David Warsh: The FBI's 'October surprise' and Trump’s election

SOMEVILLE, Mass.

As a citizen, I feel fairly confident about leaving judgment of Donald Trump’s presidency to American people in the November election.  As a journalist, I’m professionally acutely interested in the ongoing battle over the FBI, because it seems central to American’s faith in in its government institutions.

The story received another jolt last week when Atty. Gen. William Barr said the Justice Department would move to close the government’s case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Then on May 8, the president expressed dissatisfaction with the conduct of current FBI director, Christopher Wray, in a telephone interview with Fox News, as reported by The Washington Post.

Economic Principals readers have probably read enough about what critics think Attorney General Barr did wrong. If not, here’s a well-informed take is from the well-regarded online Lawfare site.

I wanted to know more about what its critics think the FBI did wrong. So after I read the commentary on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – more on that some other day – I turned to Barr’s interview with CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge, in which I thought that he gave a pretty good, if incomplete, account of his decision.  It was, he said, based on a review of the events of December 2016 and January 2017, undertaken at his request by Jeffrey Jensen, U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri.

Those events, between the election and Trump’s inauguration, transpired long before Barr became attorney general.  Looking back on it, Barr argued that the dominant opinion at the time had been mistaken.  He asserted that, since Flynn was a designated adviser to the president-elect at the time, his call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016 had been “perfectly appropriate and legitimate…. He was saying to the Russians, you know, ‘Don’t escalate.”’

The Obama administration earlier had imposed sanctions in retribution for Russian meddling in the U.S. election. When Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently took Flynn’s advice, the Russia controversy entered a new dimension. The rest of Barr’s reasoning for moving to vacate the charges of lying had to do with the timing of the FBI interviews that produced them.

It took pages of interview transcript to lay out Barr’s reasoning in the intricate matter. Even then, his argument was less than a convincing job. When Herridge pointedly asked, “Did senior FBI officials conspire to  throw out the national security adviser?,” Barr answered, “That’s a question that really has to wait an analysis of all the different episodes that occurred through the summer of 2016 and the first several months of President Trump’s administration.”   Presumably that would be the review that Barr asked John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to undertake. Durham’s assignment is understood to include an examination of the circumstances and events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

As previously noted, The Washington Post has reported that a third outside review, by John Huber, U.S. attorney for Utah, this one of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation, has been completed, and awaits action by Barr.

One other first-person account by a participant in these events remains to appear, this one by a dispassionate newspaper reporter. Devlin Barrett was working for The Wall Street Journal when he obtained an interview, with assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe it turned out, in which the existence of the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation was confirmed for the first time.  McCabe was subsequently fired for having made the disclosure. Barrett moved a few months later to The Washington Post and has remained an energetic contributor to the story ever since.

Barrett’s October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. (Public Affairs) is scheduled to appear in October. Its description on Amazon says this:

The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary’s blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center….

October Surprise is a pulsating narrative of an agency seized with righteous certainty that waded into the most important political moment in the life of the nation, and has no idea how to back out with dignity. So it doggedly stands its ground, compounding its error. In a momentous display of self-preservation, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and key Justice Department officials decide to protect their own reputations rather than save the democratic process. Once they make that determination, the race is lost for Clinton, who is helpless in front of their accusation even though she has not intended to commit, let alone actually committed, any crime.
A dark true-life thriller with historic consequences set at the most crucial moment in the electoral calendar, October Surprise is a warning, a morality tale and a political and personal tragedy.

Barrett believes, to judge from the flap copy, that the FBI cost Clinton the race. And, as a proximate cause, Comey’s letter notifying Congress that he had briefly reopened the investigation of her email probably did.

EP has argued from the beginning that various field offices of the FBI, as well as headquarters units, were torn, no less than the American electorate, by deep partisan divisions. Outsiders exploited these schisms with varying degrees of success.

Leadership sought to keep lids on warring factions, with profoundly mixed results. The November election will decide possession of the White House for the next four years, but neither Barr nor Durham nor Barrett will settle the battle over the FBI. Much remains to be learned.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

David Warsh: The lingering mysteries of the Clintons

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Donald Trump continues to advertise his itch to fire Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, presumably in hopes of short-circuiting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian probe. There is another reason thsat replacing Sessions is a bad idea.  The practices of the Clinton Family Foundation during the period  when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state remain under investigation by the FBI.

The existence of the Clinton probe was established a week before the 2016 election by reporter Devlin Barrett in The Wall Street Journal. A few months later, Barrett left the WSJ for The Washington Post. Earlier this year, Barrett and Matt Zapatosky reported that the investigation had continued after the election.

Confidence in the attorney general’s decision-making is thus doubly important. Sessions has shown himself to be sturdily perpendicular with respect to the Russia investigation; there is reason to expect his judgement will be level with respect to the Clinton matter as well.

Meanwhile, sniping at the FBI has continued, from Congress and in the conservative press. The feud within the Bureau apparently continues as well. Last week The Post’s Zapatosky reported that federal prosecutors had been using a grand jury to investigate charges that former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had lied when he denied authorizing the disclosure of the Clinton investigation in the first place, placing his own interests above those of the Justice Department, at least according to Michael Horowitz, the DOJ’s inspector general.

If the provenance of the FBI’s Russia investigation was somewhat tainted – Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for the so-called Steele Dossier, which helped prompt the investigation of Russian influence on the Trump campaign – the predicate of the Clinton Foundation investigation was apparently equally suspect. Agents in four FBI field offices had read copies of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweitzer, president of a foundation created by Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, and financed by the right-wing Mercer Family Foundation.

It has been clear since the 2016 election that the political legacy of Bill and Hillary Clinton is due for a full-scale reappraisal, as background to the 2020 campaign and beyond. Too few experts are working on the narrative of their foreign policies, chiefly NATO expansion and various humanitarian interventions; fewer still on the successes of their domestic policies; and fewest of all, I suspect, on the sources of the virulent opposition they faced, and their reaction to it. The Clinton Foundation seemed like a bad idea since the beginning. Whatever it concludes, the FBI investigation won’t make it any easier to begin to locate the Clintons in American history. That process will take decades.

David Warsh, a long-time columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.

David Warsh: Amidst scandals, centrists are gaining as Mueller plays a long game

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Prosecutors’ charges against 13 Russian individuals and organizations for interfering with the 2016 presidential election are the latest step in a lengthy and painful process in which serious people of both political parties are working to straighten the U.S. political narrative out of a very difficult twist of the plot.

Remember its central feature; it now seems a long time ago.  The 2016 campaign was widely expected, at least for a time, to become a Hillary Clinton-Jeb Bush rematch -– a continuation of a 25-year antagonism in which both candidates had been damaged.  That prospect was so unattractive that challengers arose in both parties – 16 of them in the Republican case. Bernie Sanders failed to win his party’s nomination, but Donald Trump improbably gained his. The election campaign began. As Michael Wolf’s Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House (Henry Holt, 2018) makes clear, Donald Trump never expected to win.

Two disruptive forces of particular interest intervened in the election itself.  One was the  Russian interference.  The other was an incipient FBI mutiny, involving agents in at least four field offices, eager to indict Clinton for matters related to the Clinton Foundation, and threatening to go to the press or to Congress.  Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett surfaced as much in "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe''  (subscription required) on Monday, Oct. 31, 2016, a few weeks before he left the WSJ for The Washington Post.  Those angry agents had a point, of course: there was something suspect about the Clinton Foundation from the very beginning. But the late stages of a presidential campaign is no time to begin an investigation.

The Russian campaign has received a great deal of attention, the FBI mutiny hardly any at all, but it was the threat of disclosure of previously unexamined Clinton e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop that forced  then FBI Director James Comey to reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private server. As former WSJ columnist Bret Stephens wrote last month in The New York Times (he moved to The Times a few months after the election), the FBI “probably did more than any other agency of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled FBI field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton e-mail investigation 11 days before the election.”

It is impossible to say with any real authority that either intervention tipped the election.  Clinton contends that Comey cost her the White House. Trump pretends that he received no such help. This much is clear: Had Clinton won, she would by now be up to her ears in investigations of the Clinton Foundation, from Congress at least.  Talk about the winner’s curse!

The new indictments mean that the Russian meddling that Trump has repeatedly denounced as a “hoax” turns out to have been quite real.  The charges make it much more difficult to fire Mueller. The president was quick to pronounce himself off the hook.  Soon after the Justice Department delivered the news, he tweeted, “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion!”

Yet there are many more steps to go. It is still very much an open question whether Trump will serve out his term; it is highly unlikely that he could be re-elected. Congressional Republicans remain in Trump’s corner, it is true. Some development may yet turn them against him. Maybe.  Maybe not.

Meanwhile, dealing with FBI mutineers remains part of the problem, moving them onto side tracks, or out of the bureau altogether, proceedings the still-divided agency understandably hopes to keep within the family.  They may not be able to.  Part of Trump’s aim in firing Comey presumably had to do with hopes of advancing the careers of agents who helped him during the campaign, including the mutineers. The rogues continue to stick up for themselves, in leaks to two WSJ columnists, William McGurn and Holman Jenkins Jr. (subscription required). Former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani has all but disappeared from the news, after serving as one end of a conduit for “outraged FBI agents” during the campaign.

This is how plot lines adjust. Elections take time. It doesn’t help for the enraged Left to say that the Republican Party “basically lies about everything.” Everything?  Deputy Atty. Gen.  Rod Rosenstein announced Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments last week – both men are long-time Republicans.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a James Baker III proxy, is still on the job. So are White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the other two calming generals:  Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Meanwhile, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced his candidacy last week for the Senate in Utah. If elected, he will take on the role performed to this point by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) – a conscience of sorts for a political party that has otherwise lost its head.

The sooner the current Republican majority in Congress loses power to the Democrats, the sooner that sensible women and men can begin rebuilding the party. The Democrats’ own major rebuilding is well underway.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time business and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.

Post-election notes

Four fast observations after Trump's victory:

1. Perhaps in the next presidential primaries, more people will get off their rear ends and bother to vote so we don't end up with the  general-election choices we had this year.

2. Look for an amusingly rapid drop in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

3. Trumpists are going to be mighty angry in about a  year when all those promises about swiftly returning America to "greatness'' look hollow. I wonder where they will turn then.

4. This has been Mrs. Clinton's last political campaign. The Clintons are history.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Don Pesci: '600,000 e-emails from heaven'

VERNON, Conn.

It strains credulity to imagine the Clintons – Bill and Hillary, who was Bill’s co-president for eight years – as victims, and yet there it is.

James Carville, for many years the Clinton’s backyard attack dog, really does think that FBI Director James Comey has victimized Mrs. Clinton. After having declined to prosecute (persecute?) Mrs. Clinton for having placed thousands of unsecured confidential e-mails on her private unauthorized server, exposing America’s underwear to anonymous hackers, Mr. Comey’s FBI team discovered thousands of additional unsecured e-mails while rifling through Anthony Weiner’s hamper. Mr. Weiner, married to Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s closest aide, was kicked to the curb by Ms. Abedin for sending salacious emails to Internet paramours.

It was Ms. Abedin’s habit to “’routinely forward e-mails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,’’ the agents wrote. Why? ‘’So she could print them’’ at home and not at her State Department office.” Ms. Abedin was, agents have said, “the only person at DOS (Department of State) to receive an e-mail account on the (clintonemail.com) domain....”

Since a good many of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails had been destroyed, many after Mrs. Clinton had received from Congress a subpoena instructing her to preserve them for a future hearing, the FBI team must have been pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a new cache of 600,000 e-mails.

Mrs. Clinton was once a U.S. senator from New York and, as such, was intimately familiar during her tenure as secretary of state with congressional subpoenas. As senator, she also was well versed in the protocol relating to top-secret information. She decided to ignore all this and set up her own unsecured server, and the rivers of difficulties that issued from her very nearly divine arrogance are all traceable to her poor judgment.

Yet here she is stretched on a cross fashioned by Mr. Comey – and, of course, the Russians – according to Mr. Carville. The rules of victimology now require us to offer her pity, the political version of holy water. But there is an insuperable problem: Mrs. Clinton is not a pitiable creature, nor are her minions, some of whom are refuges from the Obama administration, while others have long been associated with her. She is, instead, ruthless, greedy, self-serving and lacking in pity for those of her friendly political acquaintances who have taken bullets for her in the past.

Mrs. Clinton’s faithful body-tender, Huma Abedin, and her campaign director, John Podesta, have both been much in the news lately. Eventually, someone close to Mrs. Clinton will be pushed out of the campaign boat into shark-infested waters, a politically necessary media sacrifice to draw attention away from America’s answer to Lucretia Borgia. Some are guessing it might be Mr. Podesta but, in a pinch, any warm body will do.

Almost two years ago, when America awoke to find Mrs. Clinton was chatting with the world on a private unsecured server, Mr. Podesta wrote to Cheryl Mills, chief of staff under Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, “Not to sound like Lanny [Davis], but we are going to have to dump all those e-mails so better to do so sooner than later.’’

Ms. Mills later would be given immunity from prosecution by Mr. Comey, after having turned over to FBI investigators her own computer (was it wiped?) which later was destroyed by the FBI. Ms. Mills was given immunity, as were others who might have been squeezed by the FBI for valuable information. But Mr. Comey already had decided that a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton could not successfully be pursued.

Following his announcement that he could not establish “intent,” the roof fell in. “Intent,” it was discovered, was not necessary for prosecution, according to the relevant statutes. Mr. Comey’s wife was badgering him; FBI agents were handing in their resignations; walking through the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building in Washington D.C., Comey was snubbed by underlings; the ghost of J. Edgar was laughing behind his back.

And then 600,000 e-mails fell like manna from Heaven.

Mr. Carville is a hard-boiled political operative, a survivor of the Clinton’s bruising internecine battles. So, he is lost to sound sense. But one finds, even among journalists for whom a Trump Presidency is regarded as a disaster, a sense that although Trump is wrong about pretty much everything, he is right about the Clintons – a couple of crooks, those two.

Now we are advised by Britain’s Daily Mail, there are no fewer than “five investigations underway involving Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin's estranged husband  allegedly sexting a 15-year-old; the handling of classified material by Clinton and her staff on her private e-mail server; questions over whether the Clinton Foundation was used as a front for influence-peddling; whether the Virginia governor broke laws about foreign donations; and whether Hillary's campaign c chairman's brother did the same.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political essayist.