In the wake of victory, a more magnanimous Trump seemed to emerge, at least toward the vanquished foe he had so often branded a criminal. Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway declared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump didn’t want to see Clinton prosecuted, despite the campaign chants to “lock her up.” “If Donald Trump can help her heal then, perhaps, that’s a good thing,” Conway said.
Later that day, Trump elaborated during a visit to The New York Times. Asked about prosecuting Clinton, he said, “Look, I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back. And I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious. They say it was the most vicious primary and the most vicious campaign. I guess, added together, it was definitely the most vicious.” He reiterated, “I’m not looking to hurt them. I think they’ve been through a lot. They’ve gone through a lot. I think we have to get the focus of the country into looking forward.”
In the following days, Trump began to put his stamp on the incoming administration as he announced top cabinet and national security appointments. For the pivotal post of attorney general, he chose Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. That Sessions would get a high-level appointment came as no surprise; he’d been the first (and for some time the only) senator to endorse Trump, turning his back on his fellow Republican senator and frequent ally Ted Cruz. Sessions was a hard-line immigration opponent, fiercely opposed to any kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants, and a supporter of Trump’s proposed border wall.
He was also a controversial choice for a post like that of attorney general. His nomination to the federal bench had foundered thirty years earlier after a slew of racially tinged comments came to light, many made while he was the U.S. attorney in Mobile, Alabama. And the post of attorney general wasn’t Sessions’s first choice; he’d asked for secretary of defense or state, both rebuffed by Trump. Trump had never developed much personal chemistry with Sessions and had to be prodded to give him any cabinet-level job.
Comey didn’t know what to make of the appointment. The only interaction he’d had with Sessions came after a speech in which Comey had said it was hard for the FBI to hire cyber experts. “We may find people of great technical talent who want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey had said. At a subsequent Judiciary Committee hearing, Sessions chastised Comey, saying smoking marijuana was no laughing matter.
The following week, Trump made his first major foreign policy appointment, naming as his national security adviser Michael Flynn, the former army general who had led “lock her up” chants during the campaign. Flynn is “one of the country’s foremost experts on military and intelligence matters and he will be an invaluable asset to me and my administration,” Trump said, and the choice was warmly praised by Republicans. But Flynn’s hard-line anti-Muslim views and an affinity for Russia that mirrored the president’s worried some. “Some of the policy positions he’s advocated, a kind of a newfound affinity for the Russians and Kremlin, concern me a great deal,” said the California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff.
And Trump himself had ignored a warning from Obama that Flynn, whom Obama had fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was temperamentally unsuited for the job.
Press reports about Russian interference had only intensified since the election. In an interview on Fox News, Trump dismissed them as another attempt by Democrats to undermine his legitimacy. “I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “I think it’s just another excuse.” As for the hacked DNC emails, no one knew “if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace.”
The incoming White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said on Fox News, “This whole thing is a spin job,” and asked why Democrats “are doing everything they can to delegitimize the outcome of the election.”
In this, Priebus was only echoing Trump, who saw the entire issue of Russian interference through a single lens, which was not what it meant for American democracy but what it meant to him personally. Whether true or not, people would think Russia had tipped the scale for him, thereby rendering his historic victory illegitimate. As the press coverage continued, this theme became something of an obsession with Trump, who talked about it incessantly not only to Priebus but to almost anyone who would listen. To the White House communications director, Hope Hicks, he said Russia was going to be his “Achilles heel.”
IN EARLY DECEMBER, Comey got a call from John McCain asking if they could meet in person. McCain, the venerable Republican senator from Arizona and former presidential nominee, was in open conflict with Trump, who’d denigrated McCain’s status as a war hero on the campaign trail. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump had asserted. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” McCain, in turn, withdrew his support for Trump’s campaign after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, saying Trump’s “demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.”
McCain had gotten a version of the Steele dossier in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November. Partly because of his ongoing feud with Trump, he would have preferred to stay uninvolved and hand over the material as part of a congressional investigation. But his fellow Republicans had blocked that idea. So when McCain arrived at Comey’s office on December 9, he handed over the folder. “You should have this,” he said. Comey already had it, but didn’t say so.
Later in December, yet another copy arrived via Bruce Ohr, who’d been given a memory stick by Glenn Simpson. Ohr didn’t look at the contents of the flash drive, but assumed it contained the dossier. He didn’t know, either, that the FBI already had multiple copies.
Comey felt tremendous pressure to resolve the issue of whether Trump or anyone in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia before Trump was inaugurated, in part because Comey had already been accused of tipping the election. Despite their strenuous efforts, the FBI hadn’t found much evidence of collusion, and nothing to connect Russia’s election efforts to Trump himself. At this juncture, Comey felt it possible, even likely, that the FBI could close the Russia-Trump campaign investigation by the end of the year, and Trump could begin his presidency unencumbered by an ongoing investigation that might leak or otherwise become public at any time.
That all changed on December 29, when President Obama announced sanctions on Russia as “a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests.”
The Steele dossier aside, the Obama administration had overwhelming evidence that Russia had tried to influence the election, but the president had been reluctant to publicize it before the election out of the same fears that the FBI had wrestled with: that he’d be accused of using classified government intelligence to favor Clinton. But now, with elections safely in the past, Obama felt comfortable taking action.
Trump shrugged off the need for any punitive measures. “I think we ought to get on with our lives,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago retreat, and later added, “It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.”
Russia promised to retaliate in kind; expulsions of Russian diplomats were invariably met with a tit-for-tat expulsion of American diplomats from Russia.
So it struck Comey as exceedingly curious that the next day Putin said he wouldn’t retaliate and would adopt a wait-and-see approach instead—a clear olive branch to the incoming Trump administration. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!” Trump tweeted. Suspicions within the FBI that Putin and Trump might be in league with each other immediately ratcheted up.
The next day, the White House asked the intelligence services for anything they had that might explain Putin’s curious reaction. Comey had FBI agents review the secret intercept transcripts from the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., from the week of the sanction announcement. (The Russian embassy was the subject of an ongoing FISA court order that authorized wiretaps on the embassy phones.)
Poring over the transcripts, agents discovered two startling phone calls between the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and Michael Flynn, who knew each other and had met with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at Trump Tower early in December. The first call, from Flynn to Kislyak, was on December 29, the day the sanctions were announced. Flynn asked Kislyak not to “escalate” the situation in response to the sanctions. Then, on New Year’s Eve, Kislyak called Flynn to report that his request had been heard at “the highest levels” of the Russian government, obviously referring to Putin, and assured Flynn that it was his call that had precipitated the decision not to retaliate.
After Comey was briefed, he conveyed the information to the White House and top national security officials. Strzok and McCabe briefed their counterparts at the Department of Justice. The immediate mystery of Russia’s benign reaction to the sanctions was solved: someone in the incoming Trump administration—Flynn—had intervened and helped bring about the result.
But it only deepened the question of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. So far the Flynn investigation had yielded nothing of consequence, but here was a direct link between Flynn and the Russian government. The intercepted conversations might themselves be crimes; the Logan Act bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and Flynn was still a private citizen, albeit one who was advising an incoming president. The moribund Flynn investigation was suddenly alive again.
COMEY, OF COURSE, could say nothing about any of this when the time came for his annual New Year’s letter to FBI personnel. But he did finally address lingering concerns about the Clinton investigation and its impact on him personally:
2016 was, to put it mildly, a challenging year, in which the FBI was the focus of a great deal of public attention for our work. As it always is, our work was subject to a fair amount of second-guessing. We try to stare hard at our own work, take feedback that is thoughtful, and always seek to be better.
As for the Clinton email controversy,
I am uncomfortable spending time talking about me, but I am very grateful for the support so many of you have expressed in recent months. I would be lying if I said the external criticism doesn’t bother me at all, but the truth is it doesn’t bother me much because of the way we made decisions. At every turn last year, we were faced with choosing among bad options and making decisions we knew would bring a torrent of criticism. But at each turn, we asked ourselves only: Which option is most consistent with our values? Which option would honest, competent, and independent people choose? When you know you have made decisions thoughtfully and consistent with your values, it is freeing, in a way.
Comey and other national security officials met with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on January 5, when they gathered in the Oval Office for an intelligence briefing on Russian interference. They’d already decided that they had little choice but to brief Trump about the contents of the dossier and that Comey was the man to do it. The FBI handled counterintelligence investigations, and Brennan and Clapper were both Obama appointees who would soon be leaving. Comey agreed he should handle it, though he wished it were otherwise.
There was little chance the dossier would remain a secret for long. Senator McCain had a version, as did the Democratic senator Harry Reid, and it was known to be circulating in Washington, D.C., intelligence and media circles. CNN had already called the FBI press office to say it had the dossier and was preparing to release it.
The point of such a “defensive” briefing was to prepare Trump for potentially adverse publicity. But Comey’s primary motive was somewhat more complex. He didn’t really care whether Trump had consorted with prostitutes. Even if it were true, Trump was a private citizen traveling in Moscow, and what he did at the Ritz-Carlton was neither illegal nor any of the FBI’s business. But by briefing Trump, the FBI would achieve its primary objective: the Russians couldn’t blackmail the incoming president—because Trump now knew that the FBI was already aware of it.
However compelling the logic, that didn’t mean Comey was comfortable at the prospect of discussing salacious allegations about Trump with the man himself, someone he’d never met. Given what he considered Trump’s worldview, in which all relationships were measured in terms of who had the upper hand and could use it to extract the best deal, he worried that Trump would see the disclosure simply as a matter of leverage—that the FBI had something on him.
The legendary reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, the seemingly untouchable founding FBI director, had been tarnished by disclosures he kept secret files on presidents, information he deftly wielded to remain in power for nearly five decades until he died of a heart attack. That was anathema to Comey.
Comey thought he could defuse the idea that the FBI might use the information against him by telling Trump that he personally wasn’t under investigation. Jim Baker had argued against that, noting that while it was technically true, it was “Jesuitical”; Trump’s activities certainly fell within the scope of the investigation, and he might well become the subject. Some at the FBI thought Trump already should be. But at this juncture, Comey was determined to work with Trump. He feared that if Trump thought he was a target, he’d be at war with the FBI the moment he was inaugurated.
Toward the end of the meeting with Obama, Director of National Intelligence Clapper brought up the salacious material in the Steele dossier. Obama betrayed no reaction. “What’s the plan for that briefing?” Obama asked, referring to the forthcoming session with Trump.
Clapper said Comey would be briefing Trump alone the next day, after the incoming president’s regular national security briefing.
Obama said nothing but looked at Comey and raised both his eyebrows.
ON JANUARY 6, a motorcade of black SUVs carried Comey and other national security leaders from the airport to Trump Tower in Manhattan for Trump’s final intelligence briefing before his inauguration, now just two weeks away. The focus would be Russian interference in the election, because President Obama was preparing to release a heavily edited version of the intelligence to the public before Trump’s inauguration.
They entered from Fifty-sixth Street, shielded from the press corps waiting on Fifth Avenue. After they were seated in a conference room upstairs, Trump arrived with Vice President–elect Mike Pence, Sean Spicer, and the incoming national security team: Flynn; Mike Pompeo, his choice for CIA director; Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser; and K. T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser.
Clapper led the briefing, interrupted only once by Trump, who asked, “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?” Clapper explained that it wasn’t their task to determine whether the Russian efforts had influenced the outcome. All he could say was there was no evidence any votes had been altered or compromised.
To Comey’s surprise, Trump and his advisers asked no questions about what Russia was still doing and might do in future elections, or what the United States was doing to combat it. Instead, Priebus launched into a discussion about how they could “position” the intelligence with the media, stressing the finding that Russia had no impact on Trump’s victory.
To Comey, this was spin, not fact. Trump and his advisers went on in this vein almost as though Comey and the others weren’t there. Clapper had to interrupt to remind them, as he’d just said, that the intelligence agencies had not evaluated whether Russia had any influence on the outcome, only that it had tried.
As an experienced former prosecutor of organized crime, Comey couldn’t help but think about how the Mafia drew its participants into its “family” by sharing confidences and strategy and getting everyone to agree. Trump and his team seemed instinctively to be doing much the same thing. It made Comey deeply uncomfortable, but he said nothing.
Trump finally wound up the discussion, and Priebus asked if there was anything else they needed to know.
The moment was at hand. Clapper said, “Well, yes,” adding that he and the others would leave, and Comey would stay behind to discuss it with a smaller group.
“How small?” Trump asked.
“I was thinking the two of us,” Comey said.
Priebus suggested that he and Pence remain as well, but Trump said, “Just the two of us.”
Everyone else filed out.
“You’ve had one heck of a year,” Trump said when they were alone. He praised Comey’s handling of the email investigation, noting that Comey had repeatedly been put in an “impossible” situation. “You saved her and then they hated you for what you did later, but what choice did you have?” Trump said. Trump praised Comey’s reputation and said he hoped he’d be staying on as FBI director.
“I intend to, sir,” Comey said. It seemed an odd comment from Trump, given that Comey still had more than six years remaining in his ten-year term.
“Good,” Trump replied.
Trying to maintain a matter-of-fact tone, Comey followed the script he’d worked out with McCabe, Baker, and the others at FBI headquarters. He said he needed to discuss some sensitive information that was circulating within the intelligence community because he didn’t want Trump to be “caught cold” by some of the details. Then Comey turned to the most sensitive allegation: that the Russians had videotapes of Trump consorting with prostitutes in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz-Carlton in 2013. He spared Trump the lurid detail that the women had urinated on the same bed where the Obamas had slept.
“There were no prostitutes, there were never prostitutes!” Trump angrily interjected.
He didn’t need to “go there,” Trump said. Comey took that to mean that Trump didn’t need to pay for sex. Almost to himself, Trump repeated the year “2013” and seemed to be searching his memory. He said that he always assumed that hotel rooms where he stayed were bugged, and Comey said that when he traveled abroad, he did, too.
Comey assured Trump that it wasn’t that the FBI believed the allegations but that Trump needed to know the dossier existed and was being widely circulated. CNN had it and was looking for a “news hook.” Comey said it was important the FBI not give it one by revealing it had the dossier or was looking into its substance, and he assured Trump the bureau was keeping it within a tightly controlled circle to prevent leaks.
Trump said he couldn’t believe CNN had the dossier and hadn’t run with it.
Comey explained that the information was “inflammatory” and the media would get “killed” if it ran with it without substantiating the allegations.
That an FBI director would be briefing a future president of the United States in private about such compromising personal information was so unprecedented, so bizarre, that Comey felt as if he were watching himself in a play or movie. It was something akin to an “out-of-body experience.”
Trump suddenly started discussing women who’d falsely accused him of groping or grabbing them, again implying that his inherent sex appeal made any such moves unnecessary. Although he mentioned several of his accusers, Trump focused on a stripper who’d accused him of grabbing her (presumably a reference to Stephanie Clifford, the actress and stripper known as Stormy Daniels).
As Trump grew more agitated, Comey sensed the conversation was teetering on disaster. Now was the time to defuse the situation.
“We are not investigating you, sir,” Comey said.
He said again that the information might be “totally made up” but that to protect Trump from any effort to coerce him, the FBI needed to understand what the Russians were doing and might do. And he wanted Trump to be aware that the allegations might surface at any time in the media.
The assurance seemed to calm Trump. He said he was grateful for the information and again praised Comey and said he looked forward to working with him. The two shook hands. Comey’s private conversation with Trump had lasted only five minutes but felt much longer.
Comey left the conference room, passing Jared Kushner in the corridor as he left.
MCCABE, PAGE, BAKER, and Strzok were to varying degrees appalled by Trump’s reaction when Comey briefed them on the meeting, as much by what Trump didn’t say as by what he did. Trump could have denied the allegations; expressed outrage at the Russian attempt to interfere; urged Comey to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible; and pledged his full cooperation and that of his incoming administration. That was how they hoped an incoming president, faced with a blatant act of hostility from a foreign power, would have responded. Instead, Trump had denied there were prostitutes. That was hardly reassuring.
Still, they thought Comey had handled an exceptionally awkward encounter well. He’d stressed that the FBI was trying to protect the president. Trump had thanked him for sharing the information.
Their reactions showed how little they knew or understood Trump.
WITHIN FOUR DAYS of the Trump Tower meeting, word of the briefing had leaked. CNN didn’t publish the Steele dossier, but it came close. On January 10, the network reported, “Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.”
Trump immediately tweeted: “FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT”—his first use of the phrase “witch hunt” to describe the Russia probe.*
Just one hour later, BuzzFeed News published thirty-five pages of the dossier.
BuzzFeed News went to some lengths to justify what it knew would be a controversial decision to publish. In its introduction to the materials, it noted the dossier “has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen” it. BuzzFeed News also cautioned readers that much of the dossier’s contents couldn’t be verified, that it contained demonstrable errors, and that it had been compiled by a political opponent of Trump’s.
Conway, on national television, maintained Trump was “not aware” of any such intelligence briefing (which was patently false). Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer named in the dossier, called it “ridiculous” and a “fake story” (even though Cohen had told Trump about the possibility of embarrassing tapes).
Despite the disclaimers, the story was a bombshell. Even though CNN, the Times, the Post, The New Yorker, and other media outlets knew about the dossier and its contents and had declined to publish them, all now weighed in on the impact and significance of the revelations, driving massive traffic to BuzzFeed’s website. As the Times wrote the next day, the consequences of the story “have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day.” Multiple congressional committees launched investigations.
Trump was beside himself, tweeting obsessively that the dossier was fake. He called Steele, its author, “sick.” He also made direct calls to the intelligence officials who had just briefed him. Clapper emailed Comey, saying Trump had called him on January 11 to ask “if I could put out a statement. He would prefer of course that I say the documents are bogus, which, of course, I can’t do.”
Trump called Comey about 5:00 p.m. the same day. He seemed most concerned about how the dossier had “leaked.” Comey explained that it wasn’t really a leak, given that the dossier had been compiled by private parties who shared it widely and thus wasn’t a government document. (On the other hand, someone had leaked the fact of the intelligence briefing, which gave CNN its “news hook” for reporting about the dossier.)
Trump told Comey he’d been thinking more about his 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant and recalled that he hadn’t even spent the night there. He’d gone to the Ritz-Carlton only to change his clothes and had flown back to New York the same night. Then he launched into the graphic incident Comey hadn’t mentioned, but by now was dominating the news cycle: urinating on the bed, what Trump referred to as “golden showers.”
“I’m a germophobe,” Trump protested. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”
Comey laughed nervously. He found that unpersuasive: even a germophobe could have witnessed the incident from a safe distance. Nor did being there require an overnight stay. And Trump confirmed that he had been at the Ritz-Carlton. But Comey didn’t say anything.
As Trump ended the call, Comey gazed out his large office windows at the lit monuments of the capital. Much as during the conversation at Trump Tower, he had trouble believing he had just had such a conversation with a man who, in a little more than a week, would be president of the United States.
“SOMETHING IS ROTTEN in the state of Denmark,” began the column by the influential Washington Post columnist David Ignatius the next day, referring to “this past week of salacious leaks about foreign espionage plots and indignant denials.”
What upset Comey and others in the intelligence community wasn’t so much pointed references to the Steele dossier as what did appear to be a new leak:
According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated?
Comey was so concerned that he launched an investigation to determine the source of the leak.
Comey wasn’t the only person alarmed by the disclosure. An angry Trump called Priebus: “What the hell is this all about?”
Priebus called Flynn, saying he’d spoken to the “boss” and Flynn needed to “kill the story.”
Flynn had his deputy, K. T. McFarland, call the Post to deny the account (even though she was well aware that the column was accurate), and the Post updated the story to say that two Trump “team members” had called to deny the account, insisting that sanctions weren’t discussed.
The next day, Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Flynn had “reached out” to Kislyak only to convey holiday greetings and also denied that sanctions had been discussed. On Sunday, Pence appeared on Face the Nation and Priebus on Meet the Press to deny the Post’s reporting. Pence said he’d spoken to Flynn, and “those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.”
Comey, of course, knew none of this was true. And he wasn’t the only one. Kislyak and the Russians knew that sanctions had been discussed. As the falsehoods mounted, concerns grew within the Obama administration, especially at the Justice Department. There, Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, Axelrod, and Toscas were all convinced that Flynn was misleading other members of the incoming administration, lying to them about the substance of the December 29 conversation, which they in turn repeated to a national audience. Because the Russians knew Flynn was lying, they had leverage they could use with him. Yates felt the White House needed to be warned.
Yates called Comey to express the department’s concern, but Comey was more concerned about the ongoing investigation than any immediate risk that the Russians might blackmail Flynn. He agreed that Flynn appeared to be lying, but why? What was it about his relationship with Kislyak he needed to conceal from others in the incoming administration? The fact of the lie added more fuel to the Flynn investigation. He persuaded Yates to hold off at least until the inauguration.
THAT SAME MONTH, Bill Priestap, the head of counterintelligence overseeing Crossfire Hurricane, approached McCabe about another sensitive matter. Priestap said an analyst—Jonathan Moffa—had brought to his attention that Page and Strzok were spending a lot of time together, and he worried Page was “monopolizing” Strzok’s time. The analyst suspected the two were having an affair. Partly out of those concerns, Priestap had reduced Strzok’s responsibilities, leaving him in charge only of domestic U.S. witnesses. He’d assigned another agent, Jennifer Boone, to oversee foreign ones.
Priestap also took his concerns directly to Strzok. He didn’t ask him point-blank if he and Page were having an affair. As Priestap later said, “We all have our personal lives,” and “I’m not the morality police.” Still, he wanted Strzok to be aware that people were talking and that the impression they were having an affair was “out there.”
While “there’s no FBI policy that says you can’t have an affair, and if you do, you’re going to be punished,” Priestap worried that in the extraordinarily sensitive circumstances of the Russia investigation, an affair, or even a perception of one, could make Strzok “vulnerable” to a foreign intelligence service. “This better not interfere with things, if you know what I mean,” Priestap warned Strzok. “To me, the mission is everything,” Priestap later explained.*
McCabe told Page that Priestap had brought up the issue. “I know you and Pete are friends, but you have to be more careful,” he said. “People are talking, and this isn’t good for you.”
Page was acutely embarrassed, mortified that the issue had even come up, especially because the affair was now over. They were still friends, and still texting, at least until June, when Page finally cut off the exchange. She denied the two were romantically involved or had had an affair.
Priestap hadn’t discussed the issue with Page; she reported to McCabe, not him. But Page sought him out and said she thought splitting responsibilities between Strzok and Boone was a mistake. She told him she hoped it wasn’t because of the rumors of an affair, which weren’t true.
Priestap felt uncomfortable discussing anything so personal with Page. But he was firm about the division of responsibilities and kept the witnesses divided between Strzok and Boone. At least Page thought the rumors had been laid to rest. And she and Strzok were more careful—or so they thought.
INAUGURATION DAY, January 20, was a bleak, rainy day in the nation’s capital, and the tone of Trump’s address matched the leaden skies. Wearing a wide bright red tie, the new president looked grim as he lambasted the ruling elite and made none of the usual pleas for national unity. The speech lasted just sixteen minutes.
Wearing the campaign’s signature MAGA caps, Trump supporters thronged the National Mall, though just how many became the first controversy of the new administration. Independent estimates ranged from 300,000 to 600,000 people, far fewer than Obama had attracted four years earlier. Trump claimed the media deliberately minimized the crowd size. From his vantage point, the crowd “looked like a million-and-a-half people,” he said, and “went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, January 22, President Trump hosted a reception at the White House Blue Room for law enforcement officers who worked on the inauguration, and at the insistence of his staff Comey went, albeit reluctantly. He didn’t want to give any impression that he and Trump were personally close, which meant avoiding one-on-one encounters or photos of him with the president. He positioned himself at the far end of the room from the entrance, near a window overlooking the South Lawn. He hoped his blue suit would blend in with the draperies.
Trump and his entourage entered with a blaze of lights, surrounded by TV cameras and photographers. The event was clearly being mounted as a publicity gambit.
“We’re going to have a great eight years together, as we say,” Trump began. “And again, the inauguration was such a success, and such a safety success. And we want to thank you all because it was really a very very special experience.”
He singled out John Kelly, just sworn in as director of homeland security, “and your very beautiful wife.” He asked Joe Clancy, director of the Secret Service, to step forward. “Stay up here with us,” he said. “So let’s, uh . . .” His eyes lit on Comey. “Oh and there’s James. He’s become more famous than me! Let’s take some pictures and say hello to each other, okay? Where’s a good spot? Right here?”
The cameras rolled as Comey walked the length of the blue carpet, thinking, “This is a complete disaster,” and contemplating ways to avoid hugging the president or making any other gesture that might suggest fealty.
Once he was within range, Trump gripped Comey’s hand and leaned in close to his ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said in a stage whisper.
When Comey described the encounter to his friend Benjamin Wittes, he said he was “disgusted.” The way Trump had leaned in made it look like a kiss. Comey “regarded the episode as a physical attempt to show closeness and warmth in a fashion calculated to compromise him, especially before Democrats who already mistrusted him,” Wittes recalled.
In the Mafia, a kiss signifies something more ominous: the imminent murder of the recipient.
THE NEXT DAY, in Sean Spicer’s first press briefing as White House press secretary, he again claimed that Flynn hadn’t discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador. Now that Trump was president and Flynn his national security adviser, the threat that Russia might exert leverage over Flynn was no longer an abstraction. Comey and McCabe decided that it was time to act.
The next day, January 24, at 12:30 p.m., McCabe called Flynn at the White House on a secure phone line to say he had a “sensitive matter” to discuss. He said the media coverage of Flynn’s contacts with Russian representatives had spawned some questions.
“You know what I said, because you guys were probably listening,” Flynn said.
McCabe let that pass without comment, but as a national security expert Flynn probably did know that the Russian embassy was likely to be tapped.
Flynn professed amazement that so much confidential information had found its way into the media and asked McCabe if he thought it had been leaked. McCabe said the FBI was indeed concerned about recent “significant” leaks. But in the meantime, he was hoping Flynn would sit down with two FBI agents as “quickly, quietly and discreetly as possible.” Flynn readily agreed, saying he was available that day. They settled on 2:30 p.m., less than two hours later, at Flynn’s new White House office.
McCabe also said he felt the “quickest way” to get the interview done was to have Flynn meet alone with the agents. It was okay if he wanted someone from the White House counsel’s office to be there, but then McCabe would have to get the Justice Department involved.
“It’s fine, just send your guys down here,” Flynn responded.
McCabe tapped Strzok and a more junior agent, Joe Pientka, for the mission, and they mapped out their strategy: to maintain a relaxed, congenial atmosphere, they wouldn’t explicitly warn Flynn that any false statement to an FBI agent is a crime. (Flynn surely knew that.) If Flynn did deny something they knew had been said, they wouldn’t argue or contradict him, but would ask the question using the exact words from the phone transcript in an effort to jog his memory.
The two agents arrived early, and Flynn gave them a brief tour of the West Wing. Strzok had never been in the White House by daylight and was struck by all the activity. Movers were carting boxes and moving art into the Oval Office, where Trump himself was supervising its placement. Flynn didn’t introduce them, but praised the president’s “knack” for interior design.
Once they settled into Flynn’s office, Flynn seemed “relaxed and jocular,” as Strzok later described him. He seemed “unguarded” and “clearly saw the FBI agents as allies,” like fellow members of the administration who were going to help clear up the annoying press accounts. He seemed oblivious that they might be investigating him, despite McCabe’s call.
In this atmosphere, Flynn seemed in no hurry, ranging from a discussion of hotels where he’d stayed, to his long work hours, to Islamic terrorism, which seemed to be a singular preoccupation. Strzok’s occasional reminder “I’m sure you’re busy and have other things to do” had no apparent effect, and Strzok was surprised that Flynn seemed to have so much time on his hands. Flynn struck Strzok as out of his depth and unsophisticated, such a contrast to the worldly, poised people surrounding Clinton and the White House officials he’d met during the Obama administration.
When the discussion finally turned to Russia, Flynn described his friendly relationship with Ambassador Kislyak and volunteered that his phone calls were to commiserate over the recent assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey (“and that was all”) and the crash of a Russian military plane. Strzok knew, of course, that both statements were false.
Strzok got more specific: Had Flynn discussed the expulsion of the Russian diplomats? Flynn said he hadn’t, and reiterated what he’d said before about condolences. Did Flynn ask Kislyak not to “escalate” the situation or engage in a “tit for tat”—the exact words from the intercepted call. “Not really; I don’t recall; it wasn’t, ‘don’t do anything,’” Flynn replied.
Both Strzok and Pientka knew what was in the intercept, and it wasn’t what Flynn said. But after they left, Pientka said, “For the life of me, it sure didn’t look like he was lying.”
Strzok agreed that Flynn’s demeanor had betrayed none of the usual signs of deception. Flynn had hedged only one of his answers (“I don’t recall”). He hadn’t fidgeted, hesitated, or avoided eye contact. If he was consciously lying, he’d done a remarkable job.
Back at FBI headquarters, Strzok and Pientka briefed Comey and McCabe, calling attention to Flynn’s confident demeanor. It was all the more baffling to McCabe, who pointed out that Flynn had indicated that he knew the conversation had been intercepted. But it didn’t change the fact that, as McCabe put it, Flynn’s statement “was in absolute, direct conflict” with the truth.
Comey had alerted Yates to the interview just before the agents went to the White House and briefed her on the outcome. She was “not happy” that once again the FBI had gone off on its own in a highly sensitive manner. But now Flynn was not only vulnerable to Russian influence; he had just committed multiple crimes by repeatedly lying to FBI agents. His position in the upper ranks of the Trump administration was clearly untenable. Before the investigation proceeded any further, the White House needed to be told.
Yates and a colleague met with the White House counsel, Don McGahn, at the White House two days later. The mild-mannered, anodyne McGahn, a longtime Republican operative who’d been the Trump campaign’s general counsel, was a welcome contrast to some of the outsize personalities now in the White House. His specialty was the minutiae of campaign finance law—he’d served for five years as a George W. Bush appointee on the Federal Election Commission—but he knew less about foreign policy or criminal law.
At the meeting, Yates summarized the Flynn situation and expressed her concern that he might be compromised because the Russians would know Flynn had lied to, among others, the vice president. She said Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI two days before—surprisingly, something McGahn seemed to know nothing about. While Yates wouldn’t say that Flynn lied to the FBI, too, she implied as much by saying he’d told the FBI the same things he had apparently told Pence and Priebus.
Yates got the impression McGahn realized it was serious, asking if the administration needed to fire Flynn. That seemed obvious, but Yates didn’t feel it was her place to make that call.
For his part, McGahn got the impression the FBI hadn’t really “pinned Flynn down” in a lie.
McGahn told Trump about Yates’s visit that evening and had to explain Title 18, Section 1001 of the U.S. Code, which makes false statements to a government official a crime, as well as the Logan Act. Trump didn’t want to fire Flynn; he thought doing so just weeks into his term would be terrible publicity. Still, Trump seemed angry and annoyed with Flynn. “Not again, this guy, this stuff,” he said.
But the person he was really annoyed with might well have been Comey, whose seeming obsession with Russia had led to the salacious dossier and had now ensnared one of Trump’s top advisers. When he dined later that evening with Dan Coats, his director of national intelligence, and other advisers, Trump was clearly preoccupied and troubled by Comey. He asked everyone at the dinner what they thought of the FBI director. While no one went so far as to suggest Trump fire him, their views were generally unfavorable: he was self-righteous, a grandstander. But Coats maintained Comey was a good director and suggested Trump spend more time with him before making any decision about his future.
Trump didn’t waste any time. The next day, Comey was lunching at his desk when Trump himself called and asked, “Can you come over for dinner tonight?”
Comey said he could, not mentioning that he and his wife had dinner plans.
“Will 6:00 work?” Trump asked. “I was going to invite your whole family but we’ll do it next time. Is that a good time?”
“Sir, whatever works for you.”
“How about 6:30?”
Comey agreed, but the request made him “deeply uncomfortable,” as he put it, given his mounting concern about Trump’s respect for the independence of the bureau. But surely others would be there as well, serving as a buffer. Comey felt he had little choice but to accept a personal invitation from the new president. He canceled the date with his wife.
Trump was determined that it would be dinner for just the two of them. Priebus and Bannon had both tried to insinuate themselves, without success. Trump seemed oblivious that it might be inappropriate, or that he might want a witness to the conversation. “Don’t talk about Russia, whatever you do,” Priebus warned.
As Trump entered the Green Room that evening, he complimented Comey on being early. “I like people who are on time,” he said. “I think a leader should always be on time.” To Comey’s dismay, he saw the table was set for just two. His name was written in calligraphy on a place card.
As plates of shrimp scampi were served, Trump asked, “So what do you want to do?”
Comey wasn’t sure what he meant.
As Trump continued, it became clear he was asking if Comey wanted to continue as FBI director, although Comey had already assured him that he did. At various points, Trump said he’d heard good things about Comey and knew that people at the FBI thought highly of him; that he’d nonetheless understand if Comey wanted to “walk away” from the job given all he’d been through; and that Trump could make a change in FBI leadership if he wished but wanted to hear what Comey had to say.
It was obvious that Trump had invited him to dinner “and decided my job security was on the menu.”
Comey had the distinct impression Trump wanted something in return for keeping him as FBI director—that Trump saw the director’s position as a form of patronage.
Comey said he loved his job, thought he performed it well, and wanted to serve out his term.
That didn’t seem to be enough. So Comey told Trump he could count on him to be “reliable.” By that he meant he’d always tell him the truth, wouldn’t leak, and wouldn’t do any “sneaky things” or “weasel moves.” But Comey said he wasn’t political by nature; he wasn’t on “anybody’s side.” That neutrality was in the president’s—and the nation’s—best interest, because it gave the FBI credibility. The public could trust it to resolve even the most politically charged investigations based on the facts and law, not ideology or power. It was the essence of the rule of law rather than survival of the strongest.
That seemed to make no impression on Trump.
Looking grave, Trump said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”
Comey said nothing, his gaze locked with the president’s. The silence continued.
An inner voice spoke to Comey: “Don’t do anything. Don’t you dare move.”
Trump finally broke the deadlock, looking down at his plate and launching into a rambling monologue. He boasted about the size of the crowds at his inauguration; the massive amount of free media he’d generated; how vicious the campaign was. He praised his interior design talent, gesturing about the room and comparing the White House favorably to Mar-a-Lago. “This is luxury,” he said. “And I know luxury.” He again denied that he’d grabbed a porn star or groped a woman on an airplane.
And he offered a succinct analysis of the Clinton email investigation: “Comey 1,” in which Comey had “saved her”; “Comey 2,” in which he’d done what he had to do by notifying Congress; and “Comey 3,” when he’d “saved Hillary again” but she “totally misplayed” that.
Two different times Trump brought up McCabe, asking if “your guy” has “a problem with me,” because “I was pretty rough on him and his wife during the campaign.”
Comey explained that, on the contrary, McCabe was “a true professional” and that “FBI people, whatever their personal views, they strip them away when they step into their bureau roles.”
All in all, Trump seemed to be enjoying himself. But Comey noticed he never laughed, which made an impression.
Eventually, Trump again turned to the incident involving the Moscow prostitutes—the “golden showers thing,” in Trump’s words—and said he was thinking of asking the FBI to investigate the allegation and prove it was a lie. It upset him, he said, that his wife, Melania, might think there was “even a one percent chance” it was true.
Comey said it was up to the president, but that proving a falsehood was often difficult, and it would also suggest Trump himself was being investigated.
“Maybe you’re right,” Trump said, but asked Comey to think about it.
Trump said he was happy Comey wanted to stay on as director and repeated what good things he’d heard about him. Comey began to think he might escape relatively unscathed.
But Trump was nothing if not tenacious. “I need loyalty,” he said again.
This time Comey couldn’t just ignore him. “You will always get honesty from me,” he said.
There was a pause. That wasn’t what he’d asked for.
“That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” Trump finally said.
It was some kind of compromise. “You will get that from me,” Comey promised.
As waiters arrived with vanilla ice cream, Trump broached the topic of Flynn, expressing irritation that he hadn’t told him about a call from Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, for six days. Trump pointed to his head. “The guy has serious judgment issues.”
But Trump said nothing about Flynn’s recent interview with FBI agents. Perhaps no one had told him. Comey scrupulously avoided the subject, saying nothing about the FBI’s ongoing probe.
The dinner had lasted about eighty minutes. As they rose from the table, Trump suggested Comey and his family come back for dinner sometime.
Comey froze.
“Or a tour,” Trump said awkwardly. “Whatever you think.”