Comeys Friend Tweeted Tick Tick Tick Again on Friday
Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. And so He Shaped an Ballot.
WASHINGTON — The day earlier he upended the 2016 election, James B. Comey, the managing director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all mean solar day, and it was fourth dimension for a decision.
Mr. Comey'due south plan was to tell Congress that the F.B.I. had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner. The motion would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or practice anything that may influence an election. Just Mr. Comey had declared the example closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed.
"Should you consider what you're about to exercise may aid elect Donald Trump president?" an adviser asked him, Mr. Comey recalled recently at a closed meeting with F.B.I. agents.
He could not allow politics affect his conclusion, he replied. "If we ever beginning considering who might exist affected, and in what way, by what we do, nosotros're washed," he told the agents.
But with polls showing Mrs. Clinton belongings a comfortable pb, Mr. Comey ended up plunging the F.B.I. into the molten center of a bitter election. Fearing the backlash that would come if information technology were revealed after the election that the F.B.I. had been investigating the next president and had kept it a hush-hush, Mr. Comey sent a alphabetic character informing Congress that the instance was reopened.
What he did not say was that the F.B.I. was also investigating the entrada of Donald J. Trump. Just weeks before, Mr. Comey had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. Only in March, long after the election, did Mr. Comey confirm that in that location was i.
For Mr. Comey, keeping the F.B.I. out of politics is such a preoccupation that he once said he would never play basketball with President Barack Obama because of the advent of being chummy with the homo who appointed him. But in the final months of the presidential campaign, the leader of the nation'due south pre-eminent law enforcement agency shaped the contours, if not the consequence, of the presidential race by his treatment of the Clinton and Trump-related investigations.
Paradigm
An test by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former police force enforcement, congressional and other government officials, found that while partisanship was non a factor in Mr. Comey'southward approach to the two investigations, he handled them in starkly dissimilar means. In the instance of Mrs. Clinton, he rewrote the script, partly based on the F.B.I.'s expectation that she would win and fearing the bureau would be accused of helping her. In the case of Mr. Trump, he conducted the investigation by the book, with the F.B.I.'south traditional secrecy. Many of the officials discussed the investigations on the status of anonymity considering they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
Mr. Comey made those decisions with the supreme self-confidence of a one-time prosecutor who, in a distinguished career, has cultivated a reputation for what supporters see every bit tearing independence, and detractors view as media-savvy arrogance.
The Times found that this go-information technology-alone strategy was shaped past his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other F.B.I. officials felt had provided Mrs. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta Eastward. Lynch, the chaser general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.
His misgivings were only fueled past the discovery last yr of a document written by a Autonomous operative that seemed — at least in the eyes of Mr. Comey and his aides — to heighten questions most her independence. In a baroque instance of how tangled the F.B.I. investigations had become, the document had been stolen by Russian hackers.
The examination also showed that at 1 point, President Obama himself was reluctant to disclose the suspected Russian influence in the election last summer, for fearfulness his administration would exist accused of meddling.
Mr. Comey, the highest-profile F.B.I. manager since J. Edgar Hoover, has not squarely addressed his decisions last year. He has touched on them just obliquely, asserting that the F.B.I. is blind to partisan considerations. "We're not because whose ox will be gored by this activeness or that action, whose fortune will exist helped," he said at a public consequence recently. "We simply don't care. We tin can't care. We simply ask: 'What are the facts? What is the police?'"
But circumstances and choices landed him in uncharted and mayhap unwanted territory, as he made what he thought were the least damaging choices from fifty-fifty less desirable alternatives.
"This was unique in the history of the F.B.I.," said Michael B. Steinbach, the onetime senior national security official at the F.B.I., who worked closely with Mr. Comey, describing the circumstances the bureau faced terminal twelvemonth while investigating both the Republican and Democratic candidates for president. "People say, 'This has never been done before.' Well, there never was a before. Or 'That's non normally how you practice it.' At that place wasn't anything normal about this."
'Federal Bureau of Matters'
Paradigm
Mr. Comey owes his chore and his reputation to the night in 2004 when he rushed to the Washington infirmary room of John Ashcroft, the attorney full general, and prevented Bush administration officials from persuading him to reauthorize a classified program that had been ruled unconstitutional. At the time, Mr. Comey, a Republican, was the deputy attorney general.
Years later, when Mr. Obama was looking for a new F.B.I. director, Mr. Comey seemed an inspired bipartisan choice. But his style somewhen grated on his bosses at the Justice Department.
In 2015, as prosecutors pushed for greater accountability for constabulary misconduct, Mr. Comey embraced the controversial theory that scrutiny of police officers led to increases in law-breaking — the so-chosen Ferguson effect. "Nosotros were actually caught off baby-sit," said Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department'southward meridian civil rights prosecutor at the fourth dimension. "He lobbed a fairly inflammatory statement, without data to back it up, and walked abroad."
On other issues, Mr. Comey bucked the administration only won praise from his agents, who saw him as someone who did what he believed was right, regardless of the political ramifications.
"Jim sees his function as apolitical and independent," said Daniel C. Richman, a longtime confidant and friend of Mr. Comey's. "The F.B.I. manager, even as he reports to the attorney full general, frequently has to stand up autonomously from his dominate."
The F.B.I.'due south involvement with Mrs. Clinton'southward emails began in July 2015 when it received a letter from the inspector general for the intelligence community.
The letter said that classified information had been constitute on Mrs. Clinton'southward dwelling house email server, which she had used as secretary of state. The clandestine email setup was already proving to exist a damaging result in her presidential campaign.
Mr. Comey'south deputies chop-chop concluded that at that place was reasonable evidence that a crime may have occurred in the mode classified materials were handled, and that the F.B.I. had to investigate. "We knew every bit an organization that we didn't have a selection," said John Giacalone, a old mob investigator who had risen to get the F.B.I.'south elevation national security official.
On July 10, 2015, the F.B.I. opened a criminal investigation, lawmaking-named "Midyear," into Mrs. Clinton's handling of classified information. The Midyear team included ii dozen investigators led past a senior analyst and by an experienced F.B.I. supervisor, Peter Strzok, a former Army officer who had worked on some of the near secretive investigations in recent years involving Russian and Chinese espionage.
There was controversy almost immediately.
Responding to questions from The Times, the Justice Department confirmed that it had received a criminal referral — the starting time step toward a criminal investigation — over Mrs. Clinton'south handling of classified information.
Only the next morning time, the department revised its argument.
"The section has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information," the new statement read. "It is non a criminal referral."
At the F.B.I., this was a stardom without a divergence: Despite what officials said in public, agents had been alerted to mishandled classified data and in response, records show, had opened a full criminal investigation.
The Justice Department knew a criminal investigation was underway, but officials said they were being technically accurate near the nature of the referral. Some at the F.B.I. suspected that Democratic appointees were playing semantic games to help Mrs. Clinton, who immediately seized on the statement to play downward the issue. "It is not a criminal investigation," she said, incorrectly. "It is a security review."
In September of that twelvemonth, every bit Mr. Comey prepared for his outset public questions almost the example at congressional hearings and printing briefings, he went beyond the street to the Justice Section to see with Ms. Lynch and her staff.
Both had been federal prosecutors in New York — Mr. Comey in the Manhattan limelight, Ms. Lynch in the lower-wattage Brooklyn office. The 6-foot-eight Mr. Comey commanded a room and the spotlight. Ms. Lynch, 5 feet alpine, was known for being cautious and relentlessly on message. In her v months as chaser general, she had shown no sign of irresolute her style.
At the meeting, everyone agreed that Mr. Comey should not reveal details about the Clinton investigation. But Ms. Lynch told him to be even more attentive: Do not even call information technology an investigation, she said, according to iii people who attended the meeting. Call it a "thing."
Ms. Lynch reasoned that the word "investigation" would raise other questions: What charges were existence investigated? Who was the target? But most important, she believed that the section should stick by its policy of not confirming investigations.
It was a by-the-book determination. But Mr. Comey and other F.B.I. officials regarded it as disingenuous in an investigation that was so widely known. And Mr. Comey was concerned that a Autonomous attorney full general was asking him to be misleading and line upward his talking points with Mrs. Clinton's campaign, according to people who spoke with him after.
Equally the meeting broke up, George Z. Toscas, a national security prosecutor, ribbed Mr. Comey. "I guess you're the Federal Bureau of Matters now," Mr. Toscas said, according to ii people who were there.
Despite his concerns, Mr. Comey avoided calling it an investigation. "I am confident we accept the resources and the personnel assigned to the matter," Mr. Comey told reporters days afterward the coming together.
The F.B.I. investigation into Mrs. Clinton'southward 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 information technology.
While agents were investigating Mrs. Clinton, the Autonomous 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, simply it did non immediately cause alarm at the F.B.I. or the Justice Department.
Over the previous year, dozens of think tanks, universities and political organizations associated with both parties had fallen prey to Russian spear phishing — emails that tricked victims into clicking on malicious links. The D.N.C. intrusion was a concern, simply no more than the others.
Months passed before the D.Northward.C. and the F.B.I. met to address the hacks. And it would take more than a yr for the government to conclude that the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, had an audacious plan to steer the outcome of an American election.
Missing Emails
Paradigm
Despite moments of tension between leaders of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors working on the case made progress. "The investigative team did a thorough task," Mr. Giacalone said. "They left no stone unturned."
They knew it would not be enough to prove that Mrs. Clinton was sloppy or careless. To bring charges, they needed evidence that she knowingly received classified data or set up her server for that purpose.
That was especially important after a deal the Justice Department had made with David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former manager of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Petraeus had passed classified information to his biographer, with whom he was having an thing, and the testify was damning: He revealed the names of covert agents and other secrets, he was recorded maxim that he knew it was wrong, and he lied to the F.B.I.
Merely over Mr. Comey'southward objections, the Justice Department let Mr. Petraeus plead guilty in April 2015 to a misdemeanor count of mishandling classified data. Charging Mrs. Clinton with the aforementioned crime, without evidence of intent, would be difficult.
1 nagging issue was that Mrs. Clinton had deleted an unknown number of emails from her early months at the State Department — earlier she installed the home server. Agents believed that those emails, sent from a BlackBerry account, might exist their all-time hope of assessing Mrs. Clinton's intentions when she moved to the server. If simply they could find them.
In spring concluding twelvemonth, Mr. Strzok, the counterintelligence supervisor, reported to Mr. Comey that Mrs. Clinton had clearly been devil-may-care, merely agents and prosecutors agreed that they had no proof of intent. Agents had not all the same interviewed Mrs. Clinton or her aides, just the outcome was coming into focus.
Nine months into the investigation, information technology became clear to Mr. Comey that Mrs. Clinton was almost certainly not going to confront charges. He quietly began piece of work on talking points, toying with the notion that in the midst of a biting presidential campaign, a Justice Section led past Democrats may non accept the credibility to close the case, and that he lone should explain that decision to the public.
A Suspicious Document
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A document obtained past the F.B.I. reinforced that thought.
During Russia's hacking campaign against the Us, intelligence agencies could peer, at times, into Russian networks and see what had been taken. Early terminal twelvemonth, F.B.I. agents received a batch of hacked documents, and one caught their attention.
The document, which has been described as both a memo and an e-mail, was written past a Democratic operative who expressed conviction that Ms. Lynch would proceed the Clinton investigation from going likewise far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.
Read ane way, it was standard Washington political chatter. Read another way, it suggested that a political operative might accept insight into Ms. Lynch'south thinking.
Normally, when the F.B.I. recommends closing a case, the Justice Section agrees and nobody says anything. The consensus in both places was that the typical procedure would not suffice in this example, but who would be the spokesman?
The certificate complicated that calculation, according to officials. If Ms. Lynch announced that the case was closed, and Russia leaked the document, Mr. Comey believed it would raise doubts about the independence of the investigation.
Mr. Comey sought communication from someone he has trusted for many years. He dispatched his deputy to run into with David Margolis, who had served at the Justice Section since the Johnson assistants and who, at 76, was dubbed the Yoda of the section.
What exactly was said is non known. Mr. Margolis died of heart issues a few months later. Just some time afterward that coming together, Mr. Comey began talking to his advisers nearly announcing the end of the Clinton investigation himself, according to a former official.
"When you looked at the totality of the state of affairs, we were leaning toward: This is something that makes sense to be done alone," said Mr. Steinbach, who would not confirm the existence of the Russian document.
Former Justice Department officials are deeply skeptical of this account. If Mr. Comey believed that Ms. Lynch were compromised, they say, why did he not seek her recusal? Mr. Comey never raised this outcome with Ms. Lynch or the deputy attorney general, Emerge Q. Yates, former officials said.
Mr. Comey's defenders regard this as i of the untold stories of the Clinton investigation, one they say helps explain his decision-making. But former Justice Department officials say the F.B.I. never uncovered show tying Ms. Lynch to the certificate's author, and are convinced that Mr. Comey wanted an excuse to put himself in the spotlight.
Every bit the Clinton investigation headed into its final months, there were two very different ideas about how the case would end. Ms. Lynch and her advisers thought a curt statement would suffice, probably on behalf of both the Justice Department and the F.B.I.
Mr. Comey was making his own plans.
A Hot Tarmac
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A chance encounter fix those plans in motion.
In late June, Ms. Lynch's plane touched downwardly at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport every bit part of her nationwide tour of police departments. Erstwhile President Neb Clinton was as well in Phoenix that solar day, leaving from the same tarmac.
Ms. Lynch's staff loaded into vans, leaving the chaser general and her hubby on board. Mr. Clinton's Surreptitious Service agents mingled with her security team. When the quondam president learned who was on the plane, his aides say, he asked to say hullo.
Mr. Clinton's aides say he intended just to greet Ms. Lynch as she disembarked. But Ms. Lynch later on told colleagues that the message she received — relayed from 1 security team to another — was that Mr. Clinton wanted to come up aboard, and she agreed.
When Ms. Lynch'south staff members noticed Mr. Clinton boarding the plane, a printing aide hurriedly called the Justice Department's communications director, Melanie Newman, who said to suspension upwards the meeting immediately. A staff member rushed to stop it, but by the time the conversation ended, Mr. Clinton had been on the airplane for nigh 20 minutes.
The meeting made the local news the adjacent twenty-four hours and was soon the talk of Washington. Ms. Lynch said they had only exchanged pleasantries about golf and grandchildren, but Republicans called for her to recuse herself and appoint a special prosecutor.
Ms. Lynch said she would not step aside but would take whatsoever career prosecutors and the F.B.I. recommended on the Clinton case — something she had planned to do all forth.
Mr. Comey never suggested that she recuse herself. But at that moment, he knew for sure that when there was something to say nigh the case, he alone would say it.
Calling a Conference
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Agents interviewed Mrs. Clinton for more than than three and a half hours in Washington the next twenty-four hour period, and the interview did not change the unanimous conclusion among agents and prosecutors that she should not be charged.
Two days afterward, on the morning of July 5, Mr. Comey chosen Ms. Lynch to say that he was virtually to agree a news briefing. He did not tell her what he planned to say, and Ms. Lynch did non demand to know.
On brusk notice, the F.B.I. summoned reporters to its headquarters for the conference.
A few blocks away, Mrs. Clinton was almost to requite a spoken communication. At her campaign offices in Brooklyn, staff members hurried in front of televisions. And at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., prosecutors and agents watched anxiously.
"We were very much aware what was about to happen," said Mr. Steinbach, who had taken over as the F.B.I.'s top national security official earlier that year. "This was going to exist hotly contested."
With a black folder in hand, Mr. Comey walked into a large room on the ground floor of the F.B.I.'s headquarters. Standing in front of two American flags and two royal-blue F.B.I. flags, he read from a script.
He said the F.B.I. had reviewed thirty,000 emails and discovered 110 that contained classified information. He said figurer hackers may take compromised Mrs. Clinton's emails. And he criticized the State Section's lax security civilisation and Mrs. Clinton directly.
"Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position" should have known better, Mr. Comey said. He called her "extremely devil-may-care."
The criticism was so baking that it sounded equally if he were recommending criminal charges. Only in the last two minutes did Mr. Comey say that "no charges are appropriate in this instance."
Video
transcript
transcript
F.B.I. Recommends No Charges for Clinton
The F.B.I. managing director, James B. Comey, said on Tuesday that the agency was non recommending charging Hillary Clinton in her use of a private email server while secretary of state.
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The script had been edited and revised several times, former officials said. Mr. Strzok, Mr. Steinbach, lawyers and others debated every phrase. Speaking so openly about a closed case is rare, and the decision to exercise and then was not unanimous, officials said. 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 accept voted that way,'" Mr. Steinbach said. "You tin argue that's not the F.B.I.'s task, merely there was no playbook for this. This is somebody who'southward going to exist president of the United States."
Mr. Comey's criticism — his description of her carelessness — was the nearly controversial part of the voice communication. Agents and prosecutors have been reprimanded for injecting their legal conclusions with personal opinions. But those shut to Mr. Comey say he has no regrets.
Past scolding Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey was speaking not only to voters only to his ain agents. While they agreed that Mrs. Clinton should non confront charges, many viewed her conduct every bit inexcusable. Mr. Comey's remarks made clear that the F.B.I. did not approve.
Former agents and others shut to Mr. Comey acknowledge that his reproach was also intended to insulate the F.B.I. from Republican criticism that it was too lenient toward a Democrat.
At the Justice Department, frustrated prosecutors said Mr. Comey should accept consulted with them start. Mrs. Clinton'south supporters said that Mr. Comey's condemnations seemed to make an oblique case for charging her, undermining the event of his decision.
"He came up with a Rube Goldberg-type solution that caused him more than bug than if he had just played it direct," said Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign press secretary and a quondam Justice Department spokesman.
Furious Republicans saw the legal cloud over Mrs. Clinton lifting and tore into Mr. Comey.
In the days later on the proclamation, Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch each testified before Congress, with dissimilar results. Neither the F.B.I. nor the Justice Department normally gives Congress a fact-by-fact recounting of its investigations, and Ms. Lynch spent five hours avoiding doing and then.
"I know that this is a frustrating exercise for y'all," she told the House Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Comey discussed his decision to shut the investigation and renewed his criticism of Mrs. Clinton.
By midsummer, as Mrs. Clinton was about to accept her party's nomination for president, the F.B.I. manager had seemingly succeeded in everything he had set out to practise. The investigation was over well before the election. He had explained his conclusion to the public.
And with both parties angry at him, he had proved yet again that he was willing to speak his mind, regardless of the blowback. He seemed to have safely piloted the F.B.I. through the storm of a presidential ballot.
But equally Mr. Comey moved past one tumultuous investigation, another was nigh to rut up.
Russia Rising
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Days after Mr. Comey's news conference, Carter Folio, an American man of affairs, gave a spoken language in Moscow criticizing American foreign policy. Such a trip would typically be unremarkable, but Mr. Folio had previously been under F.B.I. 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 Mr. Trump.
Mr. Page has non said whom he met during his July visit to Moscow, describing them as "generally scholars." But the F.B.I. took find. Mr. Folio after traveled to Moscow over again, raising new concerns amidst counterintelligence agents. A former senior American intelligence official said that Mr. Page met with a suspected intelligence officer on one of those trips and there was information that the Russians were yet very interested in recruiting him.
After that month, the website WikiLeaks began releasing hacked emails from the D.N.C. Roger J. Stone Jr., another Trump adviser, boasted publicly most his contact with WikiLeaks and suggested he had inside cognition well-nigh forthcoming leaks. And Mr. Trump himself fueled the F.B.I.'s suspicions, showering Mr. Putin with praise and calling for more hacking of Mrs. Clinton's emails.
"Russia, if you're listening," he said, "I hope you'll exist able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
In late July, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into possible bunco betwixt members of Mr. Trump's entrada and Russian operatives. Besides Mr. Comey and a pocket-size squad of agents, officials said, only a dozen or so people at the F.B.I. knew about the investigation. Mr. Strzok, just days removed from the Clinton instance, was selected to supervise it.
It was a worrisome time at the F.B.I. Agents saw increased activeness by Russian intelligence officers in the United States, and a former senior American intelligence official said at that place were attempts by Russian intelligence officers to talk to people involved in the campaign. Russian hackers had also been detected trying to suspension into voter registration systems, and intelligence intercepts indicated some sort of plan to interfere with the ballot.
In late August, Mr. Comey and his deputies were briefed on a provocative set of documents virtually purported dealings between shadowy Russian figures and Mr. Trump's campaign. One report, filled with references to cloak-and-dagger meetings, spoke ominously of Mr. Trump's "compromising relationship with the Kremlin" and threats of "bribery."
The reports came from a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, who was working as a private investigator hired past a firm working for a Trump opponent. He provided the documents to an F.B.I. contact in Europe on the same 24-hour interval equally Mr. Comey's news conference about Mrs. Clinton. It took weeks for this data to land with Mr. Strzok and his team.
Mr. Steele had been a covert agent for MI6 in Moscow, maintained deep ties with Russians and worked with the F.B.I., just his claims were largely unverified. It was increasingly clear at the F.B.I. that Russia was trying to interfere with the election.
As the F.B.I. plunged deeper into that investigation, Mr. Comey became convinced that the American public needed to understand the scope of the strange interference and be "inoculated" confronting it.
He proposed writing an op-ed piece to appear in The Times or The Washington Post, and showed the White Business firm a typhoon his staff had prepared, co-ordinate to two former officials. (After the Times story was published online on Saturday, a onetime White House official said the text of the op-ed had not been given to the White House.) The op-ed did non mention the investigation of the Trump campaign, but information technology laid out how Russia was trying to undermine the vote.
The president replied that going public would play correct into Russia'south easily by sowing doubts about the election's legitimacy. Mr. Trump was already saying the organisation was "rigged," and if the Obama administration defendant Russia of interference, Republicans could accuse the White House of stoking national security fears to help Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Comey argued that he had unique credibility to phone call out the Russians and avert that criticism. Later all, he said, he had just chastised Mrs. Clinton at his news briefing.
The White Business firm decided it would exist odd for Mr. Comey to brand such an accusation on his own, in a paper, before American security agencies had produced a formal intelligence assessment. The op-ed thought was quashed. When the assistants had something to say nearly Russia, it would do so in one vocalisation, through the proper channels.
But John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about the Russian threat that he gave an unusual private briefing in the late summer to Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader.
Top congressional officials had already received briefings on Russia'due south meddling, but the ane for Mr. Reid appears to take gone further. In a public letter to Mr. Comey several weeks later, Mr. Reid said that "it has go clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States."
Mr. Comey knew the investigation of the Trump campaign was just underway, and keeping with policy, he said nil about information technology.
'Exceptional Circumstances'
Epitome
Mr. Reid's letter sparked frenzied speculation about what the F.B.I. was doing. At a congressional hearing in September, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, pressed Mr. Comey for an explanation, citing his willingness to give details nearly his investigation of Mrs. Clinton.
"Later yous investigated Secretary Clinton, you made a determination to explain publicly who you interviewed and why," Mr. Nadler said. "Yous as well disclosed documents, including those from those interviews. Why shouldn't the American people have the same level of information virtually your investigation with those associated with Mr. Trump?"
But Mr. Comey never considered disclosing the case. Doing so, he believed, would take undermined an active investigation and cast public suspicion on people the F.B.I. could not be sure were implicated.
"I'm non confirming that we're investigating people associated with Mr. Trump," Mr. Comey said to Mr. Nadler. "In the thing of the electronic mail investigation, it was our judgment — my judgment and the residual of the F.B.I.'s judgment — that those were exceptional circumstances."
Even in classified briefings with House and Senate intelligence committee members, Mr. Comey repeatedly declined to answer questions nigh whether there was an investigation of the Trump campaign.
To Mr. Comey's allies, the 2 investigations were totally different. 1 was closed when he spoke most information technology. The other was continuing, highly classified and in its earliest stages. Much of the debate over Mr. Comey's actions over the last vii months can be distilled into whether people brand that same distinction.
Just a few weeks later, in belatedly September, Mr. Steele, the quondam British agent, finally heard back from his contact at the F.B.I. Information technology had been months, but the bureau wanted to run into the material he had collected "right away," according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. What prompted this message remains unclear.
Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new intelligence reports. One, dated Sept. 14, said that Mr. Putin was facing "fallout" over his credible involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving "conflicting advice" on what to do.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $fifty,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid.
Around the same time, the F.B.I. began examining a mysterious data connection betwixt Alfa Bank, one of Russia'southward biggest, and a Trump Arrangement e-mail server. Some private computer scientists said it could represent a cloak-and-dagger link between the Trump Organization and Moscow.
Agents concluded that the calculator activity, while odd, probably did not stand for a covert channel.
But by autumn, the gravity of the Russian effort to affect the presidential election had get articulate.
The D.N.C. hack and others similar information technology had once appeared to be standard Russian tactics to tarnish a Western democracy. After the WikiLeaks disclosures and subsequent leaks by a Russian group using the name DCLeaks, agents and analysts began to realize that Moscow was not merely meddling. It was trying to tip the ballot away from Mrs. Clinton and toward Mr. Trump.
Mr. Comey and other senior administration officials met twice in the White Business firm State of affairs 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 alee. Mr. Comey was less interested in being involved.
At their 2nd meeting, Mr. Comey argued that it would look too political for the F.B.I. to comment and so shut to the election, according to several people in attendance. Officials in the room felt whiplashed. Ii months before, Mr. Comey had been willing to put his name on a paper article; now he was refusing to sign on to an official assessment of the intelligence community.
Mr. Comey said that in the intervening time, Russian meddling had go the subject of news stories and a topic of national discussion. He felt it was no longer necessary for him to speak publicly well-nigh it. So when Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, and James R. Clapper Jr., the national intelligence director, defendant "Russia's senior-most officials" on Oct. 7 of a cyber functioning to disrupt the election, the F.B.I. was conspicuously silent.
That nighttime, WikiLeaks began posting thousands of hacked emails from another source: the private email account of John D. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign.
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The emails included embarrassing letters between campaign staff members and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton's speeches to Wall Street. The disclosure further convinced the F.B.I. that information technology had initially misread Russia's intentions.
Two days later, Mr. Podesta heard from the F.B.I. for the offset time, he said in an interview.
"You lot may be enlightened that your emails accept been hacked," an agent told him.
Mr. Podesta laughed. The same agency that had then thoroughly investigated Mrs. Clinton, he said, seemed painfully slow at responding to Russian hacking.
"Yes," he answered. "I'm aware."
Supplementing the Record
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The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, was first with the salacious story: Anthony D. Weiner, the former New York congressman, had exchanged sexually charged messages with a 15-yr-old girl.
The commodity, actualization in late September, raised the possibility that Mr. Weiner had violated child pornography laws. Within days, prosecutors in Manhattan sought a search warrant for Mr. Weiner's computer.
Even with his notoriety, this would accept had little impact on national politics but for one coincidence. Mr. Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, was i of Mrs. Clinton'south closest confidantes, and had used an email account on her server.
F.B.I. agents in New York seized Mr. Weiner'southward laptop in early October. The investigation was just 1 of many in the New York office and was not treated with swell urgency, officials said. Further slowing the investigation, the F.B.I. software used to catalog the calculator files kept crashing.
Somewhen, investigators realized that they had hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which belonged to Ms. Abedin and had been backed up to her husband's computer.
Neither Mr. Comey nor Ms. Lynch was concerned. Agents had discovered devices before in the Clinton investigation (former cellphones, for instance) that turned up no new evidence.
Then, agents in New York who were searching image files on Mr. Weiner's computer discovered a State Section document containing the initials H.R.C. — Hillary Rodham Clinton. They found letters linked to Mrs. Clinton's home server.
And they made another surprising discovery: testify that some of the emails had moved through Mrs. Clinton'southward sometime BlackBerry server, the 1 she used before moving to her home server. If Mrs. Clinton had intended to conceal something, agents had ever believed, the evidence might exist in those emails. But reading them would crave some other search warrant, essentially reopening the Clinton investigation.
The election was two weeks away.
Mr. 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 warrant was an easy decision. He had a thornier result on his mind.
Back in July, he told Congress that the Clinton investigation was airtight. What was his obligation, he asked, to acknowledge that this was no longer true?
It was a perilous idea. It would push the F.B.I. back into the political arena, weeks subsequently refusing to ostend the active investigation of the Trump campaign and declining to accuse Russia of hacking.
The question consumed hours of conference calls and meetings. Agents felt they had 2 options: Tell Congress nigh the search, which everyone acknowledged would create a political furor, or go along information technology quiet, which followed policy and tradition only carried its own gamble, especially if the F.B.I. found new evidence in the emails.
"In my mind at the fourth dimension, Clinton is probable to win," Mr. Steinbach said. "Information technology's pretty apparent. So what happens after the ballot, in November or December? How do we say to the American public: 'Hey, nosotros found some things that might be problematic. Merely we didn't tell you about information technology before you voted'? The damage to our arrangement would have been irreparable."
Conservative news outlets had already branded Mr. Comey a Clinton toady. That same week, the embrace of National Review featured a story on "James Comey's Dereliction," and a cartoon of a hapless Mr. Comey shrugging as Mrs. Clinton smashed her laptop with a sledgehammer.
Epitome
Congressional Republicans were preparing for years of hearings during a Clinton presidency. If Mr. Comey became the subject of those hearings, F.B.I. officials feared, it would hobble the agency and harm its reputation. "I don't remember the arrangement would have survived that," Mr. Steinbach said.
The assumption was that the e-mail review would take many weeks or months. "If nosotros thought we could exist done in a week," Mr. Steinbach said, "nosotros wouldn't say anything."
The spirited argue continued when Mr. Comey reassembled his team later that day. F.B.I. lawyers raised concerns, old officials said. Merely in the cease, Mr. Comey said he felt obligated to tell Congress.
"I went back and forth, changing my heed several times," Mr. Steinbach recalled. "Ultimately, it was the right phone call."
That afternoon, Mr. Comey's chief of staff chosen the role of Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney full general, and revealed the program.
When Ms. Lynch was told, she was both stunned and dislocated. While the Justice Department's rules on "ballot year sensitivities" practice not expressly foreclose making comments shut to an election, administrations of both parties accept interpreted them every bit a wide prohibition confronting anything that may influence a political outcome.
Ms. Lynch understood Mr. Comey'due south predicament, just not his hurry. In a series of phone calls, her aides told Mr. Comey'due south deputies that there was no need to tell Congress anything until agents knew what the emails independent.
Either Ms. Lynch or Ms. Yates could have ordered Mr. Comey non to send the letter, just their aides argued confronting it. If Ms. Lynch issued the order and Mr. Comey obeyed, she risked the same fate that Mr. Comey feared: accusations of political interference and favoritism by a Democratic attorney general.
If Mr. Comey disregarded her order and sent the letter — a real possibility, her aides idea — it would exist an act of insubordination that would force her to consider firing him, aggravating the state of affairs.
So the contend ended at the staff level, with the Justice Department imploring the F.B.I. to follow protocol and stay out of the campaign's final days. Ms. Lynch never called Mr. Comey herself.
The next morning, Friday, October. 28, Mr. Comey wrote to Congress, "In connection with an unrelated example, the F.B.I. has learned of the beingness of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."
His letter became public within minutes. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a Republican and a leading adversary of Mrs. Clinton's, jubilantly announced on Twitter, "Example reopened."
'This Changes Everything'
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The Clinton team was outraged. Even at the F.B.I., agents who supported their loftier-profile director were stunned. They knew the letter of the alphabet would phone call into question the F.B.I.'due south political independence.
Mr. Trump immediately mentioned it on the campaign trail. "As you might take heard," Mr. Trump told supporters in Maine, "before today, the F.B.I. … " The oversupply interrupted with a roar. Everyone had heard.
Polls almost immediately showed Mrs. Clinton'due south support declining. Presidential races about always tighten in the final days, only some political scientists reported a measurable "Comey issue."
"This changes everything," Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Comey explained in an electronic mail to his agents that Congress needed to exist notified. "It would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record," he wrote.
Only many agents were non satisfied.
At the Justice Department, career prosecutors and political appointees privately criticized not simply Mr. Comey for sending the letter merely also Ms. Lynch and Ms. Yates for not stopping him. Many saw the letter every bit the logical result of years of not reining him in.
Mr. Comey told Congress that he had no idea how long the electronic mail review would have, merely Ms. Lynch promised every resource needed to complete it earlier Election Day.
At the F.B.I., the Clinton investigative team was reassembled, and the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read emails to or from Mrs. Clinton during her time at the Land Department. Equally information technology turned out, merely about 50,000 emails met those criteria, far fewer than anticipated, officials said, and the F.B.I. had already seen many of them.
Mr. Comey was once again under fire. Former Justice Department officials from both parties wrote a Washington Mail service op-ed slice titled "James Comey Is Dissentious Our Democracy."
At a Justice Department memorial for Mr. Margolis, organizers removed all the chairs from the stage, avoiding the awkward scene of Mr. Comey sitting beside some of his sharpest critics.
Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy chaser general during the Clinton administration, eulogized Mr. Margolis for unfailingly following the rules, fifty-fifty when facing unpopular options. Audition members heard it as a veiled critique of both Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch.
On Nov. 5, 3 days before Election 24-hour interval, Mr. Strzok and his squad had iii,000 emails left to review. That night, they ordered pizza and dug in. At well-nigh 2 a.m., Mr. Strzok wrote an email to Mr. Comey and scheduled it to send at six a.one thousand. They were finished.
A few hours later, Mr. Strzok and his team were back in Mr. Comey's conference room for a final conference: Simply about 3,000 emails had been potentially work-related. A dozen or so email chains independent classified information, but the F.B.I. had already seen it.
And agents had institute no emails from the BlackBerry server during the crucial period when Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department.
Cypher had changed what Mr. Comey had said in July.
That conclusion was met with a mixture of relief and angst. Anybody at the meeting knew that the question would chop-chop turn to whether Mr. Comey'due south letter had been necessary.
That afternoon, Mr. Comey sent a second alphabetic character to Congress. "Based on our review," he wrote, "we have not changed our conclusions."
Political Consequences
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Mr. Comey did not vote on Election 24-hour interval, records show, the first fourth dimension he skipped a national election, according to friends. Only the managing director of the F.B.I. was a fundamental story line on every television receiver station as Mr. Trump swept to an upset victory.
Many factors explained Mr. Trump's success, but Mrs. Clinton blamed only one. "Our analysis is that Comey's letter — raising doubts that were groundless, groundless, proven to exist — stopped our momentum," she told donors a few days after the election. She pointed to polling data showing that late-deciding voters chose Mr. Trump in unusually big numbers.
Even many Democrats believe that this analysis ignores other factors, but at the F.B.I., the accusation stung. Agents are used to criticism and second-guessing. Rarely has the agency been accused of political favoritism or, worse, tipping an ballot.
For all the attention on Mrs. Clinton's emails, history is likely to see Russian influence equally the more meaning story of the 2016 election. Questions nearly Russian meddling and possible collusion have marred Mr. Trump's commencement 100 days in the White Business firm, cost him his national security adviser and triggered two congressional investigations. Despite Mr. Trump's assertions that "Russia is fake news," the White House has been unable to escape its shadow.
Mr. Comey has told friends that he has no regrets, about either the July news conference or the October letter or his handling of the Russia investigation. Confidants like Mr. Richman say he was constrained by circumstance while "navigating waters in which every move has political consequences."
Merely officials and others close to him also acknowledge that Mr. Comey has been changed by the tumultuous year.
Early on Saturday, March iv, the president accused Mr. Obama on Twitter of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower in Manhattan. Mr. Comey believed the government should forcefully denounce that merits. Just this time he took a different approach. He asked the Justice Department to correct the tape. When officials in that location refused, Mr. Comey followed orders and said nada publicly.
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"Comey should say this on the record," said Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman in the Obama administration. "He'south already shattered all norms about commenting on ongoing investigations."
Mr. Richman sees no conflict, merely rather "a consistent pattern of someone trying to act with independence and integrity, only within established channels."
"His approach to the Russia investigation fits this pattern," he added.
But maybe the well-nigh telling sign that Mr. Comey may take had enough of being Washington's Lonely Ranger occurred concluding calendar month before the House Intelligence Committee.
Early in the hearing, Mr. Comey best-selling for the start time what had been widely reported: The F.B.I. was investigating members of the Trump campaign for possible bunco with Russian federation.
Even so the independent-minded F.B.I. director struck a collaborative tone. "I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm," he began, ushering in the adjacent phase of his boggling moment in national politics.
Mr. Comey was nevertheless in the spotlight, but no longer alone.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/us/politics/james-comey-election.html
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