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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/james-comey-fbi-director-letter
But even within the F.B.I., there are tensions. “There are three F.B.I.’s,” this agent tells me. “There are the [56] field offices, there’s [headquarters in] Washington, and then there’s [the field office in] New York.”
Often, a retired agent says, those in the field are suspicious of Washington. “Dreamland,” they called it in his day, because they believed those who weren’t on the ground investigating cases were clueless. “[Agents] out in the field never want to give a case to D.C., because they believe headquarters is a hindrance to their investigations,” says the agent, who also notes there is a paranoia that politics might interfere at headquarters. New York has an especially dim view of Washington and a reputation for fierce independence. “There is a renegade quality to the New York F.B.I.,” says a former prosecutor, which, he claims, can take the form of agents leaking to the press to advance their own interests or to influence an investigation. “New York leaks like a sieve,” concurs another former prosecutor.
There is also tension with the prosecutors in the Justice Department. The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate potential crimes, but they need one of the 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices, or an attorney at so-called Main Justice, in Washington, to open a case. Agents often feel that prosecutors aren’t bold enough to bring the cases the F.B.I. has investigated. “If prosecutors don’t move forward, it’s often perceived by agents that they didn’t have the stones,” says Ronald Hosko, who was assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Criminal Investigative Division until he retired in 2014. Prosecutors, on the other hand, think that agents don’t want to understand the legal nuances that may separate smoke from prosecutable cases. “The F.B.I. thinks everything is criminal, particularly if they have spent more than a week on it,” says a veteran prosecutor.
Comey had early exposure to the law-enforcement community in that his grandfather, whom he calls one of his heroes, was a beat cop who worked his way up to commissioner of the Yonkers Police Department. Chris Gair, a classmate at the University of Chicago, says, “He didn’t go through law school saying he wanted to be a prosecutor, but we all knew he was determined to be one of the good guys.”
When Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he brought the young Comey into the highly prestigious office, where from 1987 to 1993 he was in charge of the case against financier Marc Rich, who had fled the U.S. after being indicted for tax evasion and illegal dealings with Iran. In 1996, Comey served as deputy special counsel for the Senate WhiteÂwater Committee and, later that year, became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. In 2002, he was named the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his most widely known case resulted in putting lifestyle guru Martha Stewart behind bars for obstruction of justice and making false statements. As U.S. attorney for the Southern District, he also led a criminal investigation into Bill Clinton’s highly controversial pardon of Rich, which resulted in no prosecution. President George W. Bush then appointed him deputy attorney general, in 2003.
But two cases established his reputation in legal and political circles. The first involved obtaining indictments for the 1996 Khobar Towers incident, when 19 American military personnel were killed in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. The career prosecutors at Main Justice had been working on the case for nearly five years, so long that the statute of limitations was about to expire on some of the possible charges. Comey and another prosecutor named John Davis worked on it for about three months, and then, over a weekend, Comey holed up in his office and wrote a detailed indictment of one Lebanese and 13 Saudi suspects.
Even more famous is Comey’s dramatic hospital-room confrontation with members of the Bush administration, in early March of 2004, over the secret warrantless domestic-eavesdropping program, which caused a national furor when the press revealed its existence in late 2005. In what The Washington Post later called “the most riveting 20 minutes of Congressional testimony. Maybe ever,” Comey told the story of how he, as acting attorney general, filled in for his boss, John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized. After refusing to re-authorize the program, which he believed was illegal, Comey discovered that other members of the administration were planning an end run to get an incapacitated Ashcroft to sign off on it in his hospital bed. Comey “ran, literally ran,” up the stairs to prevent that, he testified. The next day he considered resigning.
Although views differ on both Lynch and Comey’s relationship with her, several people saw the seeds of problems to come. While she has inspired deep loyalty among some who worked for her in the Eastern District, one source close to the Justice Department says that as attorney general she was aloof internally and didn’t cultivate relationships. And impressive as her C.V. was, it was dwarfed by Comey’s. As Hosko says, Comey “literally and metaphorically casts the longest shadow in the room.”
“Comey discovered early on that he could walk all over her and she would let him get away with it,” says another close observer. “I think it was both of their faults. He wanted to be very independent, and he cultivates the integrity thing. She was a disengaged and weak A.G.”
On January 14, 2016, the inspector general notified the Senate that Clinton’s private servers had been flagged for classified information. Comey made the decision to run the investigation out of D.C., not New York, despite the fact that Clinton and her server were in New York. A core group of investigators and analysts were vetted and given security clearance, meaning that only those who were working on the case knew what they were doing.
Comey chose Washington because he wanted to be close enough to get daily updates, according to CNN, but he may also have been worried about leaks from New York. A former D.O.J. official says that, as early as 2015, a rumor was floating around that the F.B.I. agents in New York were cracking jokes about seeing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs. “It was widely understood that there was a faction in that office that couldn’t stand her and was out to get her,” this person says.
In the fall of 2015, President Obama told 60 Minutes that the Clinton e-mail issue was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.” A former prosecutor who is close to the case says that the remarks sparked outrage in the F.B.I. “Disparaging the seriousness of something his A.G. is supposed to take responsibility for is not cool,” he says.
On February 24, Lynch told Congress that she had assigned career prosecutors—that is, non-political appointees—to work on the case and that it would be conducted as “every other case.” But efforts to stay outside of politics created its own politics, particularly between the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. One person who was close to events says, “The D.O.J. was afraid of the F.B.I., afraid if it did anything that the F.B.I. perceived as impeding the investigation they could be criticized and there would be political fallout. So the D.O.J. at every level abdicated the assertiveness we expect of prosecutors. It came from the very top.”
To make matters worse, on June 27, 2016, Bill Clinton went aboard Loretta Lynch’s plane on the tarmac in Phoenix for a chat, an event that is epic in the annals of bad decisions because it gave the appearance he was privately pleading his wife’s case. Lynch was in Phoenix for a routine meeting with local police officers, while Clinton was finishing up a fund-raiser for his wife. Lynch’s staff had no chance to intervene: they had already gotten off the plane. He told Lynch, who has a reputation for being polite, that he just wanted to say hello. “It would have been very awkward for her to say no,” says a source close to events. But Clinton then proceeded to talk for nearly half an hour about his grandchildren, about golf, and about travel, according to Lynch.
The furor among Republican conservatives over the tarmac visit was immediate, with Trump citing it as a perfect example of how “special interests are controlling your government.” The right-wing Judicial Watch sued the F.B.I. for records of the plane meeting. After the outcry, Lynch told the press that not only would she “fully expect to accept” the recommendations of the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors on the case but she’d been planning to do so all along.
But neither did she recuse herself and turn the case over to D.A.G. Sally Yates. A source says there was an internal debate over what to do and the decision was made that it would be bad for the Justice Department “if the A.G. relinquished her decision-making power,” as this person puts it, because then, “with every political case going forward, there would be an expectation that the A.G. would recuse.” Instead, they went with a middle ground.
“I fear that that was a judgment that was focused on her own reputation,” says another person who was close to events. “Under no circumstances should something like this be left to career lawyers without supervision. . . . All of the people with the authority to make decisions are political appointees. The statutes do not give career lawyers the authority to make decisions. That is for a good reason: the political appointees are accountable via the electoral process. That is how it works. It was an unfathomable decision to make.” This person adds, “Lynch created the situation where the F.B.I. director could freelance.”
One source, who is willing to excuse Lynch’s poor judgment, nevertheless says, “What she did and what the D.O.J. did [after the tarmac incident] is inexcusable. To say that a political appointee can’t sit in judgment is insane. It’s saying the Justice Department cannot do its job. The director of the F.B.I. is a political appointee!” This person adds, “[Lynch] was more than happy to have Jim Comey take responsibility. It was complete and total abdication.”
Case Not Closed
Into the vacuum created by Lynch’s refusal to either dismiss the tarmac incident or move out of the way stepped Jim Comey. That he would do so is not a surprise to anyone who knew him. On July 5, Comey held the press conference in which he announced that agents had found thousands of e-mails that contained government secrets, all of which had traveled unsecure, unclassified channels on Clinton’s private e-mail network. Nonetheless, he said, “we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges,” in large part because they did not find intent, which is a critical element of most criminal cases.
Comey certainly knew that the career prosecutors, who had been working hand-in-glove with the F.B.I. agents, would agree with the decision. But he made it clear he hadn’t even informed the D.O.J., whose responsibility it is to decide whether to authorize an indictment, that he was holding a press conference. Lynch corroborated this, admitting that the D.O.J. had learned of the press conference only “right before.” Indeed, some at the D.O.J. turned to CNN to find out what Comey was saying.