Murray Waas | Vox

The wolves are coming for Kurt Volker

2019-11-19T18:19:24-05:00

Former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker departs following a closed-door deposition led by the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill on October 3, 2019. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images

House impeachment investigators are probing whether President Donald Trump, or anyone in his inner circle, directed the president’s former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, to press Ukrainian senior officials to shut down a criminal investigation of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, according to sources close to the impeachment inquiry and committee records.

If House investigators are able to uncover evidence that Trump — or anyone close to him — directed Volker to shut down the legitimate investigation of a former head of state as conducted by a sovereign foreign nation, that might constitute a new abuse of power to be included in the articles of impeachment that Democrats are looking to bring against Trump, said one of the sources.

Volker’s role is considered critical in President Trump’s effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to open a formal investigation into alleged corruption regarding a political rival and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections. Neither charge has been found to have merit. Volker was one of the so-called “three amigos” — along with Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — who had direct access to Trump and worked closely with the US president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, on the Ukraine pressure campaign.

At the core of the impeachment inquiry is a substantial body of evidence that President Trump, both personally and through subordinates, pushed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President’s Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his business dealings in Ukraine. This pressure campaign stood to materially benefit Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection effort by manufacturing dirt against a key rival. It is alleged that Trump withheld $390 million in congressionally-approved military assistance to Ukraine for months pending Zelensky’s public agreement to open an investigation.

Volker has said in closed-door testimony that he participated in efforts to push the Zelensky administration to investigate corruption, but that “he was not aware that Vice President Biden’s name was mentioned or a request was made to investigate him until the transcript of [the phone call between Trump and Zelensky] was released on September 25th, 2019.”

Volker is scheduled to publicly answer questions before House investigators on Tuesday, November 19.

Perhaps because the stakes are so high, the White House and congressional Republicans have devised an aggressive plan to discredit Volker if he were to more directly implicate the administration in this effort, according to two people with first-hand knowledge.

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They plan to paint Volker as someone who was acting on his own, freelancing in his attempts to shut down the Poroshenko investigation — pointing out that Volker worked for a lobbying firm that only two years ago received a $600,000 contract to represent the Poroshenko regime in the United States, the sources said.

Poroshenko — a confectionary and media oligarch — served as president of Ukraine from 2014 until May 2019, when he lost a reelection bid to the reform-minded Volodymyr Zelensky. The new Zelensky administration subsequently opened a wide-ranging criminal investigation of Poroshenko for alleged corruption and abuse of his presidential office for personal financial gain. That investigation is ongoing.

At a September 14 dinner in Kyiv — accompanied by William Taylor, a career foreign service officer and the acting ambassador to Ukraine at the time — Volker asked two senior Ukrainian officials close to Zelensky not to investigate Poroshenko further or prosecute him. Taylor described this conversation in his executive session testimony to House impeachment investigators. George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, was not present at the dinner, but through conversations with others who did attend, confirmed his understanding of this conversation in his own private testimony to the impeachment investigators.

House investigators believe that Trump, or people around him, sought an end to the Poroshenko investigation in order to protect themselves from whatever the former president and several of his former top aides and political allies might disclose about White House efforts to have Ukraine investigate the Bidens and other political rivals. Giuliani had for months been courting these Ukrainian sources, according to the Washington Post, to obtain “information about Hunter Biden … and [alleged] collusion between Democrats and Ukraine in the 2016 election.” Two of Poroshenko’s former prosecutor generals, as well as several others formerly or currently aligned with him, have been found to have manufactured records and made false allegations (some of them since retracted) that were used as ammunition by the Trump administration to pressure Ukraine and remove the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, from her position.

Taylor and Kent both testified Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee as the first public witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, but committee members and counsel did not ask either man about the Poroshenko matter. Volker’s name was mentioned 41 times — and in multiple instances, Taylor, Kent, and Republicans on the committee attested to his integrity and loyalty.

Volker had problematic conflicts of interest with regard to Ukraine

But Volker may have had his own motivations to curtail an investigation by the new Zelensky government. On Nov. 8, the Kyiv Post published an investigative report alleging that the Poroshenko regime — through a nongovernmental organization associated with his administration — paid a DC-based lobbying firm, the BGR Group, more than $600,000 to lobby on behalf of Ukraine, including for allowing the sale of lethal military aid.

The lobbying firm’s website today identifies Volker as a senior international advisor to BGR; he previously served as BGR’s international managing partner from 2011 to 2012.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, the president of BGR Public Relations, one of three divisions of the larger BGR Group, confirmed in an interview that Volker simultaneously worked as a senior international advisor to BGR and as special envoy to Ukraine. But, he added: “Ambassador Volker recused himself from the government of Ukraine work when he was appointed special envoy.” Birnbaum declined to provide any further information about Volker’s work for BGR.

Volker’s dual roles have raised serious issues of conflict of interest. At BGR, Volker advocated a shift of US policy to send lethal weapons to Ukraine — including Javelin missiles, a portable anti-tank weapon manufactured by Raytheon, and a key deterrent to Russian ground forces. Raytheon, which manufactures the Javelin missile system, retained BGR during the very same period of time that the lobbying firm was also representing the government of Ukraine.

The impeachment inquiry is investigating whether President Trump withheld the US military aid package, which included tens of millions of dollars worth of Javelin missiles, in order to pressure the Zelensky regime to investigate the Bidens.

In early October, Volker resigned as the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, at the request of Sen. John McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain. Aside from concerns about Volker’s role in President Trump’s shadow diplomacy with Ukraine were other disclosures that the Institute received funding from Raytheon while Volker headed the organization. BGR represented Raytheon and Ukraine during the same period of time, raising questions as to whether Volker was exploiting his work for the Institute for his lobbying clients.

Volker resigned as special envoy to Ukraine on September 27, hours after the House Intelligence Committee said that Volker would give a deposition to impeachment investigators.

A rogue operator or someone acting at the direction of the White House?

In testimony Volker gave to House impeachment investigators on October 3, he attempted to put some distance between himself and allegations against the president: “At no time was I aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden. Moreover, as I was aware of public accusations about the vice president, several times I cautioned the Ukrainians to distinguish between highlighting their own efforts to fight corruption domestically … [and] anything that could be seen as impacting U.S. elections.”

But Volker’s attorneys also gave impeachment investigators his text messages about his interactions with Giuliani, fellow US diplomats, and Ukrainian officials showing he was far more knowledgeable about the administration’s efforts to push the Zelensky government to investigate Biden, and that he at times facilitated Trump’s and Giuliani’s worst instincts by going along with their efforts to demand the Zelensky administration investigate the Bidens. Investigators believe that he might have more damaging information than he has so far revealed; sources say the White House considers him potentially a far more dangerous witness against the president than they had originally calculated.

Anticipating that Volker might directly implicate President Trump in the effort to have the investigation of Poroshenko shut down, White House officials and sympathetic Republicans staffers on the House Intelligence Committee have devised a plan to discredit and intimidate the former special envoy if he were to make such claims, according to a person asked to participate in the effort.

This person said they planned to paint Volker as having gone rogue, someone willing to use his position as an American diplomat to protect a foreign leader from criminal prosecution because Volker personally stood to gain.

But Volker’s friends and former colleagues say that it would be inconceivable that a diplomat as experienced as he would have asked a senior Ukrainian official to shut down an investigation of a former Ukrainian president — without being directed to do so by President Trump or someone close to his thinking. A former career foreign service officer for more than two decades, Volker served under five presidents, including stints as the US ambassador to NATO and as the primary deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Daniel Fried is a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, who personally oversaw Volker’s work for six years at the State Department. Fried told me that he would find it unlikely that Volker would have raised the issue of curtailing the Poroshenko investigation on his own: “He would want to make sure what the policy is. Before he would make such a recommendation he would want to know that was the line generally. I don’t see him freelancing on something like that.”

A person close to Volker, but who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing impeachment hearings, said that Volker “coordinated closely with people on the ground … with the embassy in Kyiv” before suggesting that Ukraine might forego investigating Poroshenko.

This same person said that Volker told them that he did not “act at the direction or on the instruction” of anyone at the White House or higher-ups in the State Department in Washington — and that Volker did not recall specifically asking the Ukrainians not to prosecute Poroshenko. He rather pointed out, the person said, that “it might not be in Ukraine’s national interest” to do so because it would “be politically divisive” and undermine “national unity.”

An executive branch official told me that senior State Department officials only learned of Volker’s attempted intervention on behalf of Poroshenko after the fact, when alerted to it by a foreign service officer in the U.S. embassy in Kiev.

A controversial dinner in Kyiv

The issue of whether Zelensky’s government should investigate or prosecute Poroshenko arose during the September 14 dinner attended by Volker, Taylor, and two Ukrainian advisers to President Zelensky, Andriy Yermak, and Igor Novikov. Yermak is one of Poroshenko’s closest advisers and friends, and personally oversaw sensitive negotiations with Russia and the United States.

As Taylor recently recounted in his testimony for investigators: “Ambassador Volker suggested to Mr. Yermak and Mr. Novikov … that it would be a good idea not to investigate President Poroshenko, the previous President.” At another point during his questioning, Taylor also recounted: “Kurt said [to the Ukrainians], you know, you should move forward, don’t prosecute Poroshenko.”

In his own testimony to House impeachment investigators, Kent independently corroborated Taylor’s account.

According to Kent’s testimony, after Volker suggested to the Ukrainians that they not prosecute Poroshenko, Yermak answered him: “What, you mean the type of investigations you’re pushing for us to do on Biden and Clinton?”

“And at that point Kurt Volker did not respond,” Kent testified.

Exclusive: Paul Manafort advised White House on how to attack and discredit investigation of President Trump

2018-12-14T18:35:08-05:00

Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, Feb. 28, 2018 in Washington, DC. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Paul Manafort, who served as the manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, provided advice to the president and senior White House officials on the FBI’s Russia investigation during the earliest days of the Trump administration. He gave guidance on how to undermine and discredit the FBI’s inquiry into whether the president, his campaign aides, and family members conspired with the Russian Federation and its intelligence services to covertly defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, according to government records and interviews with individuals familiar with the matter. Manafort himself was under criminal investigation by the FBI during this same time, a fact then known to the White House.

Last Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in court filings that Manafort told “multiple discernible lies” to FBI agents and prosecutors, in violation of the cooperation agreement between Manafort and the special counsel’s office. Among those, Mueller charged, were lies by Manafort to investigators that he had not been in contact with anyone in the White House.

“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort stated he had no direct or indirect communications with anyone in the administration while they were in the administration,” the special counsel said in a court pleading, “and that he never asked anyone to try and communicate a message to anyone in the administration on any subject.” Citing text messages, Manafort’s electronic records, and witness interviews, the special counsel wrote: “The evidence demonstrates that Manafort lied about his contacts.”

Those contacts continued after Trump and his associates knew that Manafort was under investigation by the FBI; after he was indicted by two federal grand juries on more than two dozen felony counts of money laundering, bank fraud, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice; and after having been convicted by a federal jury of 10 of those felonies while awaiting trial on other charges. And now we have learned, thanks to reports from the New York Times and filings in federal court by the special counsel, that those contacts continued even after Manafort became a cooperating witness against the president. The court filings, however, did not disclose any information regarding the subjects of the contacts between Manafort and the White House.

Manafort advised administration officials in the spring and summer of 2017 on how to politically undermine the FBI and Mueller investigation in three ways, according to government records and interviews with three people with knowledge of the contacts. He also gave them advice on how some of the witnesses against both him and the president might be discredited. In short, Manafort and Trump were working together to discredit the investigators as well as potential witnesses.

Manafort urged the president to attack the FBI

First, Manafort advised the president and his political surrogates to more aggressively and directly attack the FBI and other elements of the federal law enforcement apparatus investigating his administration. The goal of Manafort’s advice was to “delegitimize” the investigation itself, one person familiar with the advice explained to me. Manafort wanted nothing less than to “declare a public relations war on the FBI,” this same person said. Another goal was to discredit then-FBI Director James Comey and other senior FBI officials — as it had become increasingly likely they would be witnesses against the president.

Trump later did just that, but it’s unclear what role, if any, Manafort’s advice played in the president deciding to go on the attack. Other, more influential advisers made similar recommendations to Trump. And Trump likely did not need to hear that advice from Manafort or anyone else. As first lady Melania Trump once said of her husband: “As you may know by now, when you attack him he will punch back 10 times harder.”

Manafort also advised a senior administration official, through an intermediary, to attack the Justice Department, the FBI, and Obama administration officials for seeking court-authorized warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to eavesdrop on Manafort and a second campaign aide to Trump, Carter Page, as part of counterintelligence and criminal investigations into whether Manafort, Page, and others had conspired with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

FISA warrants are granted only when the court is presented with sufficient evidence that the person who would be the target of surveillance may be acting on behalf of a foreign power, and the legal threshold to obtain such a warrant is high. The Foreign Intelligence Service Court allowed for the electronic surveillance of Manafort prior to, and subsequent to, his role in the Trump campaign.

Trump alleged that then-President Barack Obama authorized the wiretapping of him and his campaign aides as part of an “illegal” scheme to engage in political espionage. Such allegations have since become central to the president’s attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Mueller investigation — even though Trump and his allies have yet to produce any evidence to show that any of this is true.

As part of these efforts, Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill — most notably, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the outgoing chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — made public sensitive classified information that endangered the lives of intelligence sources and interfered with ongoing criminal investigations. In May 2018, the Justice Department wrote to Nunes warning that information he was about to make public would “risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations and interference with intelligence activities.” Nunes released much of the information anyway. Trump himself ordered the declassification of other intelligence information that law enforcement and intelligence officials warned would do similar damage.

Attacking the use of FISA warrants had no effect on the outcome of Manafort’s criminal case. But a person with firsthand knowledge of Manafort’s thinking — and that of Manafort’s defense team — told me they believed discrediting the FISA process and, more broadly, the federal criminal investigation of him and other Trump campaign aides would make it more politically feasible for Trump to pardon Manafort.

Manafort urged the president to attack the DNC

Second, Manafort counseled the White House to allege — albeit with no evidence to back up said charges — that the pro-Western Ukrainian government had colluded with the Democratic National Committee to try to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election. A source with direct knowledge of the matter told me that the White House adopted Manafort’s recommendation in the summer of 2017 to specifically target Alexandra Chalupa, a political strategist and consultant for the DNC, for allegedly working with Ukrainian officials to hurt Trump’s candidacy. Despite a torrent of allegations, no evidence has surfaced that Chalupa or the DNC did anything wrong.

Acting on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” That same week, Fox News’s Sean Hannity amplified the allegations evening after evening on his show. Likewise, Republicans on Capitol Hill called for investigations of the “Ukrainian matter.” On July 25, 2017, Trump tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign – ‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”

On August 9, 2017, Matthew Whitaker (now the acting attorney general) and a conservative advocacy group he then headed, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), formally asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate the DNC’s dealings with Chalupa. The complaint was largely based on scant evidence and erroneous information; the FEC has given no indication since that it will investigate the matter further.

Even though the allegations had no factual basis to prove anything improper, they were effective propaganda. The White House made its claims shortly after the first public disclosures that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a Trump Tower meeting between a self-described intermediary for the Russian Federation and himself, Jared Kushner, and Manafort, in which the Russians promised “dirt” on Clinton. The White House was attempting to draw a parallel between its meetings with foreigners and the DNC’s via Chalupa.

But the comparison has always been a facile one, and the White House and its surrogates have not been able to prove any wrongdoing by their counterparts. The Russian Federation — an adversary of the United States — engaged in a covert intelligence effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort agreed to a meeting with individuals they were told were associated with the Russian government to obtain “dirt” on Clinton. Don Jr. in particular was acting on behalf of his father and his presidential campaign. It is illegal for a political campaign to accept any help from a foreign individual, foreign entity, or former government, and illegal not to disclose it; that is, in part, one of the reasons the Trump Tower meeting has also been a focus of special counsel Mueller’s investigation.

Chalupa looked into Manafort’s role as an adviser to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — who wanted to cut ties with the European Union and become more closely aligned with Russia — and set out to sound the alarm. At one point, she even organized a protest in Manafort’s hometown of New Britain, Connecticut, in which protesters held up signs saying, “Putin, hands off the US election.” But those endeavors were unrelated to her work for the Democratic National Committee, where she had been the co-chair of the DNC’s affiliate the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Council during the 2016 presidential election.

When Chalupa brought up Manafort with anyone at the DNC, they were largely disinterested, and in July 2016, she left her part-time consulting role at the DNC to work full time on her human rights advocacy. The DNC and the Clinton campaign have said that they were uninvolved with her efforts, and no evidence has surfaced to contradict that claim.

Manafort urged the president to attack Clinton and the Steele dossier

Third, in early 2017, Manafort provided the White House specific information on how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign had sponsored research into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. More specifically, Manafort provided information to the White House as to how to discredit the so-called Steele dossier, a report written by Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk for the British intelligence agency MI6, about alleged ties that Trump and his associates had to Russia. (Manafort provided background to the White House’s attorneys about specific allegations and information in the dossier that he said was suspect.)

Manafort also recommended that Trump play up the fact that the work had been commissioned by a private investigation firm hired by the Clinton campaign, according to a former administration official familiar with the effort.

Manafort’s contacts with the White House continued even after his cooperation with Mueller. Without telling prosecutors, Manafort’s defense attorneys were secretly providing details of their client’s cooperation with the special counsel to the president’s legal team, in an apparent effort by Manafort to undermine the investigation or perhaps win a pardon from Trump. In the process, Manafort may have thus helped Trump tailor his answers to questions recently provided to the special counsel’s office.

Harry Litman, a former US attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, has since commented: “The open pipeline between cooperator and suspect Trump may have been not on only extraordinary but also criminal. … What purpose other than an attempt to ‘influence, obstruct, or impede’ the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering.”

In short, in trying to cover up and maneuver for a pardon, Manafort and others may have committed even more crimes. Each “discernible lie” Manafort told is a potential new felony charge of lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, or combination thereof. Of obvious interest to the special counsel is whether others, most notably White House officials, conspired with Manafort to lie, mislead investigators, and possibly obstruct justice, and what, specifically, the president of the United States knew about all of this.

Exclusive: Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton

2018-11-09T18:47:07-05:00

Matthew Whitaker in August. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Matthew Whitaker, whom President Donald Trump named as his acting attorney general on Wednesday, privately provided advice to the president last year on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to investigate the president’s political adversaries, Vox has learned.

Whitaker was an outspoken critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe before he became the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in September 2017. That has rightfully raised concerns that Whitaker might now attempt to sabotage Mueller’s investigation. But new information suggests that Whitaker — while working for Sessions — advocated on behalf of, and attempted to facilitate, Trump’s desire to exploit the Justice Department and FBI to investigate the president’s enemies.

In May 2018, President Donald Trump demanded that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his presidential campaign and whether Obama administration officials were involved in this purported effort. Trump, his Republican allies in Congress, and conservative news organizations — most notably Fox News — were making such claims and amplifying those of others, even though they offered scant evidence, if any, that these allegations were true.

Sessions, Rosenstein, and other senior department officials believed that if they agreed to Trump’s wishes, doing so would constitute an improper politicization of the department that would set a dangerous precedent for Trump — or any future president — to exploit the powerful apparatus of the DOJ and FBI to investigate their political adversaries. Those efforts, in turn, coincided with the president’s campaign to undermine Mueller’s investigation into whether the president’s campaign aides, White House advisers, and members of his own family colluded with Russian to help Trump win the 2016 election.

During this period of time, Whitaker was the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and in that role was advising Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on how to counter the president’s demands. But according to one former and one current administration official, Whitaker was simultaneously counseling the White House on how the president and his aides might successfully pressure Sessions and Rosenstein to give in to Trump’s demands.

Sources say that Whitaker presented himself as a sympathetic ear to both Sessions and Rosenstein — telling them he supported their efforts to prevent the president from politicizing the Justice Department. A person close to Whitaker suggested to me that the then-chief of staff was only attempting to diffuse the tension between the president and his attorney general and deputy attorney general, and facilitate an agreement between the two sides.

But two other people with firsthand information about the matter told me that Whitaker, in his conversations with the president, presented himself as a vigorous supporter of Trump’s position and “committed to extract as much as he could from the Justice Department on the president’s behalf.”

One administration official with knowledge of the matter told me: “Whitaker let it be known [in the White House] that he was on a team, and that was the president’s team.”

Whitaker’s open sympathizing with Trump’s frequent complaints about the Mueller investigation resulted in an unusually close relationship between a president and a staffer of his level. The president met with Whitaker in the White House, often in the Oval Office, at least 10 times, a former senior administration official told me. On most of those occasions, Sessions was also present, but it’s unclear if that was always the case.

During this period, Whitaker frequently spoke by phone with both Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly, this same official told me. On many of those phone calls, nobody else was on the phone except for the president and Whitaker, or only Kelly and Whitaker. As one senior law enforcement official told me, “Nobody else knew what was said on those calls except what Whitaker decided to tell others, and if he did, whether he was telling the truth. Who ever heard of a president barely speaking to his attorney general but on the phone constantly with a staff-level person?”

Despite this being the case, on Friday as he was leaving on a trip to Paris, Trump told reporters, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker.” He also claimed that he never spoke to the then-DOJ chief of staff about the Mueller investigation: “I didn’t speak to Matt Whitaker about it,” he said.

Whitaker was a White House ally in building the case to investigate Hillary Clinton

Whitaker also counseled the president in private on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to name a special counsel to investigate not only allegations of FBI wrongdoing but also Hillary Clinton. Trump wanted the Justice Department to investigate the role that Clinton purportedly played, as secretary of state, in approving the Russian nuclear energy agency’s (Rosatom) purchase of a US uranium mining company.

The FBI had earlier investigated the allegations, concluded that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and closed out its investigation. Trump presented no new evidence to the Justice Department that would justify reopening the investigation, and thus senior Justice Department officials considered the president’s request to be a blatant attempt to improperly use the Department and FBI to discredit a political adversary.

Yet Whitaker suggested to the White House that he personally was sympathetic to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate these matters, according to the two officials with knowledge of the matter. A Justice Department official told me: “You have to have a predicate to open an investigation, or to reopen a closed case. You have an even higher one, an extraordinary threshold, to appoint a special counsel. If you don’t, what you are doing is unethical as a lawyer.”

A person close to Whitaker suggested that he did what so many others around Trump do, which is tell the president what he wants to hear: “With Sessions and Rod, [Whitaker] said he was on their side, and thought the appointment of a special counsel was ludicrous.”

Whitaker was a longtime Mueller skeptic

It had long been feared that the president would fire either Sessions — who had recused himself from involvement in the Russia investigation, to Trump’s ire — or Rosenstein, and appoint someone to replace one or both of them, which would lead to the Mueller probe being overseen by a loyalist to the president who would curtail or even sabotage the investigation. Those fears were realized with lightning speed on Wednesday when the president demanded Sessions resign and named Whitaker as the acting attorney general. The Justice Department said in a statement that Whitaker would now supervise the special counsel’s investigation.

Before he became Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker was one of the staunchest critics of Mueller’s investigation. In a July 2017 appearance on CNN, for example, Whitaker spoke of various ways the White House might sabotage Mueller’s probe. Whitaker suggested that if Sessions were to resign or be fired, his replacement might be able to curtail the investigation by simply refusing to fund it further.

“I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt,” Whitaker said.

The previous month, Whitaker, appearing on a conservative radio show, said he was sure that the president and his men did nothing wrong: “The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” he declared.

John Q. Barrett, a professor at St. John’s Law School and a former associate Iran-Contra prosecutor, tweeted after the president named Whitaker acting attorney general: “Whitaker told me in June 2017 that he was flying out from Iowa to NYC to be on CNN regularly because he was hoping to be noticed as a Trump defender, and through that to get a Trump judicial appointment back in Iowa.”

In August 2017, as a CNN legal commentator, Whitaker authored an op-ed titled “Mueller’s investigation of Trump is going too far.” He wrote: “It is time for Rosenstein, who is the acting attorney general for the purposes of this investigation, to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation.” The following month, Whitaker was named Sessions’s chief of staff.

The president’s relationship with Sessions and Rosenstein has famously been largely one of animosity and disdain. But in Whitaker, the president found a reliable and compliant friend. As the New York Times reported, “The president has long regarded Mr. Whitaker as his eyes and ears inside a department that he considers an enemy institution.” The Washington Post similarly reported, “As Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker met with the president in the Oval Office more than a dozen times, normally accompanying the attorney general. … When Trump complained about the Mueller investigation, Whitaker often smiled knowingly and nodded in assent.”

But even for a Trump loyalist, the facts stymied further investigation

In May, after Trump demanded the Justice Department investigate the FBI, several members of Congress, after reviewing classified information on the matter, said they could find no evidence to lend credence to the allegations that the FBI possibly “infiltrated or surveilled” his presidential campaign.

Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and is a reliable Trump supporter, said he concluded the allegations were “untrue.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said he could find no evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has conceded that the president made his claims about campaign “spying” based on unsubstantiated information he didn’t know to be true.

As I previously reported for Vox, after Trump’s demands of the Justice Department, Sessions, Rosenstein, and other senior department officials were in a bind. To accede to a presidential demand — especially one based on specious evidence — would politicize and compromise the independence and integrity of the department, some senior DOJ officials strongly believed.

But there was also good reason to believe that Trump, if he did not get his way, would retaliate. Officials feared that Trump might fire the attorney general or Rosenstein, jeopardizing Mueller’s investigation.

Rosenstein came up with what appeared to be an adroit compromise to diffuse the situation. He decided that — rather than the DOJ itself opening the criminal investigation the president had demanded — he would instead ask the Justice Department’s inspector general to look into the matter. Trump, placated, agreed to the arrangement, and stood down.

By requesting the inspector general conduct an inquiry of the FBI, Rosenstein and other senior department officials believed they were acting ethically. Although an investigation by the DOJ’s IG could result in criminal charges, the agency conducts reviews of systematic failures within the department. Thus, there is no predicate of criminal behavior necessary to begin such a review.

As the New York Times reported at the time, Rosenstein’s supporters saw his response to Trump as a “deft deflection” that achieved three immediate needs: “It neutered a troubling request, appeared responsive to the president’s demands and allowed Mr. Rosenstein to keep his job.”

But critics — among them senior current and former Justice Department officials — argued that by acceding, Rosenstein did irreparable damage to the department. Matthew Miller, who served as the Justice Department’s spokesperson during the Obama administration, told me, “The inspector general does not exist to disprove presidential conspiracy theories, or even legitimize them by investigating them in the first place. And the deputy attorney general should not be participating in a presidential attempt to conduct an investigation based on no evidence — and sought only to discredit the lawful investigations of the president and his campaign aides.”

The fig leaf comes off

To placate the president’s demand that a special counsel be named to investigate Hillary Clinton’s role in the uranium deal, Rosenstein and other Justice Department officials came up with a similar compromise: Instead of naming a special counsel, Sessions agreed to appoint John Huber, the US attorney for Utah, to review the department’s earlier investigation. If he found evidence of any serious wrongdoing, Huber could then recommend the opening of a formal criminal investigation or even the appointment of a special counsel.

A long-time Justice Department trial attorney told me, “This is the first time, perhaps since Watergate, that the department has been asked to review old, closed files about a president’s political opponents. It’s not right that it should have been done at all. Yet you can argue that Sessions did this in the most benign way possible. He did refuse to open a criminal investigation without cause, and he stood firm by refusing to appoint a special counsel.”

Sessions wrote to several Republican members of Congress in March to say that Huber’s review was a top priority: “I receive regular updates from Mr. Huber and upon the conclusion of his review,” so as to consider “whether any matters merit the appointment of a special counsel.” At the highest levels of the Justice Department, Huber’s review has been considered to be little more than a publicity or political stunt to placate Trump.

Now, however, with Whitaker as acting attorney general, and the future of the Mueller investigation in jeopardy, it will be up to him to make the final decision on whether a special prosecutor will investigate Hillary Clinton.

Inside the DOJ’s struggle with Trump’s demand for a “Spygate” investigation

2018-07-05T11:51:52-04:00

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is sworn in prior to testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 18, 2018. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

On the afternoon of June 14, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long-anticipated and highly critical report about the conduct of former FBI Director James Comey and other high-level Justice Department and FBI officials regarding their handling of the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation.

But largely out of public view, the Inspector General’s Office was in the midst of a perhaps even more consequential matter. Until recently, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Horowitz, and other senior Justice Department officials were grappling with a demand from Donald Trump testing the boundaries between the DOJ and White House, pitting a president willing to blow past traditional norms against an agency attempting to abide the rule of law — and unsure how to draw the line in response.

On May 20, Trump demanded on Twitter that the Justice Department “look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.” The president, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, and conservative media outlets, most notably Fox News, had been alleging for weeks that the FBI had used a spy to infiltrate Trump’s political campaign — even though they were unable to provide any credible evidence that this was true.

The president of the United States has no formal authority to order the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation. And in this particular instance, there was no evidence of wrongdoing that might rationalize the opening of such an inquiry. Moreover, Trump’s motives in demanding such an inquiry seemed intended to discredit an ongoing criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller of the president himself and several of his top advisers and family members.

But Trump was determined to get his way. On at least three occasions, according to a senior US government official familiar with the matter, Trump brought up the issue personally with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, variously asking, cajoling, and demanding either that he investigate the purported spy or appoint a special counsel to more broadly look at alleged wrongdoing by DOJ and FBI officials who had pursued the Russia interference inquiry.

What Trump was demanding, some senior DOJ officials told me — requesting anonymity due to their sensitive positions — went further than Trump’s past clashes with the Justice Department, including his public criticisms of Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and constant threats to fire Rosenstein and Mueller.

Even before he was elected, Trump had spoken of using the Justice Department to investigate his political adversaries. He alleged, without evidence, that the DOJ and FBI had covered up for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, by not bringing criminal charges against her for using a private email server as secretary of state. He regularly encouraged his supporters at his rallies to chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Once in office, Trump repeatedly demanded that the Justice Department investigate his political adversaries and even specific witnesses who might testify against him in Mueller’s probe. Each time that Trump made such demands, DOJ officials did the best that they could to deflect them — and more often than not succeeded.

But this new demand for an investigation was the most direct threat to the autonomy and integrity of the department in decades, multiple sources within DOJ said. Trump was formally ordering the Justice Department to initiate and conduct an investigation that senior Justice Department officials — both career officials and political appointees — believed to be unwarranted and illegitimate. The formality of Trump’s demand led Sessions and others to believe “this time the threat might be for real,” a senior federal law enforcement official told me.

The Justice Department threaded the needle to avoid a crisis

When Trump formally demanded that the Justice Department look into purported spying on his campaign by the FBI, it put DOJ officials in a bind. To accede to a presidential demand — especially one based on specious evidence — would politicize and compromise the independence and integrity of the department, some senior DOJ officials strongly believed. Moreover, there was good reason that Trump would retaliate against the Justice Department if he did not get what he wanted.

If the Justice Department refused to carry out the order, it was thought that the president might fire the attorney general and possibly Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel investigation into Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 elections and possible obstruction of justice. Two senior federal law enforcement officials told me in confidence that a purge of this sort would have almost certainly led to a mass resignation of senior Justice Department officials that would have been unprecedented in history.

Mueller’s investigation would have been jeopardized as well. Rosenstein appointed Mueller and oversees his work, deciding whether Mueller can bring certain cases, whether he can expand his jurisdiction, and perhaps most importantly, whether to refer information to the US House of Representatives that might lead to Trump’s impeachment. Were Rosenstein to be fired or resign, the thinking goes, Trump would replace him with someone less inclined to support the investigation.

But Rosenstein came up with what appeared to be an adroit compromise to diffuse the situation. The deputy attorney general decided that — rather than the DOJ itself opening the criminal investigation the president had demanded — he would instead ask Horowitz to look into the matter. President Trump, placated, agreed to the arrangement, and stood down.

The Inspector General’s Office conducts administrative reviews of possible missteps or misconduct by DOJ and FBI officials and contractors —as well as criminal investigations. In this instance, Horowitz was asked by Rosenstein to conduct a “review” of the matter — although if the IG were to find evidence of a potential crime, he could refer that information to prosecutors.

Likely, Horowitz would find no wrongdoing, senior department officials reasoned, and there the matter would likely quietly die. If by the long-shot chance that Horowitz found evidence of a crime, IGs are empowered to make a criminal referral to other offices in the Justice Department with the power to prosecute. One hazard that Rosenstein faced, however, was that Horowitz might simply refuse to investigate.

A senior Justice Department official told me at the time that they feared Rosenstein only came up with a temporary fix, deferring a potentially more serious showdown if Horowitz declined to formally open an inquiry or dismiss taking it on for lack of evidence. “The initial analysis might find there just isn’t enough to go on,” said the official.

But the Inspector General’s Office has since moved forward with a review of the matter, Horowitz confirmed during testimony on June 19 before two committees in Congress. Responding to a question from Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI). Horowitz said his office was “looking at … campaign-related questions that had been referred to us.” Through a spokesperson, Horowitz declined to be interviewed for this story or comment further.

Just the facts, and the facts are thin

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican from South Carolina, told Fox News on May 29 that after reviewing the highest classified information on the matter, he had not seen any evidence of wrongdoing: “I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine.” Gowdy said that the FBI’s action had “nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Rep. Tom Rooney, a Republican from Florida who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, has spoken even more dismissively of the president’s claims: “What is the point of saying there was a spy in the campaign when there was none?” Rooney says that the president’s charges simply are “untrue.”

And on June 6, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that after reviewing the same classified information, he had seen “no evidence” to support the charges.

Even the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has conceded that the president made his charges about campaign “spying” based on unsubstantiated information he doesn’t know to be true.

Questions have arisen as to whether even Trump entirely believes his own allegations: The Associated Press reported on May 24 that Trump “told one ally” that he “wanted to ‘brand’ the informant a ‘spy’ believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.” No evidence whatsoever has come to light to support Trump’s hyperbolic allegations that the FBI engaged in political espionage of his presidential campaign. Trump has claimed that there were “people infiltrating our campaign,” that a “spy” was placed in his campaign by officials at the “crooked highest levels of the FBI,” on the orders of the Obama White House — all at the behest of an amorphous “criminal deep state.”

What is known about the matter is this: The FBI utilized an informant named Stefan Halper, a former State Department official during the Reagan administration, to meet with two of Trump’s campaign aides to attempt to draw them out about their ties to Russians wanting to influence the election. One of those aides, George Papadopoulos, has since pleaded guilty to federal charges of having lied to the FBI about his conversations with people close to the Russian government who offered him and the Trump campaign damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

A former senior political appointee during the Obama administration who supported Rosenstein’s and Horowitz’s decisions, and who asked to speak anonymously due to a current job, told me: “Horowitz will report back that his review found there is no evidence that any of president’s rantings are legitimate and disprove them as the conspiracy theories they are. That’s not entirely a bad outcome.”

But Matthew Miller, who served as the Justice Department chief spokesperson during the Obama administration, sees a bigger concern. “The inspector general does not exist to disprove presidential conspiracy theories. Or even legitimize them by investigating them in the first place,” he said.

“And the deputy attorney general should not be participating in a presidential attempt to conduct an investigation based on no evidence — and sought only to discredit the lawful investigations of the president and his campaign aides.”

Some argue the DOJ has already been severely compromised

In responding to Trump’s demand, Rosenstein said he was referring the matter to the inspector general: “If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know it and take appropriate action.”

Jack Goldsmith, who served during the second Bush administration headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, tweeted that Rosenstein was in a “tricky position” and that he should be “cut [some] slack on small accommodations to POTUS outrages—such as the referral to the IG following Trump’s tweet—to allow them to continue to conduct the Russia investigation.”

Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who specialized in fighting al-Qaeda, tweeted: “Smart response by DOJ! They potentially voided a constitutional crisis by politely, yet effectively, sidelined the President’s attempt to interfere in an ongoing investigation. The Mueller probe continues…for now.”

But critics — among them senior current and former Justice Department officials, such as Miller — argue that, by acceding, Rosenstein not only allowed the Justice Department to be institutionally exploited but lent credence to Trump’s unproven allegations. It also let the president credibly claim that the Justice Department was investigating itself and the FBI for political bias within the special counsel’s inquiry, a foundation of Trump’s attacks on the Russia collusion “witch hunt,” as he has taken to calling it.

Miller and others more broadly argue that each time Rosenstein acquiesces to an unreasonable demand by Trump — even for the best of intentions, foremost protecting the Mueller probe — the independent and apolitical nature of the Justice Department slowly erodes.

More consequential have been demands by congressional Republicans that the Justice Department and FBI provide them classified files on their informant, Halper, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. The DOJ initially refused to turn over the files, saying that to do so could lead to “potential loss of human lives” and “compromise ongoing investigations.” But Trump pressured Sessions, Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray to comply anyway.

After Republican Congress members threatened Rosenstein with contempt of court, even impeachment, if he did not do what they warned, Rosenstein defiantly declared: “The Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.” But Sessions and Rosenstein have since capitulated to demands to turn over many of the papers.

What could have happened if Horowitz had refused to pursue the matter further

Sessions and Rosenstein faced a strikingly similar situation late in February, in which they engineered an effort to mollify Trump. The White House and the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee had vociferously alleged that there had been irregularities in the way the Justice Department and FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to eavesdrop on telephone conversations and read emails by Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump presidential campaign. The Justice Department and FBI denied any wrongdoing, but Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill demanded an investigation.

Wanting to appease an angry president, Sessions said at a February 27 press conference: “We believe the Department of Justice must adhere to the high standards in the FISA court and, yes, it will be investigated. The inspector general will take that as one of the matters they’ll deal with.”

But Vox has learned that, at the time, the Inspector General’s Office had not agreed to conduct any such review when Sessions made his comments.

Even Sessions’s attempt to appease Trump backfired. The president went on to demand a criminal investigation, or better yet, a special counsel to dig into alleged Justice Department and FBI wrongdoing.

“Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse,” the president tweeted the following day. “Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”

Only on March 28 — a full month later — did Horowitz announce that he had decided he would review the FISA issue “in response to requests from the Attorney General and Members of Congress.” That same day, Horowitz wrote the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who had requested the investigation in the first place, to say he was proceeding.

But in the same letter, the inspector general wrote that he had also decided not to investigate three other separate matters that Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had asked of him. Horowitz wrote that one was related to a “pending criminal matter” — referring to the special counsel — and thus he would not investigate.

For that same reason — that the FBI informant is necessarily involved in Mueller’s inquiry — a former and current senior DOJ official both told me they thought it was highly unlikely that Horowitz would launch a formal, separate investigation. But now that the inspector general has, independently, taken up the review, it may have the inadvertent effect of buying Rosenstein a little breathing room.

In the meantime, even Rosenstein’s critics are sympathetic to the jam he and the Justice Department are in, even as they are wary about the compromises already made: “Standing up to Trump … might have provoked the cataclysmic confrontation between the Justice Department and the president that has at times seemed inevitable since the Russia probe began,” former DOJ spokesperson Miller wrote in the Washington Post, on March 22.

“But the alternative is watching the slow erosion of the department’s independence, as the president’s attacks take hold, Republicans in Congress either egg him on or cower in corners, and the norms of presidential behavior drift inexorably in Trump’s direction.”

“For now, Rosenstein seems to be delaying a fight with the president,” Miller wrote. “But that day will come, and we should all hope he recognizes it before it is too late.”

Murray Waas is an investigative reporter who focuses on national security and intelligence matters.

Correction: an earlier version of this article stated that the Inspector General’s Office does not have the ability to conduct criminal investigations. It does.

Exclusive: Trump pressed Sessions to fire 2 FBI officials who sent anti-Trump text messages

2018-04-20T11:39:21-04:00

President Donald Trump sharply questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray during a White House meeting on January 22 about why two senior FBI officials — Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — were still in their jobs despite allegations made by allies of the president that they had been disloyal to him and had unfairly targeted him and his administration, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The president also pressed his attorney general and FBI director to work more aggressively to uncover derogatory information within the FBI’s files to turn over to congressional Republicans working to discredit the two FBI officials, according to the same sources.

The very next day, Trump met Sessions again, this time without Wray present, and even more aggressively advocated that Strzok and Page be fired, the sources said.

Trump’s efforts to discredit Strzok and Page came after Trump was advised last summer by his then-criminal defense attorney John Dowd that Page was a likely witness against him in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, according to two senior administration officials. That Trump knew that Page might be a potential witness against him has not been previously reported or publicly known.

The effort to discredit Strzok and Page has been part of a broader effort by Trump and his allies to discredit and even fire FBI officials who they believe will be damaging witnesses against the president in Mueller’s obstruction of justice probe.

Those attacks, in turn, are part of a broader push to denigrate Mueller himself and make it easier for Trump to publicly justify his potential firing. Those efforts have taken on new urgency as Mueller continues to rack up guilty pleas from former senior Trump officials like Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, and after the FBI, in conjunction with other federal prosecutors, raided the office, home, and hotel room of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer. Trump’s fury over the raid has made many of his closest advisers worry that he’s inching closer to firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller probe, and possibly Mueller as well.

Last May, Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, who today appears to be the special counsel’s most crucial witness against the president. Trump also enlisted his attorney general to pressure current FBI Director Wray earlier this year to fire then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Wray thought the pressure was so improper that he threatened to resign if it did not end.

Trump’s efforts against Page and Strzok demonstrate that the president personally has targeted even midlevel officials and career FBI agents.

Why Strzok and Page became the focus of right-wing anger

Strzok was formerly the FBI’s deputy assistant director of the counterintelligence division, and Page was a senior FBI attorney.

Strzok helped oversee two of the FBI’s most politically contentious investigations: the probe of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and a private email account while she was secretary of state; and an investigation into whether campaign aides to Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. As general counsel to then-Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Page provided legal and strategic advice about both investigations to both Comey and McCabe.

For a brief period, Strzok served as the lead FBI agent for the special counsel, and Page as an attorney also worked for Mueller. The two came under scrutiny by four separate Republican congressional committees after text messages between the two of them surfaced last December in which both had made derogatory comments about Trump just prior to and after the 2016 election. Strzok and Page worked closely together and were engaged in an extramarital affair at the time.

Page and Strzok repeatedly disparaged Trump in their private messages to each other. Right after Trump’s surprise electoral victory, Strzok texted Page: “OMG I am so depressed.” Page replied: “I don’t know if I can eat. I am very nauseous.”

But a review of thousands of the texts sent between the two FBI officials shows that they also severely criticized both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and talked bluntly and critically of colleagues and others. No evidence has come to light to substantiate allegations that the FBI’s investigations were politicized to either protect Clinton or persecute Trump. In fact, Strzok was reassigned from Mueller’s team when the derogatory text messages were discovered by his bosses (Page reportedly had left Mueller’s team earlier). Through their attorneys, Strzok, Page, and McCabe declined to comment.

Nevertheless, Trump and his allies have attempted to paint Mueller as untrustworthy and biased because both Strzok and Page briefly worked for him. And they have pushed the narrative that a cabal of FBI officials — which at times has included Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok, among others — are out to get the president.

“There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” veteran Washington attorney Joseph diGenova, whom Trump recently considered having join his legal defense, told Fox News in January. “Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

The missing text messages

The narrative of a “deep state” conspiracy against the White House by government workers has at times centered on some missing text messages between Strzok and Page — text messages that, according to critics of the Mueller investigation, were allegedly deleted by the FBI to cover up a plot to undermine Trump.

During the January 22 meeting with Sessions and Wray, the president parroted that narrative, complaining about a significant gap of several months in Page and Strzok’s text messages and suggesting that the FBI was covering them up, according to the two government officials familiar with the meeting.

The FBI declined to comment for this article, refusing to confirm that Wray met with the president or attorney general on January 22: “There is no public schedule for the director,” FBI spokesperson Andrew Ames said in an email. Regarding other details, Ames said, “We have no comment on the remainder of your questions.” A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said, “We don’t comment on conversations with the president.”

Trump’s meeting with Sessions and Wray occurred one day after a report in the Washington Post, in which Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had written Wray complaining that the FBI “did not preserve text messages between Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok” during a five-month period that was crucial to investigators.

After the White House meeting on January 22, the attorney general was immediately responsive. In a statement made public that same day, Sessions vowed, “We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source.”

The next morning, Trump ratcheted up the pressure, tweeting: “In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI says it is now missing five months worth of lovers Strzok – Page texts, perhaps 50,000, all in prime time. Wow!”

But within a week, the Justice Department’s inspector general was able to recover and turn over the missing text messages to Congress. It turned out the FBI had been unable to recover texts from thousands of its agents, not just Strzok and Page, when it upgraded its Samsung Galaxy phones.

Trump viewed Page as a potential witness against him

The event at the center of the special counsel’s obstruction of justice investigation is the now-famous account by Comey that President Trump had pressured him, in a one-on-one meeting in February 2017, to shut down the FBI’s criminal investigation into whether former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials.

When Comey refused to shut down the Flynn investigation and turned down other requests from Trump regarding the Russia probe, Trump fired Comey. That, in turn, led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel to investigate possible collusion between Trump campaign aides and Russia to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Mueller almost immediately expanded his investigation into whether Trump also obstructed justice.

Trump and his allies have expressed their belief that it would be difficult to bring any obstruction of justice case against the president because the allegations would boil down to the word of one person — Comey — versus that of another, the president of the United States. Trump has relentlessly attacked Comey, hoping to raise doubts about the former FBI director’s credibility.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written, Mueller could seek permission to indict and prosecute Trump if he feels he has enough evidence of a potential crime. But it’s not clear that charges can actually be brought against a sitting president, though Mueller’s findings could nevertheless be turned over to Congress and serve as the centerpiece of any impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Last June, I first reported at Vox that Comey regularly confided in three of the FBI’s most senior managers about his troubling interactions with Trump regarding the Russia probe, including the Oval Office meeting during which Trump asked Comey to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Among those Comey said he confided in were Andrew McCabe; Jim Rybicki, then Comey’s chief of staff; and James Baker, then the FBI’s general counsel.

One quote in a follow-up story particularly distressed the president’s then-private attorney, John Dowd, and other advisers to the president, according to a senior administration official. “What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official told me at the time. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”

In subsequent testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey confirmed that he regularly confided in McCabe, Rybicki, and Baker but also briefly noted that he sometimes invited other less senior FBI officials to meetings on the topic of his encounters with Trump.

One person Comey identified was “the deputy director’s chief counsel.” This was an apparent reference to Lisa Page. No press reports then or since identified her as a potential witness against Trump before this story — even as the president, his political allies, and Republican-controlled investigative committees on Capitol Hill relentlessly attacked her.

But the reference caught Dowd’s attention. After doing some research, Dowd concluded that Page might be a dangerous witness against the president, according to a senior administration official, because she may have attended meetings with Comey and other senior FBI managers during which Comey discussed his troublesome contacts with the president — perhaps even the meeting during which Trump allegedly ordered Comey to shut down the Flynn investigation. Moreover, as chief counsel to McCabe, Page might have been privy to information McCabe had about similar matters.

As first reported by Foreign Policy in late January, President Trump approved a plan to carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after Dowd warned him that they were all almost certainly going to provide damaging testimony that might implicate him in an obstruction of justice case. According to the source, one of the officials specifically targeted was Page.

The relentless Republican assault on the FBI

McCabe, as deputy director, was perhaps the most serious threat as a witness against Trump, beyond Comey. Sure enough, Trump turned his sights to McCabe in recent months.

According to an Axios report in January, Wray had threatened to resign as FBI director after Sessions, acting on Trump’s orders, pressured him to fire McCabe. Wray told Sessions that he had no cause or legal justification to fire McCabe. Sessions ultimately fired McCabe in March.

In light of those events, a senior federal law enforcement official told me that he was surprised Wray did not take more seriously the president’s discussion with him regarding Page. “A president ordinarily doesn’t care about personnel and staffing decisions at the FBI. One had to at least consider this as a furtherance of an obstruction,” the person said.

What’s been lost in the fog of conspiracy theorizing around the Mueller probe is the fact that virtually all of the FBI’s most senior managers supported Comey’s decision to announce the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election — an announcement that arguably helped Donald Trump pull off his victory.

Even as that investigation received blanket coverage, the public knew nothing at all about the FBI investigation into Trump’s top campaign officials for colluding to interfere with the presidential election to help Trump.

“Look, if there was some conspiracy by Jim Comey, Andy McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, the FBI, the deep state, whatever you want to imagine,” a senior federal law enforcement official told me, “the plain fact is that if someone at FBI wanted to tip the election, they would have leaked the existence of that investigation to the New York Times. But nobody said a word, and nobody did because that is the way things really work.”

The right’s assault on the institutional reputation of the FBI has been politically successful. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in January found that nearly 73 percent of Republicans think that “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimize Trump through politically motivated investigations.”

In the meantime, the congressional investigations of the FBI have taken a toll on the law enforcement agency’s investigative capabilities.

On March 18, Wray released a statement saying that even though the FBI had already “dedicated 27 FBI staff to review records” to the House Judiciary Committee about Comey, McCabe, Page, Strzok, and other FBI officials, the FBI was now “doubling” its efforts. There would now be no less than 54 FBI staff members who would work “two shifts per day from 8 a.m. to midnight to expedite completion of this project.”

The number is apparently greater than the number of FBI agents working full time for Robert Mueller.

Murray Waas is an independent journalist who is a former investigations editor for Vice, a former investigative reporter for Reuters, and a former senior correspondent for National Journal. He has written about the Mueller investigation for both Vox and Foreign Policy, and has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

Exclusive: top FBI officials could testify against Trump

2017-08-04T12:58:37-04:00

Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials.

McCabe has told colleagues that he too is a potential witness in the probe of whether Trump broke the law in trying to thwart the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Two senior federal law enforcement officials have told me that the new revelations illustrate why they believe the potential case against Trump is stronger than outsiders have thought.

“What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official said. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”

Trump and his supporters have long argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the special counsel to bring an obstruction case against Trump. The case would rely on the word of one man versus another, that of the president of the United States versus the FBI director he fired. But this was never the case.

Including Comey, as many as 10, and possibly more, of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned as part of the investigation into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, according to two government investigators with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Comey’s notes on his conversations could also be used as evidence, according to many reports.

The White House declined to comment. First contacted by email by on July 27, White House spokesperson Kelly Love responded late Wednesday saying, “This would be a question for outside counsel.” Love did not name which of the president’s many lawyers to contact. Marc E. Kasowitz, an attorney for the president, did not respond to a phone message Wednesday evening. The FBI also declined to comment.

FBI agents are experienced witnesses who routinely testify in high-pressure cases. Plus, the FBI itself is a rare public institution that is widely respected and trusted by the American public. The witness list and breadth of possible evidence, including notes Comey and several other senior FBI officials made at the time, could add up to a much stronger obstruction of justice case than Trump ever could have imagined.

Among those who McCabe and other law enforcement officials have privately believed are potential witnesses are six of the highest-ranking officials of the agency: They include McCabe himself; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff; James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI; David Bowdich, who as the FBI’s associate director is the agency’s third-highest official; and Carl Ghattas, the head of the FBI’s national security division; and a legal adviser to McCabe. McCabe was deputy director of the FBI until May, when he became acting director after President Trump fired Comey.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and a third senior Justice Department official are believed by law enforcement officials to be crucial fact witnesses in the obstruction probe. Their testimony is likely to support Comey and harm Trump, according to investigators and outside experts.

Mueller's case is looking stronger than Trump surrogates say

In May, Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate whether Trump colluded with the Russian government to help defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. A related area of inquiry for the special counsel is whether Trump obstructed justice when he allegedly asked Comey to shut down his inquiry of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump made sure he and Comey were alone when he allegedly pressured the then-FBI director to curtail the FBI’s Russia investigation. At a private White House dinner on January 27, Trump allegedly pressed Comey to pledge his personal loyalty. The dinner came right after the president learned Flynn was under criminal investigation.

Later, on February 14, Trump allegedly leaned on Comey privately in an Oval Office meeting to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Comey did not drop the investigation or take other steps Trump requested that the then-director of the FBI felt were improper. Trump then fired Comey on May 9.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s pressure on Comey to shut down his investigation — combined with other efforts to thwart the investigation, including firing Comey — are an obstruction of justice. As such, Comey is the central witness against Trump in any such obstruction investigation. That Trump was ordinarily alone with Comey when these various incidents occurred has led Trump and his surrogates to argue that it would be difficult for any obstruction of justice case to be brought because it would be based solely on Comey’s word.

“We have to keep in mind that is one person’s record of what happened,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by White House surrogates. “The only two people who know what happened in these meeting are the president and James Comey.”

But even though Trump took great pains to try to be alone with Comey when they spoke, Comey regularly spoke to the six high-ranking FBI managers, often right after a distressing conversation with Trump about the Russia probe.

Comey spoke to these FBI officials almost always within 24 to 48 hours after such a contact took place, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials. A person familiar with the matter told me they know for certain there were at least eight such conversations — and likely more than a dozen — that Comey had with these high-ranking FBI managers, sometimes one on one, sometimes in groups of several officials. More than one such meeting was longer than an hour.

And in at least one previously unreported instance — that of a phone conversation between the president and Comey, during which Trump pressed Comey to say that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation — Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, was present for the entirety of the phone call.

Trump had unexpectedly called Comey while Comey was in a meeting with Rybicki. As Trump and the then-FBI director spoke, Rybicki stayed put and listened to the entirety of Comey’s side of the conversation, according to Comey’s testimony to Congress and a senior federal law enforcement official.

In addition, Comey often emailed Rybicki accounts of his troublesome discussions with Trump about the Russia investigation — if not immediately after, sometimes the same day, according to a senior federal law enforcement official.

Baker, the FBI general counsel, took methodical notes during his discussions with Comey and others in the FBI hierarchy about Trump’s efforts to thwart the FBI’s investigation, according to these same sources.

Law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned

I interviewed current and former law enforcement officials, including some who, though not directly involved in the investigation, have held key positions working for independent counsels or special prosecutors investigating earlier presidents. They told me they agree with McCabe’s assertions that the senior FBI managers are almost certainly to be questioned for any investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice.

Sam Buell, a Duke University law professor who has previously served as a federal prosecutor in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, and Houston, similarly told me that Mueller will almost certainly interview all six senior FBI officials that Comey confided in, as well as Sessions and Rosenstein: “In any high-stakes matter, you are going to want to talk to anyone in the vicinity of a conversation. It doesn’t mean that they end up as trial witness. But at an investigative stage, you are going to talk to all of these people. You want their stories locked in. You want to know if what they have to say would help you or hurt you.”

John Keker, who during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations prosecuted retired Lt. Oliver North for the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, explained to me: “Think of any crime. The defense might make the case that the accuser made it up. The questions for the witness are: ‘Did you just make this up?’ ‘Are you just saying this now?’ ‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ ‘Whom did you say something to? Did you write it down?’

“But if they told people when it happens, it makes their story more plausible. It helps their credibility. In this case, the people Comey told were multiple senior FBI officials.”

Other evidence is there too

In addition to the actual testimony of Comey and nine other senior federal law enforcement officials against the president, there is other related corroboratory evidence created as a result of those conversations. And this could bolster any potential obstruction of justice case against Trump.

There are Comey’s now-famous notes, which are careful, meticulous accounts of his meetings with the president. They are powerful not only for their detail but even for the atmospherics that tell a compelling story, according to people who have read portions of them.

Explaining why he took these notes, Comey told Congress: “I knew that there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself but also to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function. … [I]t was a combination of circumstances, subject matter, and the particular person.”

FBI agents and managers are inveterate note takers. It is part of the culture of the FBI. Several of the senior FBI managers Comey consulted with are also attorneys, who have similar traditions of memorializing important matters by taking careful and contemporaneous notes.

“That’s the culture of the FBI — you habitually document everything you do,” Lauren C. Anderson, a former senior FBI official who worked for the bureau for 29 years, told the New York Times, explaining why Comey made notes of his crucial conversations with the president. Her comments also would appear to explain why other senior FBI managers might have made similar sets of notes about their conversations with Comey.

Although it is unclear which FBI managers took notes and which did not, at least one person familiar with the matter said that James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, made detailed notes of virtually every conversation with Comey or others about the Russia probe.

Those notes by Baker are crucial to investigators because Baker was a lively participant in discussions about whether to inform the Justice Department of the president’s pressure on Comey to end the Flynn investigation. During discussions about whether Comey or the Justice Department should give in to Trump’s request to say the investigation had not focused on him, Baker was the primary and strongest proponent that they not do so.

The potential testimony by Comey, McCabe, and so many other FBI witnesses could prove damning to Trump for other reasons. FBI agents and their managers are more than just highly credible witnesses. In the course of a typical FBI agent’s career, he or she works closely with federal prosecutors in making cases based on the testimony of witnesses first interviewed by the agent, and often testifies as a witness in cases, some dozens of times in the course of a career.

While most major governmental institutions have, according to most polls and surveys, faced some of their lowest ratings ever, the American public still retains strong confidence in its FBI. A November 2015 Pew Research national survey found that 68 percent of all Americans viewed the FBI favorably. Only four other federal agencies ranked higher: the US Postal Service, the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and NASA.

Even Trump allies could hurt Trump

Comey testified to Congress that he shared with senior managers of the FBI the president’s efforts to thwart the bureau’s Russia investigation. But he did not inform the Justice Department of those efforts prior to Trump firing him. A major reason he didn’t do so, Comey said, was because the FBI’s leaders told him, “Look, it’s your word against the president’s. There’s no way to corroborate this.”

But Comey testified that during a private meeting with Sessions about another matter — “the president’s concerns about leaks” — he took the opportunity “to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.” Comey told Sessions that leaving him alone with Trump “was inappropriate and should never happen again.” Comey said that Sessions “did not reply at all, his body language suggesting he was helpless or unwilling to do anything.”

Comey also testified that he expressed similar concerns to Rosenstein: “I explained my serious concern about the way in which the president is interacting, especially with the FBI.”

In his own testimony to Congress, Sessions sharply disputed Comey’s claim that he said or did nothing when Comey raised these concerns, saying he told Comey “that the FBI and Department of Justice needed to follow department policies regarding appropriate contact with the White House.”

But more importantly, while taking issue with that one aspect of the story, Sessions largely corroborated Comey’s account under oath — about how uncomfortable the then-FBI director felt with the president’s interactions with the FBI. Sessions is a Trump loyalist, the first US senator to endorse Trump, and the Trump administration’s attorney general — this only enhances his credibility as a witness whose testimony would harm Trump. (Of course, that relationship is now severely strained.) That Sessions recommended Comey’s firing as FBI director also, ironically, enhances his credibility as a corroboratory witness of Comey’s and against the president.

Rosenstein is yet to be heard from.

3 senior FBI officials can vouch for Comey’s story about Trump

2017-06-07T11:19:31-04:00

One by one this winter, then-FBI Director James B. Comey pulled aside three of the bureau’s top officials for private chats. In calm tones, he told each of them about a private Oval Office meeting with President Trump — during which, Comey alleged, the president pressed him to shut down the federal criminal investigation of Trump’s then-national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Those three officials, according to two people with detailed, firsthand knowledge of the matter, were Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel; and Andrew McCabe, then the bureau’s deputy director, and now the acting director, following Trump’s firing of Comey last month. Comey spoke to them within two days of his Oval conversation with Trump, the sources said, and recounted the president’s comments about the Flynn investigation.

The White House and Trump have categorically denied Comey’s account, which Comey reportedly detailed in his own notes shortly after his encounter with Trump. Thus far, the allegation has played as a he-said, she-said between the president and the director he abruptly removed.

That no longer appears to be the case — it will be Trump’s word versus the word of Comey and at least three other leaders of the FBI.

The FBI officials, identified here for the first time, could now emerge as corroborating witnesses for Comey’s story, both in the public debate and in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. (Other outlets have revealed Comey discussed the encounter with FBI colleagues, but have not identified the officials in question.)

A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment for this story. The White House did not return calls seeking comment. Two attorneys recently hired by Mueller did not return phone calls either.

On Wednesday, McCabe is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee. It is unclear whether he will testify about his private discussions with Comey. A senior law enforcement official told me that McCabe, Rybicki, and Baker now all consider themselves potential fact witnesses to Mueller’s probe.

Comey himself will testify a day later, before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he is expected to recount his Oval Office encounter with Trump. It will be the first time Comey has spoken publicly of the matter. CBS, NBC, and ABC will air his testimony live.

For many members of Congress, much of Mueller’s new staff, and the American public, it will be the first time they hear Comey tell a detailed account of Trump pressuring him to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn over his contacts with Russia during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.

Central to the special counsel’s investigation will be whether Trump, in allegedly attempting to interfere with the Russia investigation, acted within the law or crossed the line and engaged in obstruction of justice.

The three officials in question are all lawyers — and, likely, note takers

It is unclear whether each of the officials Comey told of the encounter took notes on their conversations with the director about Trump. But the FBI’s culture is one of creating contemporaneous notes and records, even on matters of far less importance. All three of the FBI officials are also lawyers, a profession known for its record keeping.

Rybicki has had a long career in both the US Department of Justice and FBI. At the Justice Department, he worked for the deputy attorney general, the National Security Division, the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, according to his official biography posted on the FBI’s website.

At both Justice and the FBI, he worked on both counterterrorism and counterintelligence matters, meaning that he was certainly read into the FBI’s investigations of whether the Trump campaign or administration officials colluded with Russia to interfere on Trump’s behalf to win a razor-thin election.

Baker, too, has national security experience. From 2001 to 2007, he headed the Justice Department’s office that would later formally become the department’s National Security Division. An FBI press release about Baker’s appointment as FBI general counsel states that while in that position, Baker “developed, coordinated, and implemented national security policy with regard to intelligence and counterintelligence matters for the department.”

The press release went on to note that Baker “provided the attorney general, the U.S. intelligence community, and the White House with legal and policy advice on a range of national security issues and conducted oversight of the intelligence community, including the FBI, on behalf of the attorney general.”

One senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter said that Comey specifically sought legal advice from Baker about when and how to tell the DOJ about Trump pressing Comey to shut down the Russia probe. The same official said that Comey and Baker had more than one discussion about the matter, and that Baker almost certainly made extensive notes about those deliberations.

Both Comey and Baker sought the advice of Rybicki and McCabe as to whether to inform the Justice Department of Trump’s pressure of Comey to shut down the Russia probe, according to this same official. All four of them had reservations about doing so because they did not fully trust Attorney General Jeff Sessions — and because the events were unprecedented in their experience.

McCabe was deputy director under Comey. When Trump fired Comey on May 9, McCabe became the acting director of the FBI. A 20-year veteran of the bureau, McCabe began his career in the New York office, where he worked organized crime cases and was part of an FBI SWAT team. Later, he worked on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and national security issues, experience that allowed him to become deeply immersed in the Russia probe.

McCabe has testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that as deputy director, he had “an oversight role over all of our FBI operational activity, including that [the Russia] investigation.”

The Trump administration said at one time that McCabe also was one of a number of potential candidates it was considering to replace Comey. He no longer appears to be a top candidate for the job.

One of the trio will speak to senators on Wednesday

McCabe is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and National Security Director Adm. Mike Rogers, all one day prior to Comey’s hearing before the same senators.

Republican senators on the committee reportedly are poised to question McCabe as to why neither he nor Comey informed the Justice Department about President Trump’s efforts to shut down the Russia investigation. On Thursday, they plan to grill Comey on the matter as well. Republicans have indicated they will argue if Trump actually did anything potentially outside the law — yet Comey never informed anyone at the Justice Department about it — that would raise serious questions about Comey’s credibility as a potential witness against Trump.

It is unclear whether McCabe will answer questions on his private conversations with Comey about whether to tell the Justice Department about Trump’s alleged pressure of the former FBI director. The new special counsel might believe that such information is pertinent to his investigation, and it is possible that Mueller has asked McCabe not to discuss the issue.

Mueller, himself a former FBI director, may have a bias in believing the word of Comey and other FBI managers over that of Trump. Comey and Mueller became professionally close, and also personal friends, while Comey was the deputy attorney general for part of the Bush administration and Mueller was FBI director. Comey succeeded Mueller in the job.

When he appointed Comey, then-President Barack Obama cited a 2007 confrontation that Comey had with senior officials of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush’s then–chief of staff, Andrew Card, and then–White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, sought a reauthorization of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital at the time, barely coherent, and recovering from surgery.

Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller believed that portions of the program were illegal. Comey and Mueller raced to Ashcroft’s hospital room to warn him not to sign the authorization. All three men considered resigning in protest if the program were reauthorized. Bush agreed to modify the program to bring it into compliance with the law.

During the incident, Card summoned Comey to meet him at the White House. In a harbinger of current events, Comey only agreed to go if he could bring a witness, then–Solicitor General Ted Olson.

When the controversy became publicly known, Card and Gonzales claimed that Comey and Mueller’s accounts were untrue. Yet when the Justice Department’s inspector general investigated the matter, Card and several other Bush administration officials declined to speak to investigators at all.

When the inspector general interviewed Comey and Mueller, both men served as witnesses for each other, corroborating in part one another’s accounts. Investigators concluded their accounts were truthful and accurate.

This was largely because both men kept detailed, contemporaneous, and at times even legible notes on the incident. It was also because both men gave investigators the names of subordinates — as many as a half-dozen for each of them — who were themselves involved in the events, or who were told about them by Comey and Mueller shortly after the fact.

Murray Waas is an award-winning investigative reporter