Inside Trump's Coming War With the FBI

By Chris Smith, Vanity Fair

13 May 17

 

“Agents are pissed off at the way he was fired, the total disrespect with which it was handled. It was a slap in the face to the F.B.I., to everybody in the F.B.I.”

ames Comey thought he had a year. That’s the amount of time it was likely going to take the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General to probe Comey’s actions in handling the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. If President Donald Trump was looking for a pretext to fire the F.B.I. director, a critical inspector general’s report could presumably provide it. Next year.

Clearly, Comey underestimated Trump’s impatience—as well as the president’s pathological inability to allow anyone to question the legitimacy of his election, let alone keep pressing the investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible ties with Russia. Comey is now puttering in his yard in Northern Virginia. But the political and legal whirlwind that his firing has set in motion is just beginning to spin, with the White House and the F.B.I. subject to the greatest damage. Even pro-Trump agents are horrified and furious at how Comey was treated. “It shows us, the career people who care only about justice, that there is no justice at the top,” one agent says.

There were agents who found Comey priggish; within the bureau’s New York office, there was a faction that thought he’d soft-peddled the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. But those complaints have now been dwarfed by shock and revulsion at how Comey was fired—and how it reflects on them. “The statements from the White House that he’d lost the faith of the rank and file—they’re making that up,” says Jeff Ringel, a 21-year F.B.I. veteran who retired in May 2016 and is now director of the Soufan Group. “Agents may not have agreed with everything he did. I was one of the people who thought the director shouldn’t have stepped up and made those public statements about Hillary Clinton. But Director Comey was one of the last honest brokers in D.C. Agents are pissed off at the way he was fired, the total disrespect with which it was handled. It was a slap in the face to the F.B.I., to everybody in the F.B.I. The director being treated terribly, being called incompetent, is a signal that Trump has disdain for the bureau.”

The desire to defend the F.B.I.’s honor, and to set the record straight, appears to be already motivating law-enforcement sources to try to punch holes in Trump’s version of events. On Thursday afternoon, acting F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe contradicted the White House’s account that Comey had lost the support of the agency. Others dispute the president’s claim that Comey informed him, “on three separate occasions,” that he was not under investigation. “That makes no sense,” one bureau veteran says. “I wasn’t in those meetings. But no prosecutor would make that statement to someone who could conceivably become the subject of an investigation. Jim wouldn’t have done it.” (By press time, the White House had not responded to a request for comment.)

Filmmaker Marc Levin spent much of 2016 shooting the documentary series Inside the FBI for the USA Network, and got to know both Comey and a wide variety of F.B.I. staff well. “Look, Comey made mistakes, but he was popular with the majority of people we worked with at the F.B.I.,” Levin says. “He was a tremendous motivator and a booster of the institution. So there’s a lot of pain.” An F.B.I. insider goes further. “This is a kick in the gut,” he says. “The way it was done was an insult—degrading, humiliating—not just to Comey the individual, but to the institution of the F.B.I. There’s a lot of anger.”

Comey certainly had given his enemies in both political parties plenty of openings. His choices in 2016 were debatable, at best: blasting Clinton at a press conference as “extremely careless” in her use of a private e-mail server while keeping silent on Russian efforts to sway the election to Trump. Most recently, in testimony to the Senate, Comey wildly overstated the number of government e-mails forwarded by Huma Abedin to her husband, Anthony Weiner, forcing the F.B.I. to awkwardly correct its director.

“With the 2016 campaign, Jim was placed in a situation of having to make unprecedented decisions over unprecedented situations, and I think he did it with grace and courage while maintaining the integrity of the bureau,” says David N. Kelley, a prosecutor who worked alongside Comey for years, and who succeeded him in as U.S. attorney in New York when President George W. Bush brought Comey to Washington in 2003. “Anybody who doubts his integrity in making those decisions doesn’t know him.”

So what’s next for Trump, Comey, and the F.B.I.? McCabe, who was installed by Comey as his number two slightly more than a year ago, has been with the bureau for two decades, which should bring welcome stability. But there’s also sentiment within the F.B.I. that McCabe is too slick a political player, and that he’s already compromised. In 2015, Jason Chaffetz, while investigating Clinton’s use of personal e-mails, asked McCabe to turn over documents relating to his wife’s state Senate campaign. Jill McCabe had received some $400,000 in contributions from a PAC affiliated with Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia governor and Clinton pal. “His wife ran for office in Virginia and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from a political party,” an F.B.I. longtimer says. “And I can’t take two bucks for a cup of coffee.”

The mistrust is even thicker when it comes to McCabe’s superiors. F.B.I. insiders did not anticipate that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, would become a lever in Comey’s ouster. “Rosenstein is a career D.O.J. guy, a professional,” one surprised F.B.I. hand says.

Days after Comey reportedly requested more money and manpower for the Russian investigation, Rosenstein wrote the memo that Trump brandished to rationalize Comey’s firing. Yet the former F.B.I. director’s associates recognize that Rosenstein was mostly an instrument. They place greater blame on Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for undermining Comey, and in crafting the evil genius argument that the F.B.I. director was hated by Democrats as well as Republicans.

Trump is searching for a new, permanent F.B.I. chief, and loyalty will no doubt be the president’s highest priority. But even installing a more pliant director may not do him much good. “Yes, it matters who is the director,” an agency veteran says. “But investigations don’t just go away.”

Another F.B.I. insider points out that while the media has focused on the investigation of possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign, there are actually multiple inquiries in progress. “There’s also a cyber investigation, about the hacking and whether crimes were committed,” he says. “And then there’s the business side: Was there money laundering going on? Money from these Russian plutocrats that’s been washed through Trump’s real estate and businesses? That’s gotten overlooked, but Preet Bharara and the Southern District were supposedly looking into that.” They were until April anyway, when Trump and Sessions canned Bharara along with 45 other U.S. attorneys.

For Comey, the short term future is fairly clear: He will soon be called before the Senate Intelligence committee to testify about the Russian probes and about his firing. Beyond that drama, things are much less certain. Comey has never shown any interest in running for office, and it’s hard to imagine that his bruising past year would motivate him to mount a campaign. He won’t lack for employment. In previous breaks between public service jobs he has worked as an executive at Bridgewater, the $150 billion hedge fund; a lawyer for Lockheed Martin; and for one of Virginia’s best-connected white collar firms, McGuire Woods.

Comey will, however, need a way to fully tell his side of the controversies that ultimately sunk him at the F.B.I. Maybe he’ll do it by a thousand cuts, feeding information to friendly reporters and prosecutors. Maybe he’ll give a TV network an extended, exclusive interview. Most likely, he’ll stay on the high road and stay out of sight. But after being thoroughly vilified by the media while he was F.B.I. director, citizen Comey is now on the way to seeing it vindicate him, at the expense of President Trump.