The Unmaking of the President 2016 Read online

  * * *

  *. The number thirty-three thousand is used here, rather than the usual number—approximately thirty thousand—of State Department–related emails turned over by Clinton in December 2014. This is because in his statement, Comey mentioned “several thousand” additional emails recovered by the FBI and inadvertently not included in the original total. I have estimated “several thousand” to mean about three thousand.

  †. The Intelligence Community and Control Markings Implementation Manual is a 160-page document that describes in excruciating detail how to mark documents that contain classified information—especially the need for conspicuous banners, specific punctuation, font size, slash marks, levels of classification with different requirements, syntax, etc. For example, “Classification and control markings shall be applied explicitly and uniformly when creating, disseminating, and using classified and unclassified information. . . . The banner line must be conspicuously placed at the top and bottom (header and footer) of each page, in a way that clearly distinguishes it from the informational text . . .” You get the idea.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Giuliani in the Shadows?

  As we will see, James Comey’s October 28, 2016, letter to Congress was the final decisive act that cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. Yet it was only the visible part of an overall narrative that was deep and hidden. The complete context of that letter is important to understand: It was not an isolated event but related to an extensive network of current and retired federal law enforcement officers, centered in the New York City FBI office and apparently some in Washington headquarters as well. These retired or active officers, according to many press reports, fed negative information about Hillary Clinton and ongoing investigations to former FBI agents or reportedly to the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. The former mayor had become well known for his political opposition to Clinton. But more than that, he was well known for his hatred of Clinton that was so personal and so venomous, fed by his outspoken support for Donald Trump, that some in the media and the political arena sometimes publicly wondered whether he appeared to be mentally unbalanced.

  Here is how the final began. On September 21, 2016, Britain’s Daily Mail broke the story that Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, was under legal suspicion for sending improper texts to an underage female. Abedin was, of course, the loyal and widely respected aide to Hillary Clinton who had worked for Clinton since her time in the White House. Weiner was the former New York City congressman who had suffered a dramatic fall from grace for sexting photos of himself to various adult women. On September 26, New York FBI agents seized Weiner’s laptop. Within a couple of days, the agents found it contained about six hundred thousand of Abedin’s emails, and a view of the metadata at the top of those emails, without knowing what was in the contents, indicated that some of them were to or from Hillary Clinton.

  Then, as Peter Elkind of the New Yorker described in a lengthy report published in collaboration with the public interest investigative journalistic organization ProPublica, Comey first learned about the discovery of some of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Weiner’s laptop on October 3, 2016: “By this point, the email controversy had receded as an issue in the presidential race. Any news of the discovery would surely have profound consequences, especially as the election drew ever closer. Yet, over the following three weeks, FBI agents proceeded unhurriedly with their investigation, on the premise that what they knew of the discovery was not, as one official put it to me, ‘investigatively significant.’ ”1

  Elkind went on: “More than three weeks had passed from the time that Comey and his top deputies had been alerted to the initial discovery of Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop.”

  This meant that conceivably, for up to twenty-four days—from October 3 to October 27—there was no senior level decision by Comey and his top aides about what to do about the emails found on Weiner’s laptop, no evidence that New York FBI agents pushed for such a meeting before then. Why the delay?

  Elkind reported that on October 21, Joon Kim, the deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, called an official in the deputy attorney general’s office at Main Justice in Washington to ask what was being done about Clinton’s emails on Weiner’s laptop. Joon wrote a memo noting the call. The official he talked to said this was the first they had heard about it—reinforcing the impression, well established, that Comey felt no obligation to keep his superiors at Justice informed about the Clinton emails investigation.

  However, not surprisingly, such a vague inquiry would not have triggered any action by even senior officials at Justice to investigate the matter, since they—unlike James Comey—took seriously the unvarying practice, which had governed Republican and Democratic leadership at the Department of Justice for decades, to do nothing (other than actions required to save lives) in the sixty days or less prior to a presidential election.

  We know with certainty that if Comey had ordered a warrant after he first heard about these emails on October 3, within a week the FBI team would have determined that there were no State Department–related emails that could justify opening another criminal investigation. We know this because, in fact, when the FBI obtained a warrant on October 30, two days after Comey sent his October 28 letter to Congress, Comey ordered an expedited review of the emails by FBI agents to try to complete the review before Election Day, eight days hence. In fact, the team that examined the Clinton emails were able to complete the search, using keywords to eliminate duplications, within seven days.

  Instead, because of this inexplicable slow-walk to obtain a warrant and begin the review, it wasn’t until Sunday, November 6, two days before Election Day, that Comey issued his public statement that no emails had been found that would justify any further investigation of Clinton.

  * * *

  Why did it take so long to bring these emails to the full attention of James Comey? Certainly we know from the public record that former mayor Giuliani and either current or former FBI agents, or both, were involved in keeping the pressure on Comey publicly, criticizing his July 5 nonprosecution recommendation regarding Clinton, and seeming to put public pressure on him to reopen the investigation. Giuliani’s public comments on conservative media, especially Fox News Channel, along with the amplification of his comments and other “sources” from the FBI by the alt right—the right-wing communications complex—were reminiscent of the invisible state the alt right often alluded to as an instrument of the left. The leaks and communications from the alt right, enabled and amplified through media appearances by Giuliani, were a steady beat in October, creeping into mainstream media, often without attribution, keeping the pressure on Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation. The fact that all this was happening during the exact same time period that the Clinton emails were first discovered on Weiner’s laptop did not seem to be coincidental.

  Let’s first examine what we know about Giuliani, his history and relationship with Comey, and his private and publicly announced interactions with former and perhaps current New York City FBI agents who weren’t bashful about admitting to reporters “off the record” that they were Bill and Hillary Clinton haters.

  One can speculate that Giuliani’s long-standing hostility toward Hillary Clinton began with his campaign for the New York Senate in 2000. Giuliani was expected to win before, suddenly, Clinton, who was not a New York resident, decided to test the waters to run for the Senate seat. Early polls showed Giuliani in a healthy lead over former first lady Clinton. His campaign prepared a 315-page opposition research booklet against Clinton, even including eleven pages of what was described as “Stupid Actions and Remarks.”2 But things quickly turned negative for Giuliani’s candidacy, in part due to his harsh and angry demeanor, complications in his marriage that became the subject of tabloids, and Clinton’s own effective upstate listening tour, which left positive impressions among normally dark red Republican voters. Clinton gained th
e lead in the spring of 2000.

  After falling behind in the polls and increasingly subject to public ridicule for some of his bizarre personal actions, Giuliani announced he was withdrawing due to having been diagnosed with prostate cancer. After her victory, he seemed to resent her for stealing the Senate seat he had assumed would be his for the taking.

  During the Republican National Convention in July 2016, Giuliani’s speech showed that his animus toward Clinton had not abated over the intervening decade and a half. In one memorable moment, he took out of context a statement from Clinton’s House Oversight Committee testimony on Benghazi in late 2013. She had said, with exasperation, “What difference does it make?” in response to questions by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) about alleged distortions in White House “talking points” that the tragedy was in part a result of an anti-Muslim video rather than a terrorist attack. Her question was about the issue of who wrote the talking points, since she followed the question by a statement that we should all be more concerned about finding out who was responsible for the murder of those four Americans and catching them.

  Here is what Giuliani said at the convention: “Anyone who can say that it makes no difference how or why people serving America are killed, should not be entrusted with the awesome responsibility to protect them and us and should not be allowed to be our commander in chief.”3 Of course, she had never suggested such a thing. But this level of distortion reinforced the impression that Giuliani’s hatred of Clinton was deep. At times, beginning with the convention, many media and political pundits saw his rhetoric and personal hostility toward Hillary Clinton as sometimes unhinged, beyond the norm.

  Three months later, also on display to a national TV audience, was what was described in the media as a dark and angry Giuliani seen in the background while Clinton took the microphone at the annual Al Smith Dinner on October 24, 2016, in New York City, for the benefit of Catholic Charities—a ritual for more than seventy years, with white ties and roasts and lots of laughter, attended by political celebrities, incumbent presidents, and the political challengers and members of both parties. Always in good fun and good cheer—but not for Rudy Giuliani.

  When Hillary Clinton spoke, as fate would have it, the former mayor was easy to see on TV behind her in the background. His angry expression as Clinton made a few jokes about him was obvious to everyone at the dinner and those watching on TV. According to an article in the Independent, Giuliani “sat scowling with lopsided glasses.” The next morning, a Philadelphia talk show host asked Giuliani whether his reaction to Clinton’s jokes about him at the Al Smith Dinner was to want to “take out a pair of handcuffs and hold them up at that point.” His response was as follows: “When I see her [Clinton], I see her in an orange jumpsuit. I’m sorry, or at least a striped one. I’d have prosecuted her a year ago and probably convicted her by now.”4

  Comey also had some personal and professional history involving adverse legal positions to President and Mrs. Clinton. Comey got his first job in 1987 as a young prosecutor from the then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani. One of Comey’s first assignments was to work on the criminal investigation of Marc Rich, a wealthy financier and trader whom Giuliani successfully indicted for tax evasion, among other charges. Rich was in Switzerland at the time of his indictment and he never returned to the United States to stand trial, fleeing from country to country as the U.S. authorities tried to arrest him and extradite him.

  After leaving Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in 1993, Comey worked for several years as a prosecutor in Virginia before becoming a deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, led by Republican senator Al D’Amato of New York. That committee became known for its partisanship in trying to show wrongdoing by President and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater deal. Yet Comey sought the job and served for a year on the investigation. Comey has never explained publicly why he was interested in a congressional Whitewater investigation of the Clintons.

  Comey became U.S. attorney for the Southern District in 2002 (nineteen years after Giuliani held that position). As the new U.S. attorney, Comey inherited the ongoing criminal investigation of Bill Clinton for his pardon of Marc Rich on the last day of his presidency, January 20, 2001. It was, to say the least, unusual for a former president to be under criminal investigation by a succeeding administration. It seemed reminiscent of a banana republic, where the incoming opposing party criminally prosecutes and attempts to jail the leadership of the prior government. The grounds for the investigation of the Clinton pardon seemed equally specious. President Clinton had explained his pardon was because of a late-night telephone call he received from the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, who asked him to pardon Rich. Clinton and Barak had bonded when they came close to achieving a peace settlement during negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000 with the Palestinian Authority president, Yasir Arafat.5 Prior to that call, he had decided to reject Rich’s pardon application. Barak’s phone call on the evening of January 19, 2001, as well as one from the revered ex–prime minister and future president of Israel, Shimon Peres, were a matter of public record. As soon as the FBI agents in New York heard about the pardon, however, they immediately instigated a criminal investigation, trying to connect campaign contributions by Marc Rich’s ex-wife in 1996 to Clinton’s pardon of her ex-husband (along with her contributions to the Clinton Presidential Library then under construction in Little Rock).

  Many prosecutors at the time saw the case, at best, as a stretch, especially since it involved an ex-president with a public record of the calls from the Israeli leaders pleading for the pardon. However, that was not Comey’s reaction. Shortly after he became U.S. attorney in 2002, a memo from the New York FBI office to the FBI director in Washington—who just happened to be Robert Mueller—was written describing Comey as “enthusiastic” about continuing the Rich criminal investigation of President Clinton. The investigation under Comey’s leadership was a continuing source of media leaks, presumably by some of the FBI agents in the New York office who were working on the investigation. That office was well known, according to many media reports, for leaks to the media on cases they had a special interest in (or angst about). The leaks included possible charges besides a quid pro quo for campaign contributions and donations to the presidential library, such as obstruction of justice, campaign finance violations, and what someone close to the case described as the “kitchen sink.” Comey, as a U.S. attorney, never denounced these leaks or announced an investigation of them. The irony here is that this was the same James Comey who more than a decade later appeared to have been so concerned with leaks that even their possibility provided motivation for his sending a letter to Congress on October 28, 2016.

  Comey left his position as U.S. attorney at the end of 2003 to become deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush. Two years later, the acting U.S. attorney finally closed the Clinton-Rich pardon investigation, without any announcement, despite all the leaks over the years. The case, it was said, collapsed due to the absence of any facts—but without any such public concession from the prosecutors and FBI agents who kept it going for four years. Does this pattern sound familiar?

  Shortly after Comey moved to Washington to become deputy attorney general, the number two position at the Department of Justice, in March 2004, he challenged the Bush White House, specifically White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who were seeking an extension of President Bush’s antiterrorist surveillance program. Comey took exception to that extension—as it turned out, from reporting in later years, on an entirely technical issue, not in principled opposition to the program. No matter.

  As the story got recounted in greater detail in future months and years throughout the media, “according to Comey friends and associates” (of course, never quoting Comey directly), Comey showed up in the hospital room of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to block Ashcroft’s signing of the president’s order to extend the sur
veillance program. Comey faced off, as his “friends and associates” said, on “grounds of principle” against Gonzales and Card, and convinced Ashcroft not to sign the order. Somehow, the entire story of the “courageous” James Comey “defying” the Bush White House, convincing the attorney general not to sign the order and to “uphold the rule of law,” generated an invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2007.6 Under questioning from New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer in a public hearing covered widely by the national media, Comey divulged his role in upholding what Senator Schumer and others described as “principle” and “the rule of law.”

  In large part because of that incident and the high-profile recounting of it by the seemingly reluctant Comey, he gained a reputation for his integrity, a reputation he was known to be proud of and to take great pains to preserve. Again, this is worth keeping in mind as the events of 2015–2016 affecting Hillary Clinton are recounted here.

  Meanwhile, Giuliani had worked closely with the New York office of the FBI in the 1980s when he was U.S. attorney and had made many close friends there, according to media reports. That continued when he served as mayor from 1993 to 2001. One especially close friend was the former head of the New York FBI office, James Kallstrom, who after his retirement became a Fox News contributor, where his anti–Hillary Clinton vitriol was frequently on display.