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After Trump fired Comey, Bannon told Trump that firing the FBI director was “the dumbest move in modern political history.” Trump never outright admits a mistake. But several times, he asked Bannon, “What do you think? Do you think firing Comey was a mistake?”
As if that misjudgment were not enough, Trump began a crusade to get Jeff Sessions to resign as attorney general because two months earlier, Sessions had recused himself from making decisions about the FBI investigation.
Under Justice Department guidelines, Sessions had no choice but to recuse himself. After Watergate, Congress passed a law requiring “the disqualification of any officer or employee of the Department of Justice…from participation in a particular investigation or prosecution if such participation may result in a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof.” Implementing this language, the Justice Department imposed a rule barring employees from participating in investigations when they have a personal or political relationship with “any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution” or which they know “has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.”
When aides explained the guidelines to Trump, he raged that as attorney general, Eric Holder Jr. had ignored congressional subpoenas for documents related to the Justice Department’s response to Operation Fast and Furious. In fact, the recusal requirement is clear-cut. Whether an attorney general is required to comply with a congressional subpoena in a particular matter is not. In the end, a federal judge sided with Holder, declining to hold him in contempt over the issue.
Nonetheless, Trump was enraged at Sessions.
“Look at what Holder went through,” Trump said to aides. “He got destroyed left and right year after year and he hung in there and he was tough. Say what you will, he was a great attorney general for Obama.”
After Sessions’s recusal, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein took over the Russia investigation, leading to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel. That provoked even more presidential rage—not to mention legal fees in the millions.
In an interview with the New York Times, Trump went public with his hostility toward Sessions, saying he would not have picked Sessions as his attorney general if he had known he was going to recuse himself. But because Sessions did not know during the confirmation process the exact scope of the FBI investigation into Russian interference during the campaign, he did not know until he was sworn in as attorney general in February 2017 that the investigation included individuals associated with the Trump presidential campaign. Sessions had worked on the campaign, and he clearly had personal and political relationships with probable subjects of the investigation. They included former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and possibly others. After becoming attorney general, Sessions then realized that he was obligated to recuse himself from the FBI’s Russia investigation.
The irony was that despite Trump’s sniping, as the nation’s top law enforcement official Sessions made a notable mark on the Justice Department, rolling back some of the Obama administration’s signature policies while emphasizing his own agenda.
From attacking sanctuary cities that allow illegal aliens who have committed felonies to go free, to tearing up agreements that discourage police from acting proactively to catch criminals, Sessions implemented the conservative agenda Trump had promised during the campaign.
Sessions directed federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest possible charges and sentences in all criminal cases, overriding the previous guidance from Holder, who sought to ease penalties for some nonviolent drug offenses and reduce prison sentences for such crimes. Sessions reversed another controversial policy by further empowering the police to seize the personal property of people suspected of crimes but not charged. And Sessions ordered a resumption of the transfer of surplus weapons, vehicles, and other equipment from the nation’s military to state and local law enforcement agencies.
That revived a program which Obama had sharply curtailed on the nonsensical grounds that protecting police from violent protesters aggravated the protesters, spurring on their violence. Obama said in 2015 that “militarized gear sometimes gives people a feeling like [police] are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them.” In other words, not offending protesters is more important than saving police officers from injury or death.
The same thinking had led Obama to avoid referring to militant Islamic extremism as the main terrorist threat. The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving, but referring to militant Islamic extremism makes the point, distinguishing between radical elements and the rest of the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. If you are afraid to name the enemy, how can you fight it or expect others to rally to your side?
To be sure, the FBI has been frustrated by the unwillingness of Islamic leaders to help the Bureau with tips on possible terrorists. A handful of terrorist plots have been rolled up by the FBI based on tips from Muslims. But what the FBI finds disturbing is that Muslim leaders by and large are reluctant to let the Bureau know of radicals within their community. The FBI is not about to publicize this. But Arthur M. “Art” Cummings II, who was the FBI’s executive assistant director in charge of counterterrorism and national security investigations, opened up to me about the problem.
The FBI has outreach programs to try to develop sources in the Muslim community and solicit tips, but Cummings found little receptivity. He found that while Muslims have brought some cases to the FBI, Muslim leaders in particular are often in denial about the fact that the terrorists who threaten the United States are Muslims.
“I talked to a very prominent imam in the U.S.,” Cummings said. “We would have our sweets and our sweet tea. We would talk a lot about Islam. I would say we understand Islam and where they’re coming from. We’d tell him what our mission is, trying to keep people from murdering Americans or anybody else, for that matter.”
Months later, the FBI found out that the man’s mosque had two extremists who were so radical that the mosque’s leadership kicked them out. Clearly, those two extremists would have been of interest to the FBI. If they only engaged in anti-American rhetoric, the FBI would have left them alone. More likely they were planning action to go with their rhetoric.
Cummings asked the imam, “What happened?”
“What do you mean?” the imam asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” the agent said.
“Why would I tell you about this?” the imam said. “They’re not terrorists,” he said of the radicals. “They just hate the U.S. government.”
At one meeting, a Muslim group suggested having a photo taken of their members with the FBI director to show that their community is a partner in the war on terror. Cummings responded, “Let me make a suggestion: When you bring to my attention real extremists who are here to plan and do something, who are here supporting terrorism, and I work that based on your information, then I promise you, I will have the director stand up on the stage with you.”
To Cummings’s amazement, the answer was: “That could never happen. We would lose our constituency. We could never admit to bringing someone to the FBI.”
“Well, we’ve just defined the problem, haven’t we?” Cummings told them.
While Muslims will occasionally condemn al-Qaeda, “rarely do we have them coming to us and saying, ‘There are three guys in the community that we’re very concerned about,’ ” Cummings said. “They want to fix it inside the community. They’re a closed group, a very, very closed group. It’s part of their culture that they want to settle the problem within their own communities. They’ve actually said that to us, which I then go crazy over.”
On one hand, “They don’t want anyone to know they have extremists in their community,” Cummings observed. “Well, beautiful. Except do you read the newspapers? Everyone already knows it. That horse has left the barn. So there’s a lot of talk about engagement, but realistically, we’ve got a long, long way to go.”
As with his opposition to giving police military armaments, Obama wanted to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on the grounds it only sparks more violence by serving as a recruiting tool for terrorists. But the prison never was a chief recruiting tool for terrorists, and in any case terrorists will use any symbol of America as a recruiting tool. If prisoners were moved from Guantánamo Bay to a prison in the United States, by Obama’s logic, the new prison would become a recruiting tool. While Obama signed an executive order on the second day of his presidency to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, he never did close it. Trump proclaimed that it would remain open and take in more prisoners.
On the day Mueller was appointed special counsel, the president was interviewing candidates to replace Comey as FBI director. Sessions was with him briefly but made it a point not to participate in the interviews. Sessions left the Oval Office to go to the Cabinet Room to take a phone call. On the phone, Rod Rosenstein told him that he had just appointed Bob Mueller special counsel. Sessions returned to the Oval Office and told Trump of the appointment.
Mueller was admired by all sides for his integrity and effectiveness as FBI director. A former Marine and prosecutor, Mueller took over an FBI that had been rocked by scandals directly attributable to decisions of former FBI director Louis Freeh: the Richard Jewell case, the Wen Ho Lee case, the problems with the FBI Laboratory. Because Freeh had no use for technology, FBI agents had to double up on computers that had green screens and did not connect to the Internet. No one would take the machines even as donations.
Freeh froze the normal, collaborative decision-making processes of the FBI. He punished anyone who brought him bad news or disagreed with him.
“Freeh took away from the SACs [special agents in charge] the desire to make decisions because they feared repercussions,” says Anthony E. Daniels, whom Freeh named assistant FBI director to head the Washington field office. “They were terrified of him. Freeh had contempt for management.”
“Freeh said he wants everything straight. The first person who told it to him straight, he cut his head off. If an agent brought him bad news, he killed the messenger and pushed him out,” says Weldon Kennedy, whom Freeh appointed associate deputy director for administration.
Days after he took office as director, Mueller ordered thousands of new Dell computers.
Like a giant ocean liner, the FBI does not change course quickly. Mueller had to deal with a bureaucracy that often resisted change and did not always give him straight answers.
Early on, Mueller removed Sheila Horan as acting director of the Counterintelligence Division. Besides finding that she was generally not on top of the subject, he felt she did not appropriately brief him on a Chinese counterintelligence case involving FBI agent James J. Smith in Los Angeles and had failed to warn him of problems with the case.
More than anything else, Mueller’s removal of Horan defined the difference between the new director and Freeh. While Freeh had the habit of punishing anyone who disagreed with him or brought him bad news, Mueller banished those who failed to give him the facts.
Mueller was not a diplomat. Back when he headed the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Mueller would throw office parties at his home. He would signal that the festivities were over by flicking the lights. As a former Marine, Mueller expected his orders to be carried out to the letter. There would be no hand-holding. At the same time, he would go out of his way to offer condolences to FBI officials when they lost loved ones.
“He comes off as your central-casting ex-Marine—tough, no-nonsense, and not suffering fools gladly,” says Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general.
Mueller charged Art Cummings with shifting the FBI’s emphasis to intelligence and rolling up future terrorist plots. Of course, the FBI always wanted to prevent attacks and often did. But as in the case of the first World Trade Center bombing, the Bureau would often close a case and move on to another without trying to develop sources and leads on future plots. Cummings would tell agents that by making an arrest, they could be jeopardizing the national security. They needed to cultivate suspects to pinpoint and stop the next attack.
To uncover terrorists and bring them to justice, the FBI deployed secret Tactical Operations (TacOps) teams—FBI agents who case a home or office, then break in to plant bugging devices and leave without getting caught and shot as burglars. Shown to me at FBI headquarters, the bugging devices are the size of postage stamps and will record for twenty hours or transmit as instructed remotely.
As revealed in my book The Secrets of the FBI, to prevent dogs from giving them away, before a break-in, TacOps agents show a photo of any dog that might be on the premises to a veterinarian who is on contract. He prescribes just the right amount of tranquilizer to shoot into the dog with a dart gun. On the night of the break-in, if the target is an office and closed for the night, agents conduct surveillance at the homes of anyone who might work there. If anyone tries to return to the office, agents will delay them by staging a phony accident, issuing a traffic ticket while dressed as police officers, or opening a fire hydrant and closing off the area.
Cummings devised trip wires that would warn the FBI of a terrorist plot. Under Cummings’s direction, the FBI in effect reverse-engineered a terrorist operation. It looked at a potential terrorist incident and then worked backward to pinpoint all the elements a terrorist might require to achieve his goal. The FBI then had a road map of possible clues to an impending plot. As an example, the FBI asked companies or laboratories that supply certain chemicals or biological materials to report any suspicious purchases to the FBI or police.
Trip wires led to the arrest of Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a twenty-year-old college student from Saudi Arabia who allegedly was planning to blow up the Dallas home of former president George W. Bush. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In another case, a nursery notified the FBI of large purchases of castor plants. The FBI found that the purchaser was planning to make ricin from castor beans and send it to a judge.
The results were palpable. Because of the change in emphasis and proactive programs Cummings put in place under Mueller’s direction to detect possible plots, the United States has not had a successful attack by a foreign terrorist network since 9/11.
Trump and many Republicans jumped on the FBI because agent Peter Strzok, who was on both the Russia and Hillary investigations, had texted anti-Trump, pro-Hillary messages to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. But the fact that one agent had acted unprofessionally was no reason to cast aspersions on the entire Bureau. Judges, FBI agents, and journalists all have political opinions. The fact that Strzok voiced those opinions in strident fashion using FBI phones made him unsuited to investigate the Trump administration. But in the end, Mueller and Comey, both originally Republicans, made the decisions. What counts is that Mueller removed the agent from the Russia probe as soon as he heard about the messages.
It later came out that a text message from Strzok to another FBI colleague expressed skepticism about the Russia probe, saying he was hesitant to join the Mueller investigation because “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” But Republican members of Congress conducting oversight investigations never blinked. Even though his text message demonstrated that he separated his professional judgment from his personal feelings, they continued a witch hunt against the FBI that was as baseless as the witch hunt against Trump and his alleged collusion with Russia.
Media outlets and Republican legislators spread the notion that the FBI obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to “spy” on the Trump campaign based on information in the dossier compiled about Trump with funding from Hillary’s campaign. Putting aside the fact that Comey as FBI director described the dossier as “salacious and unverified,” the notion that the FBI would rely on any third-party report to obtain a court order and that a federal judge would approve the request is ludicrous.
Given the power of the FBI, Americans and the media must remain vigilant when it comes to possible misuse of its authority. My reporting revealing the abuses of William S. Sessions in my book The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency led to his dismissal as FBI director by President Clinton. But the vast majority of FBI agents work incredible hours and often risk their lives to keep us safe. If your son or daughter were kidnapped, you would want the FBI on your side.
Despite Mueller’s accomplishments and reputation for integrity, Trump lit into Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office because he blamed the appointment of Mueller on Sessions’s recusal. Trump hurled a volley of insults at him, telling the attorney general it was his fault they were in the current situation. Saying that Sessions should resign, he said that choosing him to be attorney general was one of the worst decisions he had made and called him an “idiot.”
Ashen and emotional, Sessions agreed to quit. Sessions later told associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in his decades of public life.
White House counsel McGahn informed Priebus that the special counsel had been named and that Jeff Sessions had just resigned. Priebus and McGahn agreed they could not let that happen. Sessions was already in the parking lot. Priebus ran after him and brought him to his White House office overlooking the North Lawn. Priebus, McGahn, Pence, and Bannon calmed him down. They told Trump that accepting Sessions’s resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and rally Republicans in Congress against him. Having served in the Senate for two decades, Sessions was widely liked and admired in Congress. Moreover, Sessions was taking on every task Trump wanted him to pursue.
Trump relented, eventually returning the resignation letter Sessions sent him, adding a handwritten response making it clear he wanted Sessions to continue in his job. After interviewing a number of candidates, Trump chose Christopher Wray as the new FBI director. A partner at King & Spalding, Wray had a distinguished record as principal associate deputy attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and assistant attorney general for the criminal division from 2003 to 2005 under President George W. Bush. The Senate confirmed him in a ninety-two to five vote. But given the hard feelings Trump had stirred up within the FBI over his firing of Comey, who was widely admired throughout the Bureau, the FBI told Trump that even though he was officially invited, it would be better if he did not attend Wray’s swearing-in ceremony.