Rather, it’s the former FBI director’s use of Russian disinformation and the role that might have played in Trump’s 2016 win.
Rather, it’s the former FBI director’s use of Russian disinformation and the role that might have played in Trump’s 2016 win.
This is the last in a series of five columns on the recent revelations that the Justice Department, beginning in the Trump administration and continuing into the Biden administration, conducted investigations of leaks of sensitive information by government officials to members of the media. Those investigations reportedly involve subpoenas for communications records of several journalists, as well as other controversial information demands by investigators. Follow these links for the first, second, third, and fourth columns in the series.
A s detailed in the first column in this series, former FBI director Jim Comey appears to be the target of a leak investigation that was pursued by the Trump Justice Department, possibly one that the Biden Justice Department continued. There is an intriguing angle here, but it has precious little to do with leaks of classified information.
It appears that the Justice Department has been exploring whether, as FBI director, Comey improperly disclosed classified information that he claims factored into his decision to cut his Justice Department superiors out of his recommendation against indicting Hillary Clinton in her email scandal. The information made its way into an April 2017 New York Times report. There is no known evidence that Comey caused the dissemination of the information, and the chance that a case could be made against him — when an FBI director has broad legal authority to disclose intelligence gathered by the Bureau — is, to my mind, non-existent.
Far more interesting is the fact that the intelligence in question is almost certainly Russian disinformation, and that, though the FBI knew it was bogus, the former director’s reliance on it may have triggered a chain of events that landed Donald Trump — Comey’s nemesis — in the White House.
In early 2016, the Kremlin’s spies appear to have intentionally exposed for the consumption of Dutch intelligence a document claiming that Hillary Clinton would not be charged in the email scandal because the fix was in. Specifically, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was said to have confided to Leonard Bernardo, of the progressive, George Soros–backed Open Society Foundations, that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. As the Washington Post elaborated, Wasserman Schultz had supposedly been thus assured by a senior Clinton campaign staffer, Amanda Renteria. Renteria had supposedly been told by none less than then–attorney general Loretta Lynch herself that the FBI’s investigation of Clinton would not be permitted to go too far — the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate would not be charged.
As is its wont, Russian intelligence appears to have floated out plausible-sounding nonsense as a trap for the unwary.
It is not enough to say that all parties mentioned in the document deny its claims. Bernardo does not know Wasserman Schultz, who had never even heard of Bernardo. Similarly, Renteria and Lynch have never met or communicated. Wasserman Schultz and Renteria have crossed paths fleetingly at political functions but say they’ve had no substantive communications.
Furthermore, the FBI had every reason to know, and appears to have concluded in short order, that the document was Russian disinformation. The Bureau never saw a copy of the supposed email from Wasserman Schultz to Bernardo. In the past, the Dutch source had provided other information that the FBI could not validate. And significantly, as Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz recounted in his report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton-emails investigation, the same Russian document contained an allegation that “Comey planned to delay the [emails] investigation to aid Republicans”; plainly, Comey knew that was not true.
Yet, Comey says this patently false information played a material part in inducing him, without notifying his Justice Department superiors and in defiance of DOJ protocols, to hold a press conference at which he extensively outlined the evidence against Clinton even though she was an uncharged person. He lambasted her for recklessly failing to safeguard classified information but unilaterally assessed that she should not be indicted.
The former director told IG Horowitz that he was not accusing Lynch of impropriety based on the Russian document — though he had faulted the former Obama AG for (a) instructing him to refer to the Clinton criminal probe as a “matter” rather than an “investigation”; and (b) Lynch’s infamous “tarmac meeting” with Mrs. Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton (who, as president, had launched Lynch to prominence in a top DOJ post), while the emails investigation was winding down. Rather, regarding the Russian disinformation, Comey said he’d reasoned that the credibility of the investigation would be destroyed if, were Lynch to be the one who announced that Clinton would not be charged, Russia then leaked the document claiming Lynch had earlier assured Clinton’s campaign that there would be no charges.
IG Horowitz was skeptical about Comey’s version of events.
By mid June 2016, when Comey told Horowitz he began to grow concerned regarding the Russian document, Comey and his staff had already been working for weeks on a statement Comey envisioned issuing without DOJ approval.
After the suspect Russian document came into the FBI’s possession, moreover, Bureau officials briefed senior DOJ officials (though not Lynch) about it in March 2016. At the time, nobody suggested that the document compromised Lynch’s legitimacy as the decisionmaker. Nor would such a suggestion have made sense: Again, the same document portrayed Comey as corrupt, so the “what if it leaks?” concerns would have called for sidelining him, too.
In addition, if an attorney general actually is conflicted, that does not mean the FBI director assumes the Justice Department’s responsibilities. Instead, those duties are assumed by the deputy attorney general — in this case, Sally Yates, as to whom Comey never intimated there was a conflict. But the then-director did not raise his alleged concerns with either AG Lynch or deputy AG Yates. He just usurped their role.
A point about that role — DOJ’s role — also needs to be made because it is too often overlooked in connection with the Clinton investigation. There was no need to make any public announcement that the investigation had been closed.
Just as the Justice Department routinely refuses to admit the existence of investigations publicly, it routinely says nothing publicly when investigations are closed. After all, there is no legal significance to closing a file; it can always be reopened if new evidence warrants doing so. It is not just that the FBI had no business making an announcement about its views on whether Clinton should be prosecuted; the FBI does not have to make any recommendation about charges at all; and if the FBI does make a recommendation, Justice Department prosecutors are under no obligation to follow it. Nor need the Justice Department announce any charging decision at all. Typically it does not, and should not.
In sum, the FBI’s job is to conduct the investigation and hand it off to DOJ for a prosecutorial determination, not to relieve DOJ of hot potatoes that inevitably fall in its lap.
Is this all just ancient history? No.
The former director’s intervention in the charging decision ended up triggering his equally flawed decision to announce publicly, just ten days before the election, that he was reopening the probe due to the trove of Clinton emails found by the FBI on the computer of Anthony Weiner (who was under investigation in a “sexting” scandal and was the then-husband of Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin). The FBI director undoubtedly believed polls that indicated Clinton’s election victory was a sure thing and that his announcement would make no difference — it might even help the seemingly inevitable President Clinton have a clean slate once the FBI, yet again, publicly closed the investigation (which it did a few days later).
But, of course, the race turned out to be much tighter than expected. Comey’s eleventh-hour bombshell was loudly exploited by Trump and stalled whatever momentum Clinton may have had. Given how razor-thin Trump’s victory was, Clinton is not wrong to insist that Comey’s interventions — publicly marshaling the evidence against Clinton even though she was not charged, and then suggesting on the eve of the election that she might, on second thought, be guilty — cost her the presidency.
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has long pressed these questions, illuminating the media’s telling lack of curiosity about them. They arise again now in the context of the leak investigations that have been exposed. It appears that when the Trump Justice Department subpoenaed telecommunications companies in order to scour journalists’ communications records, the principal official in their crosshairs was Comey. The former director was accused by former president Trump of being an incorrigible leaker, particularly after Comey admitted choreographing the leak to the New York Times of an Oval Office meeting at which he says Trump pressured him to drop any investigation of Michael Flynn — the former national-security adviser whom, at the time, Trump had just fired.
The apparent Russian disinformation that cast doubt on Lynch’s credibility as decision-maker in the Clinton emails caper was reported by the Times in April 2017, as part of a lengthy analysis of Comey’s handling of the politically fraught Clinton and Trump investigations. Investigators evidently theorized that he could have self-servingly leaked the substance of the Russian information to the Times.
In IG Horowitz’s comprehensive report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton investigation, the Russian document is the subject of an index that, to this day, remains classified (see IG Horowitz Report, pp. 236, 242 & n.156). There has been minimal media or political pressure for its disclosure.
At this point, the question of who leaked that information to the media is comparatively trivial — except, of course, to the journalists whose communications records were pored over by investigators trying to nab the leaker. What is significant for historical purposes, however, is the Russian document itself, especially: how it was assessed by the FBI, and the outsized role it may have played in Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 election victory.
According to the Horowitz report, former director Comey maintains that the suspect Russian document helped convince him that Lynch could not credibly make the Clinton-emails charging decision. He decided to make it himself, an intervention that started a chain of events that ended in Clinton’s narrow defeat. Ironically, the FBI investigated whether Vladimir Putin used real information, in the form of hacked DNC emails, to influence the 2016 presidential election. In reality, those emails had no impact. The real question is whether, through disinformation, Putin duped the FBI into influencing the outcome of that election, in a manner that had decisive impact.