CHAPTER 11 SPEAK OR CONCEAL
—ROBERT H. JACKSON, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE
ALTHOUGH THE CLINTON email case seemed like the center of the universe to the Washington political class, the FBI was actually involved in many other important matters. During the summer of 2016, we were working like crazy to understand what the Russians were up to. Evidence within the intelligence community strongly suggested that the Russian government was trying to interfere in the election in three ways.
First, they sought to undermine confidence in the American democratic enterprise—to dirty us up so that our election process would no longer be an inspiration to the rest of the world.
Second, the Russians wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton. Putin hated her, blaming her personally for large street demonstrations against him in Moscow in December 2011. Putin believed Clinton had given “a signal” to demonstrators by publicly criticizing what she called “troubling practices” before and during the parliamentary vote in Russia that year. She said, “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.” Putin took that as an unforgivable personal attack.
Third, Putin wanted to help Donald Trump win. Trump had been saying favorable things about the Russian government and Putin had shown a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle.
At the heart of the Russian interference campaign was the release of damaging emails stolen from organizations and individuals associated with the Democratic Party. There were also indications of an extensive Russian effort to penetrate voter registration databases maintained by the states. In late July, the FBI learned that a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor named George Papadopoulos had been discussing, months earlier, obtaining from the Russian government emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. Based on this information, the FBI opened an investigation to try to understand whether Americans, including any associated with the Trump campaign, were working in any way with the Russians in their influence effort.
As with the Clinton email investigation, for months the Bureau resisted all calls from reporters and other outside observers to confirm an investigation was under way. It was simply too early, we didn’t know whether we had anything to go on, and we wouldn’t want to tip off any of the individuals we were examining. The FBI and the Department of Justice did not officially confirm our investigation—and then only in a general way—until March 2017.
A harder question was whether, during the heat of a presidential campaign, to tell the American people more about the overall Russian effort to influence the election. President Obama and his national security team wrestled with that question throughout August and September. At one meeting with the president, we discussed whether some kind of public “inoculation” made sense. That is, arming the American people with knowledge of the hostile effort to influence their voting decisions might help blunt its impact. I said I was tired of being the guy at the podium with controversial news—especially after the beating I had taken since the July 5 announcement—but I was willing to be the voice on this, absent any alternatives. I also acknowledged to the president that an inoculation effort might accidentally accomplish the Russians’ goal of undermining confidence in our election system. If you tell Americans that the Russians are tampering with the election, have you just sowed doubt about the outcome, or given one side an excuse for why they lost? This was very tricky. President Obama saw the dilemma clearly and said he was determined not to help the Russians achieve their goal of undermining faith in our process. The administration continued to consider the idea of inoculation and what that might look like.
A few days later, to offer an option as the Obama team deliberated, I followed up on the idea of providing a “voice of inoculation” by drafting and sharing within the administration a newspaper opinion piece in my name. It laid out what the Russians were doing with the dumping of stolen emails, highlighted hacking aimed at state voter databases, and placed those activities in the context of historical Russian election disruption efforts. I intended that as a warning to the American people. But there was no decision. The Obama team’s deliberations were, as usual, extensive, thoughtful, and very slow. I suspected a major factor in their deliberations was the universal view of pollsters that Donald Trump had no chance. During a September meeting about the Russian effort, I remember President Obama reflecting that confidence in the outcome, saying of Putin, “He backed the wrong horse.” Why risk undermining faith in our electoral process, he seemed to conclude, when the Russian efforts were making no difference? And why give Donald Trump the excuse to blame Obama for frightening the American people? He was going to lose anyway.
Finally, a month later, in early October, the Obama team decided some kind of formal statement from the administration was in order after all. The director of national intelligence, Jim Clapper, and the secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, were prepared to sign it. The FBI leadership team and I decided that there was not an adequate reason for us to also sign on. By that point, there was widespread media coverage of a Russian campaign to influence the election. Numerous unnamed government officials were identified as sources in those stories. Prominent legislators issued statements and told the media they had been briefed about the Russian interference campaign. Candidate Clinton herself was talking about the Russian effort to elect her opponent. The websites and social media outlets pushing out stolen emails—including WikiLeaks and the Twitter page of its founder, Julian Assange—were widely and publicly associated with Russia. Given all of that, the administration’s October statement was at best a marginal addition to the public’s knowledge. Adding the FBI’s name would change nothing and be inconsistent with the way we hoped to operate on the eve of an election.
Despite what politicians and pundits may say, there are no written rules about how the FBI and the Department of Justice should handle investigations as elections draw near. But there is a powerful norm that I always tried to follow: we should try to avoid, if possible, any action in the run-up to an election that could have an impact on the election result. In October 2016, there was no good reason for the FBI to speak about the Russians and the election. Americans already knew what was happening, so the FBI could reasonably avoid action.
But “avoid action” was not an option when the Clinton email investigation came back to my office in October in a powerful and unexpected way, four months after I had declared in front of cameras that the FBI had done a thorough investigation and was finished.
At some point in early October, someone at FBI headquarters (I think it was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe) mentioned to me that former Congressman Anthony Weiner had a laptop that might have some connection to the Clinton email case. I don’t remember the conversation clearly. I suspect that is because it seemed like a passing comment and the notion that Anthony Weiner’s computer might connect to Midyear and Hillary Clinton made no sense to me.
Weiner was a disgraced former Democratic congressman from New York, who resigned in 2011 after revelations that he was sending naked pictures of himself to a variety of women. He was also the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Secretary Clinton’s closest aides. The FBI had come into possession of the content of Weiner’s laptop as part of a criminal investigation into Weiner’s alleged improper contact with underage girls. The criminal investigators in New York had a search warrant that allowed them to review certain files from the laptop. In the course of their work, the criminal team saw other file names, but they could not open those under the authority of their search warrant, which was confined to materials directly relevant to the sex case. And some of the names on those thousands of email files led the criminal team in New York to think they might be related to the Clinton case.
At 5:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 27—twelve days before the election—McCabe sent me an email saying the Midyear team needed to meet with me. I had no idea what that was about, but of course asked my staff to set something up as soon as possible. Later that morning, I walked into my conference room and smiled broadly at the team leaders, lawyers, and executives from the Midyear case, each sitting in the same seats they had occupied so many times in the year of the Clinton email investigation.
“The band is back together,” I said, as I slid into my seat. “What’s up?”
It would be a long time before I smiled like that again.
Members of the team explained that it appeared Weiner’s laptop contained hundreds of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal email domain. This was an enormous trove of Secretary Clinton’s emails. In 2014, Clinton had turned over to the State Department about thirty thousand emails and deleted about thirty thousand others as personal. This was far higher than those totals. But there was something else that caught their attention. The Midyear team had never been able to find Secretary Clinton’s emails from her first few months as secretary of state, a period during which she was using an ATT BlackBerry email domain. The investigators had been keen to find those early emails because if there were so-called smoking-gun emails—perhaps in which the secretary had been instructed not to use her personal email system or in which she had acknowledged doing something improper with classified materials—those emails were likely to be at the beginning of her tenure at State, when she first set up her own email address. But we had never found those early BlackBerry emails.
For reasons no one around the table could explain, the Weiner laptop held thousands of emails from the ATT BlackBerry domain. They told me those might well include the missing emails from the start of Clinton’s time at the Department of State. The team said there was no prospect of getting Weiner’s consent to search the rest of the laptop, given the deep legal trouble he was in.
“We would like your permission to seek a search warrant.”
Of course, I replied quickly. Go get a warrant.
“How fast can you review and assess this?” I asked.
Everyone in the room said that this review would take many weeks. There was, they said, simply too much material to do it more quickly. They needed to individually read tens of thousands of emails, and it had to be done by people who knew the context. This was not a situation where we could bring in hundreds of FBI employees to do the work. They wouldn’t know what they were reading or looking for. The team told me there was no chance the survey of the emails could be completed before the November 8 election, now less than two weeks away.
“Okay,” I said. “Do it as quickly as you can, but do it well, always well, no matter how long that takes.”
After the meeting, the team contacted lawyers at the Justice Department, who agreed we needed to immediately get a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. Now we had another decision to make.
In July, and in the period since, I had repeatedly told the country and Congress that the FBI had done an honest, competent, and independent investigation and we were finished. There was no case here. People could take that to the bank. Yet, on October 27, the FBI and the Department of Justice had just decided to seek a search warrant to review a huge trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including information that conceivably could change our view of the investigation. And, as I was assured by top investigators at the Bureau, there was no prospect of finishing the review before the election. What was our responsibility?
As I’ve noted, our long-standing tradition is to avoid, if at all possible, taking any action that might have an impact on an election. That tradition, that norm, was part of my identity. It was why the FBI hadn’t signed the October Obama administration statement about Russian election interference. If this was a brand-new investigation, doing nothing would have been an option. But in the Clinton email case, I saw only two choices, only two doors, and they were both actions.
One door was marked “Speak.” By speaking, I would tell Congress that the FBI’s prior statements about the investigation being over were no longer true. That would be really, really bad. It would put the Bureau, and me, in a place where we might have an impact on an election. Really bad, nauseating even. To be avoided if humanly possible.
What was that other door? “Conceal,” is what it read to my eyes. On behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an organization whose success relies on the public trust, I had testified under oath in public hearings to Congress and the American people that this case was finished. Now I knew that was no longer true. To remain silent at this point, while taking the step of getting a search warrant to review thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including possibly the missing early emails, would be an affirmative act of concealment, which would mean the director of the FBI had misled—and was continuing to mislead—Congress and the American people.
Speak or conceal—both terrible options. The Midyear senior team debated them both. We talked, then broke so people could think, then we talked again. We sat around my conference table and looked at it from every direction we could think of. My chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, took his normal seat at the opposite end of the oblong table from me, so he could quietly watch all the participants and their body language; his job was to make sure I was hearing from everyone, with nothing held back. He has unusual emotional intelligence, and if he saw something concerning—someone hesitating or being talked over—he would speak to the person privately and alert me so I could draw that person into a later discussion. The FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker, played a similar role. He was a longtime and wise friend, and I could count on him to bring arguments and concerns to me if they weren’t being adequately voiced. He would often come to me privately and play devil’s advocate because he knew we needed every view, every concern, every argument.
We made arguments against our arguments, but even with a dozen perspectives, we kept coming back to the same place: the credibility of the institutions of justice was at stake. Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States in less than two weeks, what would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department, or her own presidency if it later was revealed, after the fact, that she was still a subject of an FBI investigation? What if, after the election, we actually found information that demonstrated prosecutable criminal activity? No matter what we found, that act of concealment would be catastrophic to the integrity of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Put that way, the choice between a “really bad” option and a “catastrophic” option was not that hard a call. We had to tell Congress that things had changed.
As we were arriving at this decision, one of the lawyers on the team asked a searing question. She was a brilliant and quiet person, whom I sometimes had to invite into the conversation. “Should you consider that what you are about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” she asked.
I paused for several seconds. It was of course the question that was on everyone’s mind, whether they expressed it out loud or not.
I began my reply by thanking her for asking that question. “It is a great question,” I said, “but not for a moment can I consider it. Because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent force in American life. If we start making decisions based on whose political fortunes will be affected, we are lost.”
In other words, if we at the FBI started to think like every other partisan in Washington thought—what’s good for my “side” or whose political futures we might help or hurt—then the FBI would no longer have, and would no longer deserve, the public trust. The reservoir would be empty.
I instructed the team to tell the senior staff at Justice that I believed it was my duty to inform Congress that we were restarting the investigation. I would say as little as possible, but the FBI had to speak. I said I would be happy to discuss the matter with the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. I’m not sure exactly why I opened the door to them in a way I hadn’t in July. I think part of it was a human reaction; I had taken an enormous amount of criticism for freezing them out in July. Part of it was also that I thought they would see the issue as I did and support me in what was to be a brutal situation. After all, the attorney general had publicly testified in July that the email investigation had been done well and was complete. Now her own prosecutors were seeking a search warrant. Surely, she would see that concealing that would be dishonest and a catastrophe for the Department of Justice. But, through their staffs, Lynch and Yates communicated that they thought this was a bad idea, that they would advise against it, but that it was my call and they didn’t see a need to speak with me about it. They didn’t order me not to do it, an order I would have followed.
They didn’t want to choose a door: Speak or Conceal?
After I got this answer, I briefly toyed with the idea of communicating to them that I had decided not to tell Congress, just to see what they would do if I shifted the responsibility entirely to them, but decided that would be cowardly and stupid. Once again it became my responsibility to take the hit. I told the Midyear team to offer Justice the chance to review my draft letter to Congress and suggest any changes. They took that opportunity and, while preserving their advice against my doing it, offered some useful suggestions for how to describe what was going on, and in just a few sentences.
On Friday morning, October 28, which oddly enough stuck in my head as the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Ramsey Rapist attack, I sent the letter to the chairpersons and the ranking members of each committee to which the Bureau had provided information in the wake of the “completion” of the Clinton email investigation. As I did in July, I again emailed the entire FBI workforce about what was happening:
To all:
This morning I sent a letter to Congress in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation. Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them.
Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.
My letter to Congress was released to the press in about ten minutes, which in Washington was about nine minutes later than I expected. And my world caught back on fire.
The lovers and the haters from July largely switched positions. The fear that my letter was going to bring a Trump victory drove some normally thoughtful people around the bend. There was much hysteria about how we were violating Justice Department rules and policies. Of course, there were no such rules and there had never been another situation in the middle of an election like this. I suppose reasonable people might have decided not to speak about the renewed investigation, but the notion that we were out there breaking rules was offensive. “Tell me what you would do in my shoes and why you would do that,” I asked, unheard, of op-ed writers and talking heads on television. I knew the answer, of course: most of them would do what would be best for their favorite team. Well, the FBI can’t have a favorite team. The FBI represents the blindfolded Lady Justice and has to do the right thing outside the world of politics.
On Sunday night, October 30, I received an email from the attorney general, asking if she could meet with me privately after our Monday morning intelligence briefing at FBI headquarters.
“Of course,” I replied.
As the briefing drew to a close, the attorney general, in front of the full conference room of our staffs, asked if she could meet with me. Which was a little odd, since I’d already agreed to the private meeting over email. But our staffs all noticed her request, which I suppose was the point. We went into a private office reserved for the attorney general, just off the morning briefing room. Her staff and mine waited outside, and we were finally alone.
During the last few days, the outcry in the media had been so intense, especially and understandably among supporters of Hillary Clinton, that I didn’t know what I was about to hear from Loretta Lynch. Was she going to scream at me? Threaten me? Warn me? Deliver a message from the president? Everyone in the Obama administration almost certainly was angry at me and fearful that I’d jeopardized Clinton’s election. I had every reason to believe that Loretta was among that group.
I walked into the room first. I turned and waited as the attorney general closed the door. She then turned, lowered her head, and walked toward me with arms out wide. This was awkward in a number of respects. Perhaps mostly because I am about eighteen inches taller than Loretta Lynch. When our bodies came together, her face went into my solar plexus as she wrapped her arms around me. I reached down and pressed both forearms, also awkwardly, against her back.
“I thought you needed a hug,” she said as we separated. She was probably right. Although I’m not a hugger by nature, I felt physically beaten after the last few days. I also probably looked that way.
She then sat down on the couch and gestured for me to sit in an armchair near her. “How are you doing?” she asked. I detected genuine concern in her voice.
I told her this had been a nightmare. I explained how I saw the choices I faced and that “really bad” was better than “catastrophic.” And then she floored me with another surprise.
“Would they feel better if it leaked on November 4?” she asked, referring to the Friday before the election.
“Exactly, Loretta,” I answered.
I hadn’t made my decision based on the prospect of a leak, but she was right. Once Justice approved the search warrant, it was likely the world would find out we had restarted the investigation anyhow, and we would look dishonest. Was she telling me I had done the right thing? Was she in some way thanking me for taking this brutal hit? She wasn’t going to answer those questions for me.
Moments later, our conversation concluded. Loretta rose and reached for the door, but paused. Turning her head slightly toward me, she said, with just the slightest hint of a smile, “Try to look beat up.” She had told somebody she was going to chew me out for what I had done. What a world.
I found the whole nightmare very painful. So much so that it actually made me a bit numb. Even people who liked me were confused by what I had done. Many others were downright nasty. I understood. My wife, who wanted Hillary Clinton to be elected the first woman president, was mostly concerned that I was back in the middle again. She said she understood why I did what I did, but resented the fact that I had to stand out front and take another hit. “It’s like you keep stepping in front of the institution to get shot,” she said. “I get it, but I wish it wasn’t you, and I wish other people would get it.”
Emotions were extraordinarily raw, and it looked like the FBI had just put a finger on the scale for Donald Trump. And there was no hearing, no press conference, no chance to explain why we were doing what we were doing or to add anything to the letter we’d sent. Because we didn’t know what we had and what we might find, any further public statement would be inherently limited and misleading and only add confusion and damage the FBI. For that reason, we chose the wording in my letter carefully:
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.
Early the next week, while the Weiner laptop email review was under way, I attended a meeting in the White House Situation Room. As I walked down the White House halls and even when I was sitting in the meeting room, I felt like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, where (spoiler alert) he doesn’t realize he’s dead. I imagined I could see my breath as I sat around the Sit Room table. Only Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan acknowledged me, each coming to me in the hallway as I waited for the meeting to start, putting a hand on my arm, and urging me to hang in there. With those two exceptions, nobody else in the room even met my eye.
Jim Clapper was the leader I admired most in government. His bald head and grouchy, deep, often mumbling voice masked a person who almost perfectly embodied the balances of kindness and toughness, confidence and humility. As the leader of the FBI, which is part of the American intelligence community, I reported to Director Clapper as well as the attorney general. I had come to treasure our quarterly evening meetings—“vespers,” he called them—where we would sit in a secure room at his office and talk about work and life. Joined by our deputies, we would hoist wine for me, a vodka martini with two olives for him, and I would learn from someone who had led for nearly as long as I had been alive. To seal our friendship, I regifted to him a tie my brother-in-law had given me. It was solid red and decorated with little martini glasses. Because we considered ourselves people of integrity, I disclosed it was a regift as I handed him the tie. Clapper would invariably change into the martini tie for our vespers.
As we headed into the final week before the election, I checked on the Midyear team every day. They were working constantly, reading hundreds of new Clinton emails that we had never seen before. In a huge breakthrough, one I had been assured was not possible, the wizards at the FBI’s Operational Technology Division figured out a way to do some of the de-duplicating electronically so agents and analysts didn’t need to read hundreds of thousands of emails. Commercially available software wouldn’t work for us. But the custom software program cut it down to mere thousands, which they read night after night. Despite what the team had told me on October 27, there might be a way after all to finish the review before the election.
On November 5, the Saturday before the election, the team told me they would be finished reviewing emails by the next morning and would be prepared to meet with me to offer their views. We met Sunday morning, two days before the election. There were indeed thousands of new Clinton emails from the BlackBerry domain, but none from the relevant time period. There were new work-related emails to and from Secretary Clinton. There were emails with classified content, but none of it was new to us. None of the new emails changed their view of the case. I pressed and pressed, wanting to be sure this wasn’t their fatigue talking. No, they pushed back, we are tired, but we are also sure this is the right answer.
We then began debating what to do next. The group’s overall view was that, having written to Congress on October 28, I was obligated to write to Congress again. There was one dissenter. The head of the National Security Branch of the FBI argued that it was just too late to speak again. He didn’t offer much reasoning, only that he thought it was simply too close to the election. I think he was reacting to the pain our first letter had caused. We listened, kicked it around for a while, and decided we had to write to Congress again. If our rule in this unique context—Speak or Conceal—was to be as transparent as possible about the Bureau’s activities, then it made no sense to act any differently on November 6 than we had on October 28. As before, we offered the Department of Justice senior staff the chance to edit my draft letter, and they gave us suggestions.
On Sunday, November 6, we sent a short letter to Congress informing them that the Clinton investigation was complete and our view had not changed. We didn’t consider further public statement because it could only add more confusion two days before the election were I to stand before cameras to talk about what we found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. For reasons I couldn’t yet explain, the FBI found that Weiner’s laptop contained large numbers of new work-related Clinton emails (after she had previously claimed to have produced all work-related emails to the State Department) and also many of the emails we had seen previously about classified topics. The team had additional investigative work to do with respect to Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner to figure out how they ended up with classified emails. Better, we concluded, to mirror the first notification to Congress with a similarly short closing notification. There was no time to send an email to the FBI workforce; they would hear about it on the news before turning on their computers Monday morning. The FBI had chosen not to conceal important information from Congress and the American people, and we had worked incredibly hard to competently close the case prior to Election Day. I thanked the Midyear team, telling them I had never worked with a finer group of people and that they had helped me deal with really hard problems in a great way.
That night, Patrice and I and one of our girls went out to a local Tex-Mex restaurant. The news about the second letter, closing the case again, was everywhere. A patron walked past my table and whispered, “Go Hillary.” I was too tired to care. I wasn’t going to vote. I didn’t want anything more to do with the whole thing. I was deeply sorry we were part of it. I wanted a drink, so I had a delicious margarita on the rocks with salt, and even that made the news: The Washington Post reported that I was spotted drinking a “giant” margarita.
* * *
I have spent a great deal of time looking back at 2016. And even though hindsight doesn’t always offer a perfect view, it offers a unique and valuable perspective.
Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.
I have seen and read reports that Hillary Clinton blames me, at least in part, for her surprising election defeat. I know that at one point in her book she wrote that she felt she’d been “shivved” by me. She had worked for much of her professional life to become the first woman president of the United States, and quite understandably that loss, as unexpected and unpredicted as it was, hurt her badly. I have read she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made. I also know many Democrats are similarly baffled—even outraged—by the actions I took.
After the election, I attended a classified briefing with a group of senators from both parties. Toward the end of our meeting, which was not about Hillary Clinton’s emails, one of the Democrats, then–Senator Al Franken, blurted out what probably many were thinking. He said he wanted to address “the elephant in the room,” which was “what you did to Hillary Clinton.” I asked Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who was also present, whether I could have an opportunity to respond to that. With a tone that seemed close to enjoyment, McConnell sat back and said, “Sure. Take all the time you need.”
What I said to the senators gathered was that I wished they could go back in time with me and look at what happened from my perspective—from the FBI’s perspective. “Come with me to October 28,” I said. Even if I couldn’t persuade them that I made the right decision, I hoped that at least I could explain what I was thinking, the doors I saw, and why I chose the one labeled “Speak” rather than the one labeled “Conceal.” I didn’t handle everything in the investigation perfectly, but I did my best with the facts before me. That was the point I was trying to convey that day, and I convinced at least one person in attendance. When I finished speaking, Senator Chuck Schumer came up to me. With tears in his eyes, he grabbed my hand with one of his and reached out with the other hand to repeatedly tap the center of my chest. “I know you,” he said. “I know you. You were in an impossible position.”
I hope very much that what we did—what I did—wasn’t a deciding factor in the election. I say that with a wife and daughters who voted for Hillary Clinton and walked in the 2017 Women’s March in D.C. the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. As I said in testimony, the very idea that my decision had any impact on the outcome leaves me feeling mildly nauseous (or, as one of my grammatically minded daughters later corrected me, “nauseated”). That’s not because Donald Trump is such a deeply flawed person and leader (so flawed that he likely misunderstood what I meant when I testified that the notion of impact on the election left me “mildly nauseous”). It leaves me feeling sick because I have devoted my life to serving institutions I love precisely because they play no role in politics, because they operate independently of the passions of the electoral process. But 2016 was an election like no other. One of my kids showed me a tweet that seemed to capture the feelings at the time. It said, “That Comey is such a political hack. I just can’t figure out which party.”
I don’t like being criticized, but I have to pay attention to the criticism because all human beings can be wrong sometimes. Still, to avoid being paralyzed and crushed by second-guessing, I use a rule of thumb: if the criticism is coming from a person I know to be thoughtful, I pay close attention to it. I even pay attention to anonymous critics and even savage partisans if their logic or factual presentation tell me they may be seeing something I missed. The rest of the crazies, and there were a lot of crazies, I ignore.
The stuff that gets me the most is the claim that I am in love with my own righteousness, my own virtue. I have long worried about my ego. I am proud of the fact that I try to do the right thing. I am proud of the fact that I try to be truthful and transparent. I do think my way is better than that of the lying partisans who crowd our public life today. But there is danger that all that pride can make me blind and closed off to other views of what the right thing is.
I have replayed the Clinton email case hundreds of times in my mind. Other than mistakes in the way I presented myself in the July 5 public statement in front of the television cameras, I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time. But I also think reasonable people might well have handled it differently.
For example, had I been a Democrat who had served in prior Democratic administrations, I’m not sure stepping away from the attorney general for the July 5 announcement would have been a helpful option. If I had a Democratic pedigree, I would have been painted as a conflicted partisan, and I would not have been able to credibly step away from the Justice political leadership to represent the institution independently. Of course, even an FBI director with a Democratic pedigree who didn’t make a separate announcement would have faced the same decision to speak or conceal in late October because he or she would have informed Congress, in some fashion, that the investigation was completed in July.
Had I not served so long in the Department of Justice and led the organization in the Bush administration, I don’t know that I would have felt the need to protect more than the FBI. I also don’t know that I would have had the nerve to step away from the attorney general if I hadn’t seen the negative side of deferring—about torture—in my last days as deputy attorney general in 2005. My public speaking experience also made it an option to do a live press conference. Another director, with different experiences behind him, might have deferred to Justice, letting that institution sort out its issues.
A different FBI director might have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor in late June, after Bill Clinton’s visit to the attorney general’s plane. I still think that would have been unfair to Hillary Clinton, but I can imagine another director doing it that way rather than trying to protect the institutions in the way I did.
Another person might have decided to wait to see what the investigators could see once they got a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. That’s a tricky one, because the Midyear team was saying there was no way to complete the review before the election, but I could imagine another director deciding to gamble a bit by investigating secretly in the week before the election. That, of course, walks into Loretta Lynch’s point after our awkward hug. Had I not said something, what was the prospect of a leak during that week? Pretty high. Although the Midyear team had proven itself leakproof through a year of investigation, people in the criminal investigation section of the FBI in New York knew something was going on that touched Hillary Clinton, and a search warrant was a big step. The circle was now larger than it had ever been, and included New York, where we’d had Clinton-related leaks in prior months. Concealing the new investigation and then having it leak right before the election might have been even worse, if worse can be imagined. But a reasonable person might have done it.
I’ve also asked myself a hundred times whether I should have pressed for faster action after hearing something about Weiner’s laptop around the beginning of October. But I did not understand what it meant until October 27. I had moved on to other cases and problems, and assumed if it was important, the team would bring it to me. Had I been told about it earlier, I’m sure I would have had the same reaction I had on October 27—we need to go get those emails, immediately. Whether I should have, or could have, been told the details earlier than October 27 is a question I can’t answer.
The 2016 presidential election was like no other for the FBI, and even knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it differently, but I can imagine good and principled people in my shoes making different choices about some things. I think different choices would have resulted in greater damage to our country’s institutions of justice, but I’m not certain of that. I pray no future FBI director is forced to find out.
* * *
In late November, after the election, I was in the Oval Office for a national security meeting with the president and other senior leaders. I still had that Sixth Sense feeling, especially among people who likely had thought they were going to continue their time in the White House under a new Democratic president. But President Obama was not among them. He greeted me as he always had and was professional and welcoming.
Extraordinary observer of body language that he was, maybe President Obama sensed I felt ill at ease, or maybe he just felt it was important to say something to me for a variety of reasons. As the meeting broke up, he asked me to stay behind. I sat on the couch, back to the grandfather clock. He sat in his normal chair, back to the fireplace. The White House photographer Pete Souza lingered to record the moment, but the president shooed him away. Within seconds, it was just the two of us.
President Obama then leaned forward, forearms on his knees. He started with a long preamble, explaining that he wasn’t going to talk to me about any particular case or particular investigation.
“I just want to tell you something,” he said.
I knew how badly Obama had wanted Hillary Clinton to win the White House. He had campaigned tirelessly for her and, by some accounts, harder for her than any other president had for their hoped-for successor. I knew he took the loss hard, as did the entire White House staff. But I respected President Obama and was very open to whatever it was he had to say.
“I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,” he said. Then he added something that struck me as remarkable. “I want you to know that nothing—nothing—has happened in the last year to change my view.”
He wasn’t telling me he agreed with my decisions. He wasn’t talking about the decisions. He was saying he understood where they came from. Boy, were those words I needed to hear.
I felt a wave of emotion, almost to the verge of tears. President Obama was not an outwardly emotional man in these kinds of meetings, but still I spoke in unusually emotional terms to him.
“That means a lot to me, Mr. President. I have hated the last year. The last thing we want is to be involved in an election. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“I know, I know,” he said.
I paused and then decided to add something. Maybe it was what I believe a large proportion of the country was feeling.
“Mr. President, my wife would kill me if I didn’t take the opportunity to thank you and to tell you how much I’m going to miss you.”
Although I hadn’t supported President Obama when he ran for office, I had developed great respect for him as a leader and a person, and it was only at that moment that I felt the full weight of his imminent departure and what it would mean.
Unable to help myself, I added, “I dread the next four years, but in some ways, I feel more pressure to stay now.”
He said nothing to this. There was no hint of what he thought of the incoming president or the future of the country, though undoubtedly there was much he could have said in both respects. Instead he patted me on the arm, then we rose and shook hands, and I walked out of the Oval Office. Soon that same office would have a new and very different occupant.
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