The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FBI CHIEF HAD NO EASY CALL ON CLINTON, TRUMP CASES
FBI investigations land at center of bitter election.
WASHINGTON — The day before he upended the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all day, and it was time for a decision.
Comey’s plan was to tell Congress that the FBI had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner. The move would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or do anything that may influence an election. But Comey had declared the case closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed.
“Should you consider what you’re about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” an adviser asked him, Comey recalled recently at a closed meeting with FBI agents.
He could not let politics affect his decision, he replied.
“If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we’re done,” he told the agents.
Fearing the backlash that would come if it were revealed after the election that the FBI had been investigating the next president and had kept it a secret, Comey sent a letter informing Congress that the case was reopened.
What he did not say was that the FBI was also investigating the Trump campaign. Just weeks before, Comey had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. Only in March, long after the election, did Comey confirm that there was one.
For Comey, keeping the FBI out of politics is such a preoccupation that he once said he would never play basketball with President Barack Obama because of the appearance of being chummy with the man who appointed him. But the leader of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency shaped the contours, if not the outcome, of the presidential race by his handling of the Clinton and Trump-related investigations.
An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former law enforcement, congressional and other government officials, found that while partisanship was not a factor in Comey’s approach to the two investigations, he handled them in starkly different ways.
In the case of Clinton, he rewrote the script, partly based on the FBI’s expectation that she would win and fearing the bureau would be accused of helping her. In the case of Trump, he conducted the investigation by the book, with the FBI’s traditional secrecy.
The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other FBI officials felt had provided Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, who Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.
The examination also showed that at one point, Obama himself was reluctant to disclose the suspected Russian influence in the election last summer, for fear his administration would be accused of meddling.
Comey has not squarely addressed his decisions last year. He has touched on them only obliquely, asserting that the FBI is blind to partisan considerations.
“We just don’t care. We can’t care,” he said at a public event recently. “We only ask: ‘What are the facts? What is the law?’”
But circumstances and choices landed him in uncharted and perhaps unwanted territory, as he made what he thought were the least damaging choices from even less desirable alternatives.
“This was unique in the history of the FBI,” said Michael Steinbach, a former senior national security official at the FBI. “People say, ‘This has never been done before.’ Well, there never was a before. Or ‘That’s not normally how you do it.’ There wasn’t anything normal about this.”
Opening the investigation
The FBI’s involvement with Clinton’s emails began in July 2015 when it received a letter from the inspector general for the intelligence community.
The letter said classified information had been found on Clinton’s home email server, which she had used as secretary of state. Comey’s deputies quickly concluded that there was reasonable evidence that a crime may have occurred in the way classified materials were handled.
On July 10, 2015, the FBI opened a criminal investigation, code-named “Midyear,” into Clinton’s handling of classified information. The Midyear team included two dozen investigators led by a senior analyst and by an experienced FBI supervisor, Peter Strzok.
The FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server was the biggest political story in the country in the fall of 2015. But something much bigger was happening in Washington. And nobody recognized it.
While agents were investigating Clinton, the Democratic National Committee’s computer system was compromised. It appeared to have been the work of Russian hackers. The significance of this moment is obvious now, but it did not immediately cause alarm at the FBI or the Justice Department.
Months passed before the DNC and the FBI met to address the hacks. And it would take more than a year for the government to conclude that Russian President Vladimir Putin had an audacious plan to steer the outcome of an American election.
In spring last year, Strzok reported to Comey that Clinton had clearly been careless, but agents and prosecutors agreed that they had no proof of intent. Nine months into the investigation, it became clear to Comey that Clinton was almost certainly not going to face charges.
He quietly began work on talking points, toying with the notion that, in the midst of a bitter presidential campaign, a Justice Department led by Democrats may not have the credibility to close the case and that he alone should explain that decision to the public.
As the Clinton investigation headed into its final months, there were two very different ideas about how the case would end. Lynch and her advisers thought a short statement would suffice.
Comey was making his own plans, and a chance encounter set those plans in motion.
‘Extremely careless’
In late June, Lynch’s plane touched down at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as part of her nationwide tour of police departments. Bill Clinton was also in Phoenix that day, leaving from the same tarmac. When the former president learned who was on the plane, his aides say, he asked to say hello.
The meeting was soon the talk of Washington. Lynch said they had only exchanged pleasantries, but Republicans called for her to recuse herself and appoint a special prosecutor. Lynch said she would not step aside but would accept whatever career prosecutors and the FBI recommended on the Clinton case — something she had planned to do all along.
Comey never suggested that she recuse herself. But at that moment, he knew for sure that when there was something to say about the case, he alone would say it.
Agents interviewed Hillary Clinton for more than 3 1/2 hours in Washington the next day, and the interview did not change the unanimous conclusion among agents and prosecutors that she should not be charged.
Two days later, on the morning of July 5, Comey called Lynch to say that he was about to hold a news conference. On short notice, the FBI summoned reporters to its headquarters for the briefing.
“Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position” should have known better, Comey said. He called her “extremely careless.”
The criticism was so blistering that it sounded as if he were recommending criminal charges. Only in the final minutes did Comey say that “no charges are appropriate in this case.”
The script had been revised several times, former officials said. Strzok, Steinbach, lawyers and others debated every phrase. But the team ultimately agreed that there was an obligation to inform American voters.
“We didn’t want anyone to say, ‘If I just knew that, I wouldn’t have voted that way,’” Steinbach said. “You can argue that’s not the FBI’s job, but there was no playbook for this. This is somebody who’s going to be president of the United States.”
By midsummer, as Clinton was about to accept her party’s nomination for president, another tumultuous investigation was about to heat up.
Russian interference
Days after Comey’s news conference, Carter Page, an American businessman, gave a speech in Moscow criticizing U.S. foreign policy. Page had been under FBI scrutiny years earlier, as he was believed to have been marked for recruitment by Russian spies. And he was now a foreign policy adviser to Trump.
Page has not said whom he met during his July visit to Moscow, describing them as “mostly scholars.” But Page later traveled to Moscow again, raising new concerns among counterintelligence agents. A former senior U.S. intelligence official said Page met with a suspected intelligence officer on one of those trips and there was information that the Russians were still very interested in recruiting him.
In late July, the FBI opened an investigation into possible collusion between members of Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. Strzok, just days removed from the Clinton case, was selected to supervise it.
In late August, Comey and his deputies were briefed on a provocative set of documents, from a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, about purported dealings between shadowy Russian figures and Trump’s campaign. It was increasingly clear at the FBI that Russia was trying to interfere with the election.
As the FBI plunged deeper into that investigation, Comey became convinced that the American public needed to understand the scope of the foreign interference and be “inoculated” against it. He proposed writing an op-ed piece to appear in The Times or The Washington Post, and showed the White House a draft his staff had prepared. The article did not mention the investigation of the Trump campaign, but it laid out how Russia was trying to undermine the vote.
The president replied that going public would play right into Russia’s hands by sowing doubts about the election’s legitimacy. Trump was already saying the system was “rigged,” and if the Obama administration accused Russia of interference, Republicans could accuse the White House of stoking national security fears to help Clinton.
Comey argued that he had unique credibility to call out the Russians and avoid that criticism. After all, he said, he had just chastised Clinton at his news conference. The White House decided it would be odd for Comey to make such an accusation on his own, before U.S. security agencies had produced a formal intelligence assessment. The op-ed idea was quashed.
Even in classified briefings with House and Senate intelligence committee members, Comey repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether there was an investigation of the Trump campaign. But by fall, the gravity of the Russian effort to affect the presidential election had become clear.
Comey and other senior administration officials met twice in the White House Situation Room in early October to again discuss a public statement about Russian meddling. But the roles were reversed: Susan Rice, the national security adviser, wanted to move ahead. Comey was less interested in being involved.
At their second meeting, Comey argued that it would look too political for the FBI to comment so close to the election, according to several people in attendance.
Weiner’s role
The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, was first with the salacious story: Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman, had exchanged sexually charged messages with a 15-year-old girl. Within days, prosecutors in Manhattan sought a search warrant for Weiner’s computer.
Even with his notoriety, this would have had little impact on national politics but for one coincidence. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, was one of Clinton’s closest confidantes, and had used an email account on her server.
FBI agents in New York seized Weiner’s laptop in early October. Eventually, investigators realized that they had hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which belonged to Abedin and had been backed up to her husband’s computer.
Then, agents in New York who were searching files on Weiner’s computer discovered messages linked to Clinton. The election was two weeks away.
Comey learned of the Clinton emails on the evening of Oct. 26 and gathered his team the next morning to discuss the development. Seeking a new search warrant was an easy decision, but he had a thornier issue on his mind.
Back in July, he told Congress that the Clinton investigation was closed. What was his obligation, he asked, to acknowledge that this was no longer true? It would push the FBI back into the political arena, weeks after refusing to confirm the active investigation of the Trump campaign.
Agents felt they had two options: Tell Congress about the search, which everyone acknowledged would create a political furor, or keep it quiet, which followed policy and tradition but carried its own risk, especially if the FBI found new evidence in the emails.
“In my mind at the time, Clinton is likely to win,” Steinbach said. “It’s pretty apparent. So what happens after the election, in November or December? How do we say to the American public: ‘Hey, we found some things that might be problematic. But we didn’t tell you about it before you voted’? The damage to our organization would have been irreparable.”
FBI lawyers raised concerns, former officials said. But in the end, Comey said he felt obligated to tell Congress.
“I went back and forth, changing my mind several times,” Steinbach recalled. “Ultimately, it was the right call.”
The next morning, Oct. 28, Comey wrote to Congress, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”
His letter became public within minutes. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, announced on Twitter, “Case reopened.”
At the FBI, the Clinton investigative team was reassembled, and the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read emails to or from Clinton during her time at the State Department. As it turned out, only about 50,000 emails met those criteria, far fewer than anticipated, officials said, and the FBI had already seen many of them.
On Nov. 6, two days before Election Day, Strzok and his team were back in Comey’s conference room for a final briefing: Nothing had changed what Comey had said in July. That afternoon, Comey sent a second letter to Congress. “Based on our review,” he wrote, “we have not changed our conclusions.”
‘Stopped our momentum’
Comey did not vote on Election Day, records show, the first time he skipped a national election, according to friends. But the director of the FBI was a central story line on every television station as Trump swept to an upset victory.
Many factors explained Trump’s success, but Clinton blamed just one.
“Our analysis is that Comey’s letter — raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be — stopped our momentum,” she told donors a few days after the election.
For all the attention on Clinton’s emails, history is likely to see Russian influence as the more significant story of the 2016 election. Questions about Russian meddling and possible collusion have marred Trump’s first 100 days in the White House, cost him his national security adviser and triggered two congressional investigations. Despite Trump’s assertions that “Russia is fake news,” the White House has been unable to escape its shadow.
Last month before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey acknowledged for the first time what had been widely reported: The FBI was investigating members of the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia.