.
Once they were alone, Obama told him he didn’t want to discuss any particular investigation but wanted to tell him something. “I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability. I want you to know that nothing—nothing—has happened in the last year to change my view.”
Comey felt tears welling up.
“That means a lot to me, Mr. President,” Comey said. “I have hated the last year. The last thing we want is to be involved in an election. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“I know,” Obama reassured him.