David Warsh: How some rebellious FBI agents pushed Comey into tipping 2016 election to Trump
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Donald J Trump is unlikely to win a second term. It may seem beside the point to dwell on the circumstances in which he was elected in the first place. It isn’t. Understanding the events of the last days of the 2016 campaign is essential to understanding some of the difficulties that lie ahead.
To be clear, two quite different controversies have been unfolding over the last four years. Both involve the FBI. One concerns the investigation of connections among Trump, his businesses; his campaign and Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, Paul Manafort, the Steele dossier, Russian hackers, WikiLeaks, shadowy Russians promising dirt, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, future short-lived National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and all that.
The other revolves around accusations of political partisanship, one way or another, within the FBI: Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, agent Peter Strzok, FBI attorney Lisa Page, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, former U.S. Attorney and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and so on. The two stories overlap occasionally, but not much.
When it comes to the second, more important story, the place to start is October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election (Public Affairs, 2020), by Devlin Barrett, of The Washington Post.
As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Barrett wrote four crucial stories in ten days on the eve of the election. One of them has been at the center of the battles surrounding the FBI ever since. Now, after nearly four years as reporter for the WPost, Barrett has written a book that makes intelligible the whole tangled affair. October Surprise is an important book.
Barrett’s first article, headlined “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife,” appeared 10 days before the election. It disclosed that Deputy Director McCabe’s wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, a 2015 candidate for Virginia Senate, had received $467,500 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee. (She was defeated.) McAuliffe was a long-time ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor, in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member. Barrett noted that McAuliffe had been under investigation by the FBI’s Washington field office in a probe of $120,000 of donations to his campaign by a Chinese businessman with no specified charge.
The second story, “FBI Reviewing Newly Discovered Emails in Clinton Server Probe,” described the letter that FBI Director James Comey had sent that day to Congress. He was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email he had unilaterally closed three months before, because of the discovery of a laptop computer. Byron Tau had the first byline; Barrett apparently contributed essential background on the “dysfunctional relationship between Justice Department and the FBI.”
Barrett’s third story, “FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe” appeared eight days before the election. It revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The probe had begun a year before; by early 2016 four field offices – Little Rock, Los Angeles, New York and Washington were investigating charges that financial crimes or influence peddling had occurred at the charity. Some agents had grown frustrated, believing that FBI leadership balked at the probe, perhaps ordered by Obama administration Justice Department officials to close it down.
In fact, Deputy Director McCabe had turned aside Justice Department inquiries in August 2016, Barrett reported, “according to people familiar with the conversation.” At one point, McCabe had challenged a supervisor, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a properly predicated investigation?” After a pause, the official replied, “No, of course not,” according to Barrett’s unidentified source. The investigation continued, though in a low key way, in the months before the election.
Barrett’s fourth story, “Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe,” confirmed details of stories that had appeared the day before and added some of his own. The Clinton Foundation investigation had been predicated on, among another things, a book, Clinton Cash, written by a former George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Schweizer, and bankrolled by Steve Bannon, a couple of years before he became Trump’s campaign manager. A secret recording of a source boasting of deals allegedly done by the Clintons was another element, according to Barrett.
All that in the two weeks before the election.
It was Comey’s decision to reopen the email investigation that dominated the news, but Barrett’s second and third stories had disclosed the existence of a much more complicated battle within the FBI. The significance of the laptop emails themselves quickly evanesced, but the anger about Clinton’s private server was renewed. It seems likely that the reopened investigation, not Russian tampering, provided the push that put Trump over the top.
The Clinton Foundation investigation has flitted in and out of the public eye ever since, most recently as the basis for Trump’s increasingly urgent exhortations to Attorney General Barr to indict one or both Clintons for felony influence-peddling. John Huber, the U.S. Attorney in Utah, tasked by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review the Clinton investigation, has been reported to have found nothing worth pursuing, and forwarded his report to Barr. The matter is now in the hands of FBI Director Christopher Wray, former Connecticut US Attorney John Durham and Barr. Barr’s decision is expected not long after the election.
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Every complicated story requires a timeline. Barrett took this truth to heart and built the timeline into the narrative. His book is divided into three parts. The first involves stage-setting and background. The middle part starts with Comey’s unilateral decision on July 5 to make public his recommendation that no charges be filed against Clinton for her email practices. It ends with the November election. It takes up 60 percent of the book’s 324 pages; the chapters are dated (including named days of the week) and sequential. The third part relates what happened over the next four years. Barrett has an advantage in the telling, especially myriad details established by the Justice Department Inspector General’s review, including the real-time intimate commentary on matters via the work-phone texts of agent Strzok and FBI lawyer Page. The result verges on point-of-view ubiquity. You know, or like to think you know, what nearly everybody is thinking.
Thus Barrett begins his account with the 2012 drone-missile strike against suspected terrorists meeting in a tent in the wilds if Waziristan, a mountainous region of Pakistan, a few details of which were incorporated in emails that eventually wind up on Hillary Clinton’s private server. In a few pages Barrett follows the path of their discovery to an FBI manager’s determination, in July 2015, to pursue a criminal investigation instead of a more easily finessed “spillage review.”
There follows a chapter on Comey, another on McCabe, the man he chose as his deputy, and a third on Loretta Lynch, whom Comey had known and liked since both were young assistant US attorneys in Brooklyn in the 1990s. In 2016, as Attorney General, she was Comey’s boss. A fourth chapter is devoted to Lynch’s decision to meet with former President Bill Clinton, whom she knew to be under FBI investigation, when, in their respective planes, both were delayed by a storm in Phoenix, Arizona. These are commodious chapters and allow Barrett to equip the reader with all sorts of relevant knowledge: the divisions arising from the rapid expansion of the FBI’s responsibilities after 9/11 to include counter-terrorism duties as well as traditional law enforcement work; the effect on Comey of his brief sabbatical from government work as chief of security at Bridgewater Associates, a successful hedge fund; and a description of changing attitudes about race and gender at the Justice Department.
The middle part, the timeline, proceeds at a breakneck-pace, one astonishing development after another, on the Clinton and Trump campaign trails (30,000 emails said to be non-job-related had been deleted from the Clinton server; “Russia, if you’re listening…,” said Trump), down to those final four weeks, week-by-week, finally day-by-day, beginning on September 27. That was the day on which FBI agent John Robertson, a specialist in child abuse, assigned to search Anthony Wiener’s laptop computer in New York (one of Wiener’s texting partners was 15 years old), discovered a trove of 141,000 previously unexamined Clinton emails that had been forwarded to her friend and close State Department associate Huma Abedin, Wiener’s wife. Robertson forwarded the news to Washington the next day, where the discovery was shared among thirty senior managers in a conference call. (This is the point at which begin the portions of the manuscript published by The Washington Post, starting on page one, last month.)
There follow three weeks in which nothing was done to search the emails. So much else was going on – a tug-of-war over the Steele dossier, the first Wikileaks of the Democratic National Committee emails. It turns out that inattention to the laptop was the result of a stand-off. New York agents wanted a warrant. McCabe, though he consulted Strzok, didn’t seek one; nor did he tell his boss, who had been at a hearing on Capitol Hill on the day the discovery was announced, being grilled by Republican members of the Freedom Caucus. By Wednesday Oct. 19, Robertson was getting nervous. He consulted FBI lawyers, who warned him that if he leaked news of the laptop, he could go to prison. He composed a memorandum to himself.
On Monday, Oct. 24, the first of Barrett’s bombshell stories, appeared, “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife.” At this point Barrett’s play-by-play of six chapter, 62 pages, becomes too intricate to describe – and too absorbing to put down. On Tuesday, Nov. 8, the election was held. Trump won, by the narrowest of margins. The rest is the third part of Barrett’s book.
The last section of October Surprise describes the fallout from those few weeks. The very day Comey was fired, May 9, 2017, McCabe told bureau internal investigators that he had “no idea” where the leak in Barrett’s third story came from. Confirming that the Clinton Foundation was under investigation was a serious breach of the rules. It turned out he had himself authorized two of his aides to travel to Manhattan to make the disclosures in person to Barrett. McCabe was fired, and subsequently nearly indicted for lying under oath. Robert Mueller began his investigation. The extra-marital affair between Strzok and Page was discovered, their emails belittling Trump widely read. They were humiliated and reassigned. In his final chapter, Barrett comes down hardest on Comey as a well-meaning moralist, who without intending to, opened Pandora’s box. “Whoever wins the 2020 election, the once-sacrosanct ten-year term of FBI directors may be cut short again,” Barrett concludes.
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Quite aside from the light it casts on the election, October Surprise must be one of the best books ever written on the practice of newspaper journalism. Certainly I’ve never read a better one: only The Making of the President (1960), by Theodore White, and All the President’s Men (1974), by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, compare. Its virtue, however, obscures a weakness. Barrett’s book is a strictly internal history. From whom does the FBI seek to “save itself,” as the subtitle asks? From itself; from departures from its own ideals of Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity; from blemishes to the reputation it had largely regained in the years since Watergate.
Surely it is equally true that the bureau’s top managers were trying to insulate both the agency and its Justice Department overseers from outsiders seeking to persuade its agents to act for illegitimate political purposes. These outsiders don’t appear in Barrett’s account. There is no Freedom Caucus of scapegoating Congressional Republicans, no Fox News, no Bannon, no Breitbart, and no Wall Street Journal editorial page. The story of criminalizing political behavior reaches back to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Investigation, and the “Contra-gate” scandal of the Reagan years.
Thus in some ways the most interesting figure in Barrett’s book appears only once, at the very beginning. He is Mike Steinbach, assistant director for the FBI’s Counter-Terrorism Division. It was he who made the decision to investigate certain disclosures of classified matters on Clinton’s email server as a possible criminal matter, rather than a much less serious “spillage case.” He then circulated news of what he had done in a memo to his colleagues. What was he thinking? It is pointless to ask. The FBI has 34,000 employees. You can’t call those among them who disapprove of Hillary Clinton “mutineers.” It is an organization that has to be led.
But the take-away lesson of Barrett’s book is that a spreading campaign among a relative handful of rebellious FBI agents stampeded the director into a disclosure that tipped the election to Donald Trump. That is a considerable blot on the Bureau’s escutcheon to live down. And after the inauguration? That is part of the story, too. As noted in Lawfare, Inspector General Horowitz’s report including this exchange of texts between two agents on Nov. 9, 2016, both of them working on campaign issues:
Handling Agent: “Trump!”
Co-Case Handling Agent: “Hahaha. Shit just got real.”
Handling Agent: “Yes it did.”
Co-Case Handling Agent: “I saw a lot of scared MFers on…[my way to work] this morning. Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.”
Handling Agent: “LOL”
A persuasive external account of the factors leading to Comey’s fateful decision will be many years in coming. The author must aspire to the same high standards as Barrett’s internal account. In the meantime, get ready for Attorney General’s Barr’s decision with respect to the Clinton Foundation investigation, and to President Trump’s reaction to it. If Biden is elected, no Cabinet appointment that he makes will be more important than Attorney General. Follow the story in The Washington Post.id
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this first appeared.
David Warsh: Two heroes -- Volcker and Comey
Paul Volcker
James Comey
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
It’s difficult to explain heroics of the past to young leaders of the present day. Circumstances change so swiftly, new perils mount with such sudden speed that what was required even forty years ago in terms of preparation, ingenuity, and courage may fail to impress – especially if it happens to involve monetary policy.
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker died recently at 92. In recognition of his passing, I read the superbly detailed “The Reform of October 1979: How It Happened and Why,’’ by David Lindsey, Athanasios Orphanides and Robert Rasche. Their article was written for a conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on the twenty-fifth anniversary of a momentous change.
It was on a Saturday evening — Oct. 6, 1979 — that Volcker summoned reporters to the Fed, the first such press conference in the central bank’s history. Volcker had recently been appointed to the job by President Jimmy Carter. The atmosphere in financial markets was one of crisis. A climactic meeting of the system’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee had ended three hours before.
Volcker announced that, after decades of seeking to control inflation by manipulating the price of money, meaning the short-term interest rates it controlled itself, the Fed would henceforth begin targeting the quantity of money instead. After decades relying entirely on Keynesian doctrine, the Fed would capitulate to its monetarist critics and see what would happen. Whatever the change meant in theory, policy-makers knew that in practice they were tying their hands with respect to interest rates. Monetary stringency meant that market rates would move to heights that the FOMC never would have dared to have explicitly voted.
A crushing recession followed, complicated by much political byplay. To make a long and scary story short, market participants of all sorts gradually revised downward their expectations of future price increases. Convinced that the Fed’s governors would not relent, world markets began a financial asset boom. By 1985 inflation had declined to 3.4 percent, from the 12 percent annual rate during Volcker’s first year on the job.
Meanwhile, the FOMC quietly gave up on the policy of seeking to manage “the money supply” and returned to targeting interest rates. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke would later explain, deregulation and financial innovation meant that they couldn’t get a handle on the behavior of the monetary aggregates, no matter which one they chose.
There are accounts of Volcker’s story for every taste and attention span. The best is William Silber’s narrative of his friend’s career, Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (Bloomsbury, 2012). Stephen Axilrod’s Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and its Management, Martin through Greenspan (MIT, 2011). Volcker’s autobiography, Keeping at It: the Quest for Sound Money and Good Government (Public Affairs, 2018), written with Christine Harper, gives the fullest flavor of the man. For a short course, you can’t beat the obit in The New York Times.
I particularly admire The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, by Robert Samuelson (Random House, 2009), Samuelson covered the events of those years as a newspaper reporter and columnist, first for Newsweek, then for The Washington Post. He decided to write the book, he explained, because no one else had, or apparently would. He began
History is what we say it is. If you asked a group of scholars to name the most important landmarks in the American story of the past half-century, they would some or all of the following: the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s resignation; the sexual revolution; the invention of the computer chip; Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980; the end of the Cold War; the creation of the Internet; the emergence of AIDS; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and the two wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003). Looking ahead, these scholars might include other developments: the rise of Japan as a major economic power in the 1970s and 1980s’ the emergence of China in the 1980s from its self-imposed isolation’ and the spread of nuclear weapons (to China, India, Pakistan, and others.) But missing from any list would be the rise and fall of double-digit US inflation. This would be a huge oversight.
Many of Volcker’s efforts after leaving office, in 1987 were devoted to improving the lot of public servants. Instead, their standing has continued to degrade. Especially striking therefore was the afterword for the paperback edition of Keeping at It, which he finished in September. It appeared Friday as a column on the op-ed page of the Financial Times, under the headline “Paul Volcker’s Final Warning for America’’.
Increasingly, by design or not, there appears to be a movement to undermine Americans’ faith in our government and its policies and institutions. We’ve moved well beyond former President Ronald Reagan’s credo that ‘government is the problem.’ with its aim of reversing decades of government expansion.
Today we see something very different and far more sinister. Nihilistic forces are dismantling policies to protect our air, water, and climate. And they seek to discredit the pillars of our democracy: voting rights and fair elections, the rule of law, the free press, the separation of powers, the belief in science, and the concept of truth itself.
That brought the story forward to last week. As I listened, on a long drive, to congressional Republicans defend Donald Trump on a long drive, I thought about another civil servant, this one a hero of the present day. It always seemed to me that Volcker’s attitude towards his job had something to do with his physical stature. He was 6 feet 7 inches tall. His seriousness may have derived in part from his height (and, of course, in part from his parents), but his authority stemmed from his seriousness. In the end being tall simply helped.
Similarly tall, and, as far as I can tell, similarly motivated, is former FBI Director James Comey. If Comey is not as slyly funny as was Volcker, he is at least as high-minded, or perhaps more, by as much as an inch – he is 6 feet 8 inches tall. He is also scrupulously honest (an undesirable trait in a central banker), yesterday acknowledging that the FBI had loaded the dice when they sought court permission to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Today the battles of the Trump presidency present a complicated landscape. In another forty years, though, my hunch is that it will be Comey who will be seen to have symbolically slain the dragon.
David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where column first appeared.
David Warsh: Repudiation, not impeachment, should be the goal
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
A couple of weeks after the 2016 election, I argued that Donald Trump had become a president by accident. He hadn’t chosen his cabinet yet, and I was prepared to give him the benefit of at least some doubts. He was certainly smart enough to be president, I wrote, “but in one respect he is especially ill-equipped for the job’s most important requirement – that of narrator-in-chief.”
At best I was half right. The match-up was indeed an accident. The failure of either party to produce a suitable candidate in timely fashion permitted Trump to slip in. But once he gained the GOP nomination, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton on his own,.
Trump is a bully, a thug, a draft dodger, a tax cheat, a finagler. He is corrupt to his core. But one thing he’s not is stupid. His campaign positions – postures, really, like his television career – were sufficient to the win the states he needed. Any Democratic candidate who wants to be president is going to have to build on them – secure borders, more cautious with foreign wars, tougher on China, softer on Russia, more explicit concern for those left behind, and plenty of infrastructure spending.
I may have been mistaken, too, when a year later I wondered if Trump wouldn’t run again. It’s too soon to tell; it is still possible he’ll declare that he has done what he came to do and pull out. He could do that as late as the first quarter of next year. But today he seems more like a gambler who can’t quit while he’s ahead. “Jobless rate hits 50-year low!” Why not chance it again?
There’s been a lot of talk recently about impeachment – and the impossibility of gaining a conviction from the current Senate. (Never mind as-yet insufficient grounds.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is right. Impeachment is a red herring, at least for now. What is needed is something more than just beating him in an election. What’s required is repudiation, Something like this is what former Vice President Joe Biden has in mind when in his stump speech he refers repeatedly to Trump as an “aberration” And that’s just the beginning.
What would repudiation involve? It would be necessary to retake the Senate, for one thing. The traditionalist wing of the Republican Party would have to re-emerge, for another. A lengthy examination of the claims of Trump’s cheerleaders in the media would be required. And Trump himself would either have to be defeated at the polls in 2020, or impeached and convicted in the course of a second term. Something along these lines is what former Vice President Joe Biden has in mind when he refers in his stump speech to Trump an an “aberration.” And that is just the beginning of the path.
The alternative? Donald Trump joins Ronald Reagan in Valhalla, at least in the minds of his base, while America sinks deeper in discord.
A story in The New York Times the other day made clear how hard it will be for the Democratic Party to retake the Senate. Three strong potential candidates opted out last week: Stacey Abrams, in Georgia; Rep. Cindy Axne, in Iowa; and Rep. Joaquin Castro, in Texas. Four other potential candidates had previously decided not to contest competitive seats: John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado; Gov. Steve Bullock, of Montana; former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, of Texas; and Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa. Each had her or his reasons. Other candidates and other competitive races exist. But it may take a “wave” election before the Democratic Party controls the upper house again.
Then, too, the Democratic primaries have a great deal of sorting out to do. And primaries have a lot of sorting out to do before the often-fractious party nominates a candidate next year.
Meanwhile, there is much more reporting to be done, beginning with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much-anticipated report of the underpinnings of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in the summer of 2016 – the role of the so-called Steele Dossier in particular. But that is only the beginning. There is also the FBI’s ongoing investigation of the Clinton Foundation, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, apparently predicated on a book bankrolled by Trump campaign adviser Steve Bannon. Unattended so far, too, is the story of a threatened mutiny by dissident FBI agents that forced Director James Comey to briefly reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation a week before the election, only to close it again. Comey ordered an internal probe before he was fired.
The Mueller Report is a blueprint for repudiation – scrupulous and dispassionate. House committees could follow its example, inquiring carefully into matters of stewardship of various departments of government by the Trump administration, instead of badgering the President for his tax returns.
And as for the narrator-in-chief of the Trump presidency? There’s a good chance that it will turn out to be former FBI Director Comey. His book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (Flatiron Books, 2018), was blunt: “The president is unethical, and untethered to the truth or institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty.”
The other week Comey was at it again, in an op-ed piece in the Times, “How Trump Co-opts Leaders like Barr.” How was it that that Attorney General William Barr, “a bright and accomplished lawyer,” found himself “channeling the president in using phrases like “no collusion” and “FBI spying?” Why did the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein feel it necessary to thank Trump for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations” when the president had spent two years assailing the department that Rosenstein had helped lead?
“I have some idea from four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others,” wrote Comey. “He’s the president and he rarely stops talking…. Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator in his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it – this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room…. The web-building never stops.”
Comey, of course, spent the first part of his career prosecuting mob bosses in New York. He may yet have the satisfaction of leading a chorus of repudiation of the accidental president.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran economics, media and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran. He’s based in Somerville.
David Warsh: Should Trump get his own FBI director?
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 14 signaled what may become the first major battle of the Trump administration, when it called upon FBI Director James Comey to resign.
“[I]f the director has demonstrated anything in the last year, is that he’s lost thetrust of nearly everyone in Washington, along with every American who believes the FBI must maintain its reputation as a politically impartial federal agency.”) If he doesn’t quit on their motion, the WSJ editorialists continued,
“Jeff Sessions should invite him for a meeting, after {Mr. Sessions} is confirmed as Attorney General, and ask him to resign. If Mr. Comey declines, Donald Trump should fire him in the best interests of the nation’s most important law enforcement agency.’’
In a season of bad ideas, the proposition that Donald Trump should have his own FBI director is the worst one yet. It should be laughed off and then dismissed.
It won’t be, though, because Comey has become the focal point of dissatisfaction by leaders of both parties and pundits left and right. Democrats blame him for swinging the election by notifying Congress that a small cache of previously unexamined Hillary Clinton e-mails had turned up. Republicans blame him for absolving Clinton of criminal conduct in the private email server.
Last week Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz announced he would undertake a wide-ranging review of FBI actions before the election. Comey welcomed the investigation, and the rest of us should, too. It will take a few months to complete. Horowitz mentioned six areas of specific concern.
The first instance was Comey’s decision last July to call a press conference to announce the results of a year-long investigation requested by Congressional Republicans. He excoriated Hillary Clinton for “extremely careless” conduct in her use of a private server for State Department business but added that that carelessness didn’t amount to criminal conduct.
The second occasion came in October, ten days before the election, when Comey wrote to the same Congressional leaders to say that a small trove of unexamined Clinton e-mails had been located in an unrelated investigation. Three days before the election, he announced that they had been found to contain nothing new.
The third topic that the Inspector General promised to investigate has to do with the circumstances that led Comey to announce the discovery of the new e-mails.
According to stories by Devlin Barrett, of the WSJ. Comey was dealing with furious dissent over the Clinton investigation in at least four FBI field offices – New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Little Rock – offices in which agents had extended their investigation to practices of the Clinton Foundation. Candidate Trump himself surmised as much, telling a Colorado crowd in late October, “I’ll bet you without any knowledge there was a revolt in the FBI.”
A fourth matter concerns whether FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have been recused from the case, either before or after his wife, a candidate for the Virginia Senate, accepted a large donation from a prominent Clinton backer, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A fifth involved the use of an FBI Twitter account to publicize the release, days before the election, of 129 pages of internal documents under terms of a Freedom of Information Act request – material pertaining to Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich nearly 16 years before.
A sixth pertained to some potentially inappropriate contact between Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. WikiLeaks hacks disclosed a series of e-mails between the two; Kadzik had previously been Podesta’s attorney.
The office of the Justice Department Inspector General, created in 1989, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary a couple of years ago. Horowitz, a longtime Justice Department and Sentencing Commission administrator, worked briefly for Comey twenty-five years ago, as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. The fourth attorney to serve as IG, he was sworn in on April 16, 2012.
The irony, as recounted here inOctober, is that Comey is famously perpendicular to the political special interests that routinely test any FBI director. No doubt that the courses that Comey chose in July and October were irregular; in each case he was dealing with an irregular situation – a congressional attempt to stampede the bureau in the summer, the prospect of open revolt among its rank-in-file two weeks before the election. To have explained the matter more fully would have almost certainly made things worse; to have done nothing would have risked mutiny, a disaster.
The FBI, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency, is deeply divided along partisan lines. Some significant faction still want to send Hillary Clinton to prison. Agents have been communicating indirectly with advisers to the president-elect and to the press. Strong and principled management at the top is required. Democrats and sensible Republicans should sit back and wait for the Inspector General’s account.
David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.