CHAPTER 12 TRUMP TOWER
—ROBERT M. GATES, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
A SMALL FLEET of fully armored SUVs—carrying the directors of national intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—made its way toward the tall, shining gold tower in the middle of Manhattan. It was January 6, 2017, two weeks before Inauguration Day, and we had all flown up that morning. The NYPD led our cars through the barricade and onto the side street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan. We walked in a group, surrounded by our security people, and entered the side-street entrance for the Trump Tower residences.
The press, in their holding area on Fifth Avenue, couldn’t see us arrive, nor could the protesters, in their own holding area not far away. Still, it was quite the scene in the comparatively quiet Trump Tower residences lobby. We were a two-elevator crowd of leaders and protectors. One elevator discharged a lady going to walk her tiny dog. She and her dog, both wearing expensive coats against a cold Fifth Avenue day, passed through our tight pack of dark suits and armed men. Chief spies holding locked bags with our nation’s secrets politely mumbled, “’Scuse us.”
After all the live TV images of job applicants and dignitaries coming and going through the gilded Fifth Avenue lobby as though on a reality TV show, the leaders of our country’s biggest intelligence agencies were sneaking in to see the president-elect. We were sneaking in to tell him what Russia had done to try to help elect him.
This was to be the third and final briefing session by the leadership of the intelligence community—referred to inside the government as the IC—to describe the classified findings of an intelligence community assessment (ICA) of Russia’s actions during the presidential election. At President Obama’s direction, analysts from the CIA, NSA, and FBI, coordinated by senior analysts from ODNI—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—had spent a month pulling together all sources of information to offer government officials, as well as the incoming Trump administration, a complete picture of the level of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. A watered-down, unclassified version of the ICA had been prepared for public release. But this was the meaty stuff. This was about sharing the most sensitive information, including sources and methods—precisely how we knew what we knew—spelling out in great detail why we had achieved the unusual state of a joint high-confidence opinion that Russia had intervened extensively in an American presidential election.
The four agencies had joined in the assessment, which was both stunning and straightforward: Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an extensive effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. That effort, which came through cyber activity, social media, and Russian state media, had a variety of goals: undermining public faith in the American democratic process, denigrating Hillary Clinton and harming her electability and potential presidency, and helping Donald Trump get elected.
Our first briefing on the assessment had occurred the day before, January 5, 2017, with the incumbent of the Oval Office. In front of President Obama, Vice President Biden, and their senior aides, Jim Clapper, the director of national intelligence, laid out the work that had been done, the conclusions reached, and the basis for those conclusions. The president asked a variety of questions, as did the vice president.
It was at moments like these when I occasionally caught a glimpse of the warm, brotherly, and sometimes exasperating relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden, two very different personalities. The pattern was usually the same: President Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, “Can I ask something, Mr. President?” Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or ten minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.
In this instance, we stayed on track. After an extended discussion on the intelligence assessment, the president asked what the plan was for further briefings. Director Clapper explained that we were to meet the Gang of Eight the next morning—the top officials in Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, briefed on intelligence matters—and then we would go immediately to New York City to brief the president-elect and his senior team.
Clapper explained to Obama that there was an unusual matter that needed to be brought to Mr. Trump’s attention: additional material—what would become commonly called “the Steele dossier”—that contained a variety of allegations about Trump. The material had been assembled by an individual considered reliable, a former allied intelligence officer, but it had not been fully validated. The material included some wild stuff. Among that stuff were unconfirmed allegations that the president-elect had been engaged in unusual sexual activities with prostitutes in Russia while on a trip to Moscow in 2013, activities that at one point involved prostitutes urinating on a hotel bed in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton that the Obamas had used while on a visit there. Another allegation was that these activities were filmed by Russian intelligence for the possible purpose of blackmail against the president-elect. Director Clapper explained that we believed the media were about to report on this material and therefore we had concluded it was important for the intelligence community to alert the incoming president.
Obama did not appear to have any reaction to any of this—at least none he would share with us. In a level voice, he asked, “What’s the plan for that briefing?”
With just the briefest of sidelong glances at me, Clapper took a breath, then said, “We have decided that Director Comey will meet alone with the president-elect to brief him on this material following the completion of the full ICA briefing.”
The president did not say a word. Instead he turned his head to his left and looked directly at me. He raised and lowered both of his eyebrows with emphasis, and then looked away. I suppose you can read whatever you want into a wordless expression, but to my mind his Groucho Marx eyebrow raise was both subtle humor and an expression of concern. It was almost as if he were saying, “Good luck with that.” I began to feel a lump in my stomach.
As the meeting broke up, my eyes fixed on the bowl of apples on the Oval Office coffee table. Because the president and Mrs. Obama were very health conscious—the First Lady had run a campaign in schools about exchanging junk food for fruits and vegetables—the apples had been a fixture of the Oval Office for years. I wasn’t entirely certain they were edible, but I once saw Chief of Staff Denis McDonough grab two at a time. He surely wasn’t eating plastic fruit replicas. My youngest daughter long ago had asked me to get her a presidential apple, and this was surely the last time the Oval Office, an apple, and I would ever be together. Now or never. Swipe an apple at the close of a meeting about Russian interference? So tacky. But fatherhood beats tacky. I scooped an apple. Nobody stopped me. I photographed it in the car and texted the picture to my daughter, delivering the product that evening. She let me taste a slice. Not plastic.
* * *
Later that day, I received a call from Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, who had been a friend since we were federal prosecutors together in Manhattan in the 1980s. He had been in the Oval Office that morning for the briefing. I have no idea whether he was calling me at President Obama’s suggestion, or if the two even spoke about the matter, but he gave voice to how I viewed the Oval Office eyebrow raise.
“Jim, I’m worried about this plan for you to privately brief the president-elect,” he said.
“Me, too,” I replied.
“Have you ever met Donald Trump?” he asked.
“No.”
“Jim, please be careful. Be very careful. This may not go well.”
I thanked Jeh for the concern and the call. This was not making me feel better.
Still, I could see no way out of it. The FBI was aware of the material. Two United States senators separately contacted me to alert me to its existence and the fact that many in Washington either had it or knew of it. CNN had informed the FBI press office that they were going to run with it as soon as the next day. Whether it was true or not, an important feature of disarming any effort to coerce a public official is to tell the official what the enemy might be doing or saying. The FBI calls that a “defensive briefing.”
How on earth could we brief the man about Russian efforts and not tell him about this piece? But it was so salacious and embarrassing that it didn’t make sense to tell him in a group, especially not a group led by Obama appointees who were leaving office the moment Trump became president. I was staying on as FBI director, we knew the information, and the man had to be told. It made complete sense for me to do it. The plan was sensible, if the word applies in the context of talking with a new president about prostitutes in Moscow. Still, the plan left me deeply uncomfortable.
There was more to the discomfort: I long ago learned that people tend to assume that you act and think the way they would in a similar situation. They project their worldview onto you, even if you see the world very differently. There was a real chance that Donald Trump, politician and hardball deal-maker, would assume I was dangling the prostitute thing over him to jam him, to gain leverage. He might well assume I was pulling a J. Edgar Hoover, because that’s what Hoover would do in my shoes. An eyebrow raise didn’t quite do this situation justice; it was really going to suck.
The bit about “pulling a J. Edgar Hoover” made me keen to have some tool in my bag to reassure the new president. I needed to be prepared to say something, if at all possible, that would take the temperature down. After extensive discussion with my team, I decided I could assure the president-elect that the FBI was not currently investigating him. This was literally true. We did not have a counterintelligence case file open on him. We really didn’t care if he had cavorted with hookers in Moscow, so long as the Russians weren’t trying to coerce him in some way.
The FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker, argued powerfully that such an assurance, although true, could be misleadingly narrow: the president-elect’s other conduct was, or surely would be, within the scope of an investigation looking at whether his campaign had coordinated with Russia. There was also the concern that the FBI might then be obligated to tell President Trump if we did open an investigation of him. I saw the logic of this position, but I also saw the bigger danger of the new president, who was known to be impulsive, going to war against the FBI. And I was determined to do all I could, appropriately, to work successfully with the new president. So I rejected Jim Baker’s thoughtful advice and headed to Trump Tower with “we are not investigating you” in my back pocket. Once again, we were in an unprecedented spot.
By the beginning of 2017, after all the controversies over the Clinton case, I had become a relatively identifiable public figure. Even if I wanted to hide from view, my height made that even harder. It was clear that any number of Republicans shared Hillary Clinton’s view that I’d affected the election result in Trump’s favor. As much as Clinton partisans felt anger—and in some cases even hatred—toward me, in Trump World, I was something of a celebrity. Which made my entrance into Trump Tower really uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be seen as anything different from the other intelligence leaders doing their jobs.
We gathered in a small conference room belonging to the Trump Organization. It was blandly decorated and had been outfitted with a temporary heavy gold ceiling-to-floor curtain to block the glass wall that would otherwise show our meeting to the hallway. The president-elect entered the room on time, followed by the vice president–elect and the rest of the designated senior White House team.
This was the first time I’d ever seen Donald Trump face-to-face. He appeared shorter than he seemed on a debate stage with Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, as I looked at the president-elect, I was struck that he looked exactly the same in person as on television, which surprised me because people most often look different in person. His suit jacket was open and his tie too long, as usual. His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. I remember wondering how long it must take him in the morning to get that done. As he extended his hand, I made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.
Trump brought his entire senior team into the small conference room. Vice President–Elect Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer sat at the oval conference table, with Trump and Pence seated at opposite ends. They were quiet and serious. As we shook hands, the vice president–elect held the handshake an extra few seconds and said my first name, drawing it out—“Jiiiimm.” It struck me as an odd combination of someone greeting an old friend and consoling that friend. I don’t think we had ever met, although I recall our speaking on the phone once fourteen years earlier, in 2003, when I was United States Attorney in Manhattan and we were investigating a guy who registered common misspellings of popular children’s websites so that when a child mistyped “Disneyland.com” or “Bobthebuilder.com” they were directed to a pornography website. My reaction was “That should be a crime.” When I found it had become a federal crime only months earlier, I asked for the contact information of the member of Congress responsible for the Truth in Domain Names Act so I could thank that person. It turned out to be Indiana congressman Mike Pence, who told me on the phone that he had pushed for the law after one of his own children was redirected in that sick way.
Director Clapper sat closest to the president-elect, with CIA Director John Brennan, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and me to his right. Against the wall behind me sat Trump’s future CIA Director Mike Pompeo and designated Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert and Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland. The president-elect’s CIA intelligence briefer—a career employee assigned to deliver regular intelligence briefings to the incoming president—was also in the room to take notes.
By this point, I had worked relatively closely with two presidents, in addition to scores of other leaders in government. I was curious to see how Trump, the classic “fish out of water,” would operate in a totally foreign role. Running a private family-held company is, of course, quite different from running a nation—or even running a large public corporation. You have to deal with various constituencies who don’t report to you and to live under a web of laws and regulations that don’t apply to a typical CEO.
As I’d seen from other leaders, being confident enough to be humble—comfortable in your own skin—is at the heart of effective leadership. That humility makes a whole lot of things possible, none more important than a single, humble question: “What am I missing?” Good leaders constantly worry about their limited ability to see. To rise above those limitations, good leaders exercise judgment, which is a different thing from intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem, to decipher a riddle, to master a set of facts. Judgment is the ability to orbit a problem or a set of facts and see it as it might be seen through other eyes, by observers with different biases, motives, and backgrounds. It is also the ability to take a set of facts and move it in place and time—perhaps to a hearing room or a courtroom, months or years in the future—or to the newsroom of a major publication or the boardroom of a competitor. Intelligence is the ability to collect and report what the documents and witnesses say; judgment is the ability to say what those same facts mean and what effect they will have on other audiences.
In my first meeting with Trump, I looked to see how he struck that balance of confidence and humility and whether he showed signs of having sound judgment. I confess I was skeptical going in. My impression from the campaign was that he was a deeply insecure man, which made it impossible for him to demonstrate humility, and that he seemed very unlikely to be confident and humble enough to ask the “What am I missing” question at the heart of sound judgment. But I didn’t see enough at Trump Tower that day to see whether that assessment was correct or not. The president-elect was appropriately subdued and serious.
Director Clapper presented the intelligence community assessment, just as he had to President Obama and the Gang of Eight. There were a few questions and comments, most of which came from Tom Bossert in the back row. During the discussion of Russia’s involvement in the election, I recall Trump listening without interrupting, and asking only one question, which was really more of a statement: “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?” Clapper replied that we had done no such analysis, which was not our business or expertise. What we could say is that we found no evidence of alteration of the vote count.
What I found telling was what Trump and his team didn’t ask. They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be. Nor did they ask how the United States might prepare itself to meet that threat. Instead, with the four of us still in our seats—including two outgoing Obama appointees—the president-elect and his team shifted immediately into a strategy session about messaging on Russia. About how they could spin what we’d just told them. Speaking as if we weren’t there, Priebus began describing what a press statement about this meeting might look like. The Trump team—led by Priebus, with Pence, Spicer, and Trump jumping in—debated how to position these findings for maximum political advantage. They were keen to emphasize that there was no impact on the vote, meaning that the Russians hadn’t elected Trump. Clapper interjected to remind them of what he had said about sixty seconds earlier: the intelligence community did not analyze American politics, and we had not offered a view on that.
I had been in many intelligence briefings with the two previous presidents and had never seen Presidents Bush or Obama discuss communications and political strategy in front of intelligence community leaders. There had always been a line. The intelligence community does facts; the White House does politics and spin, and does it on its own. The searing lesson of the Iraq war—based on bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction—was “never mix the two.” I tried to tell myself that maybe this was because Trump and his team had little experience on these matters—Trump, of course, had no experience in government whatsoever—but in an instant, the line between intelligence and politics began to fade.
As I was sitting there, the strangest image filled my mind. I kept pushing it away because it seemed too odd and too dramatic, but it kept coming back: I thought of New York Mafia social clubs, an image from my days as a Manhattan federal prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s. The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino. I couldn’t shake the picture. And looking back, it wasn’t as odd and dramatic as I thought it was at the time.
The Italian Mafia, as noted earlier, called itself La Cosa Nostra—“this thing of ours”—and always drew a line between someone who was a “friend of yours,” meaning someone outside the family, and someone who was a “friend of ours,” meaning an official member of the family. I sat there thinking, Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an “amica nostra”—friend of ours. To draw us in. As crazy as it sounds, I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us all part of the same family and that Team Trump had made it a “thing of ours.” For my entire career, intelligence was a thing of mine and political spin a thing of yours. Team Trump wanted to change that.
I should have said something right then. After all, I hadn’t exactly been shy when it came to asserting myself to leaders in other administrations. I’m not sure it would have made a difference, but maybe I should have told the new team about the norms of behavior, developed over generations, in fits and starts, to try to keep politics out of intelligence, to ensure that the president gets the best facts, whether he likes them or not, and to insulate the intelligence community from charges that its conclusions are politically cooked. Thinking that intelligence leaders would willingly contribute to a conversation about how to do PR in support of any presidential administration was at best a naïve notion, reflecting a misunderstanding of our role. Thinking that members of the outgoing Obama administration would be part of such an effort was just dumb.
But in that moment, I convinced myself that speaking up would be crazy. I didn’t know these people and they didn’t know me. We had just served up “the Russians tried to get you elected.” Should I now give them a lecture about how to behave with us? And when I’m about to have a private session with the president-elect to talk about Russian hookers? Nope. Don’t think so. So I said nothing. And nobody else said anything, either. Nobody on the Trump team thought to say, “Hey, maybe this is a conversation for later,” or “Perhaps we should move on, Mr. President-Elect.”
I actually think it was Trump who ended the communications strategy session by saying they could talk about it at another time. At that point, Reince Priebus asked if there was anything else that we should tell them.
Here we go, I thought.
Clapper said, “Well, yes, there is some additional sensitive material that we thought it made sense for Director Comey to review with you in a smaller group. We will excuse ourselves so he can discuss it privately with you.”
“Okay, how small?” the president-elect asked, looking at me.
“It’s up to you, sir,” I said, “but I was thinking the two of us.”
Reince Priebus interjected, “How about me and the vice president–elect?”
“That’s fine sir,” I answered, turning to the president-elect. “It’s entirely up to you. I just didn’t want to do it with a larger group.”
I don’t know if Trump knew what I was about to say, but the president-elect waved his hand at Priebus and then pointed at me. “Just the two of us. Thanks, everybody.”
The group shook hands with the visitors and everyone filed out. Jeh Johnson’s words banged around my head. “Jim, please be careful. Be very careful.”
We waited quietly while the others filed out. When we were alone, the president-elect spoke first, throwing out compliments. “You’ve had one heck of a year,” he said, adding that I handled the email investigation “honorably” and had a “great reputation.” This was nice of him to say, and there seemed to be genuine concern and appreciation in his voice. I nodded in gratitude, with a tight smile. He said that the people of the FBI “really like you” and expressed his hope that I would stay on as director.
I replied, “I intend to, sir.”
Though it might have been the polite or obvious thing to say to ingratiate myself with the president-elect, I didn’t thank him for saying this, because I already had the job, for a stated ten-year term, and didn’t want it to appear as if I needed to reapply. In fact, only once in the Bureau’s history was an FBI director fired before the end of his term—when Bill Clinton, without controversy, removed William Sessions in 1993 over allegations of serious ethical improprieties. Ironically, the man Clinton replaced him with, Louis Freeh, turned out to be a thorn in the administration’s side as he pressed aggressively for investigations of alleged administration misdeeds.
After Trump finished with his opening monologue, which lasted for a minute or so, I explained the nature of the material I was about to discuss and why we thought it important that he know about it. I then began to summarize the allegation in the dossier that he had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and that the Russians had filmed the episode. I didn’t mention one particular allegation in the dossier—that he was having prostitutes urinate on each other on the very bed President Obama and the First Lady had once slept in as a way of soiling the bed. I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material. This whole thing was weird enough. As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia. Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that the allegations weren’t true.
I explained that I wasn’t saying the FBI believed the allegations. We simply thought it important that he know they were out there and being widely circulated.
I added that one of the FBI’s jobs is to protect the presidency from any kind of coercion, and, whether or not the allegations were true, it was important that he know Russians might be saying such things. I stressed that we did not want to keep information from him, particularly given that the press was about to report it.
He again strongly denied the allegations, asking—rhetorically, I assumed—whether he seemed like a guy who needed the services of prostitutes.
He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations. As he began to grow more defensive and the conversation teetered toward disaster, on instinct, I pulled the tool from my bag: “We are not investigating you, sir.” That seemed to quiet him.
My job done, the conversation ended, we shook hands and I left the conference room. The entire private session took about five minutes, and now I was away, retracing my steps to go out the back entrance. The other directors had gone ahead. On the way down the hall I passed two men in winter coats coming the other way. One looked familiar, but I kept walking. When he was past me, he called, “Director Comey?” and I stopped and turned. Jared Kushner introduced himself, we shook hands, and I continued on my way.
I walked out the side door, stepped into the armored car, and headed to the Manhattan FBI office to do what I loved. I walked floor upon floor of FBI offices and cubicles, thanking incredible people for their work. After the uncomfortable conversation I’d just had, it was like taking a shower.
On January 10, four days after my meeting with Trump, the online publication BuzzFeed published in full the thirty-five-page dossier that I had briefed Trump on. The article began:
A dossier making explosive—but unverified—allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks. The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians.
In response, the president-elect tweeted: “FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”
The following day, January 11, I had another conversation with the future president. In three years working under President Obama, I had never spoken to him on the phone and only talked to him alone in person twice. Yet here I was, still in the Obama administration, standing at my FBI headquarters office window, having my second private conversation with Donald Trump in five days. Below me, as I held the phone to my ear, I could see cars moving on a darkened Pennsylvania Avenue. Across the street, the Justice Department was aglow with busy offices. I remember looking up and to my right at the brightly lit Washington Monument. I could see it rising high above the new Trump hotel that had just been opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, walking distance from the White House.
President-Elect Trump was calling from New York. He started the call by again praising me, which now seemed like a conversational device rather than a sincere expression of approval. He added, “I sure hope you are going to stay.” I assured him, again, that I was staying at the FBI.
He then moved to the purpose of the call. He said he was very concerned about the “leaking” of the Russian “dossier” and how it happened. I wasn’t sure if he was implying that a federal agency had leaked it, so I explained that the dossier was not a government document. It had been compiled by private parties and then given to many people, including in Congress and the press. The FBI hadn’t asked that it be created or paid for it to be created. The document was not classified and not a government document, so it wasn’t really correct that it had been “leaked.”
He then said he had been thinking more about the part I had briefed him about privately at Trump Tower. He had been talking to people who had gone with him on the trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe 2013 pageant. He now recalled that he had not even stayed overnight in Moscow. He claimed he had flown from New York, had only gone to the hotel to change his clothes, and had flown home that same night. And then he surprised me by bringing up the one allegation I had specifically tried not to discuss with him.
“Another reason you know this isn’t true: I’m a germophobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”
I actually let out an audible laugh. I decided not to tell him that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in close proximity to the participants. In fact, though I didn’t know for sure, I imagined the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow was large enough for a germophobe to be at a safe distance from the activity. I thought all of that and said none of it.
Instead, I stared out at the monuments and wondered what had happened to me and our country that the FBI director was talking about this with our incoming president. Having delivered his defense on a subject I didn’t care about, for the second time, the president-elect ended the call. I went to find my chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, to tell him the world had gone crazy and I was caught in the middle of it.
It stayed crazy.
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