What’s in it for me? Go behind the scenes of the FBI’s Russia probe.
In January 2017, the FBI’s top counterintelligence professionals were gathered together in a small room at the Bureau’s headquarters. A long whiteboard stretched across one wall. Three initials – DJT – were written at the top. Listed below were the names of a matrix of individuals connected to the newly-elected president, Donald Trump. They included Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Mike Flynn, and Carter Page, among others.
Each of these men had connections to Russia. And, to varying degrees, they had used those connections to help the Trump campaign. That much the FBI knew. But a troubling question still remained: should the FBI open a counterintelligence investigation into the president himself? It wasn’t an easy question, but Trump’s behavior had grown too suspicious to ignore.
Unfortunately, that’s not the narrative that partisan media and the White House have chosen to circulate. Ever since the Russia investigations became public, Twitter feeds and news sites alike have been flooded with accusations of, witch hunts, and deep-state plots against Trump. It’s time to set the record straight about what really happened.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
how Russia coerces its targets;
the real reason the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane; and
why Trump ended up accusing the author of treason.
Russia is a master of espionage and intelligence.
By all appearances, Don Heathfield and Ann Foley were ordinary citizens. Their friends knew them as Canadian immigrants who had moved to Massachusetts so that Don could attend Harvard. The couple worked, went out, and took vacations with their two sons.
But Don and Ann had a major secret. Their real names were Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were Russian intelligence agents known as illegals. They lived their daily lives as normal citizens. But all the while, they were secretly feeding information back to Russia.
Don and Ann were far from the only illegals operating within America. The FBI even had a separate investigation into these illegals known as Operation Ghost Stories. The author, Peter Strzok, was one of the case agents. It was his first time dealing with Russian intelligence and espionage. But Russia’s world-class skill at secret intelligence operations meant it wouldn’t be his last.
The key message here is: Russia is a master of espionage and intelligence.
To fully understand Russia’s intelligence operations, we should first define what exactly intelligence means in this context. According to Strzok, it refers to the secret operations a nation conducts to obtain strategic advantage. Don and Ann’s intelligence work, for example, involved meticulously assessing American citizens and identifying those who could be persuaded to help Russia.
With intelligence comes counterintelligence, the effort to thwart an adversary’s intelligence work. While all nations engage in counterintelligence, Russia is particularly skilled at a form of it known as active measures. This involves using false or distorted information to influence political or social outcomes. Later on, we’ll see how active measures played a role in the 2016 US election.
Along with active measures, the Russians also often employ coercion to manipulate their targets. They do this by collecting compromising material, called kompromat, which might disincentivize a target from acting a certain way. Kompromat can consist of anything that a target might not wish to become public knowledge, like sexual advances or bribes. Once Russia obtains kompromat on an individual, he becomes dependent on Russia to keep his secret. The intelligence community would say that that person is compromised.
Unfortunately, the term kompromat is one all Americans should now know, thanks to the actions of the US president, Donald Trump. But the story begins with a wholly different investigation in 2015 – one that centered around the then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
The FBI’s Midyear Exam investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
In early 2011, the African country of Libya descended into violence. In October of that year, its leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, was deposed and killed. A year later, in September, a mob gathered outside the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. They stormed the building and ultimately killed four Americans.
In the wake of this tragedy, many Republican lawmakers were outraged. They demanded to know if any responsibility lay with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To find out, the House of Representatives voted 232 to 186 to create the Select Committee on Benghazi in May 2014.
As part of the investigation, the State Department was forced to collect and release Hillary Clinton’s emails. A year into the proceedings, the inspector general noticed something while combing through the messages. Some of Clinton’s emails appeared to contain classified information. The IG’s discovery led to a new investigation – this time, involving the FBI. Its code name was Midyear Exam, and Strzok would eventually take it over.
The key message here is: The FBI’s Midyear Exam investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
On July 10, 2015, four days after the inspector general’s initial discovery, an investigation was opened into Clinton’s alleged misconduct. The secretary of state had been using a private email account to conduct business, rather than the State Department’s official system. This alone wouldn’t have been a major cause for alarm – except for the fact that the emails contained classified information.
To get to the bottom of Clinton’s email usage, the FBI had to explore several avenues of inquiry. Where were all of Clinton’s emails? Who had put classified information into the emails, and why? And had any unauthorized parties gained access to the classified information?
It was fairly easy to lay out these questions. But actually finding the answers was anything but.
The first step, locating all the servers, was a painstaking process. So was determining which emails contained classified information. Often, multiple government agencies had to weigh in on a single email.
After that, agents needed to be sent around the world to conduct interviews with various parties. These were necessary to determine the intentions of those who had included the classified information in their emails. And finally, the FBI needed to take action if any of the classified information had ended up in unauthorized hands.
Months into the investigation, the team finally began to get a sense of whether a criminal prosecution of Clinton was warranted.
The FBI decided not to recommend a prosecution against Hillary Clinton.
Over the course of the investigation, the Midyear team had realized a couple of things. One: there had definitely been mishandling of classified information. Two: there didn’t appear to be any evidence of behavior that the Department of Justice had previously charged for violations of criminal law.
The FBI has a high bar for opening mishandling cases. But the DOJ has an even higher bar for prosecuting them. And ultimately, the DOJ has the final say as to whether to bring criminal charges. It’s especially unlikely to prosecute cases where a person hasn’t knowingly or maliciously disclosed classified information.
At this stage, Midyear seemed to be fitting that bill. There was certainly extreme carelessness when it came to Clinton’s use of her private email. But it didn’t seem that she’d had any criminal intent when she did so.
The key message here is: The FBI decided not to recommend a prosecution against Hillary Clinton.
Throughout winter 2015, the Midyear team was preparing to conduct some final interviews on key players – including Clinton herself. However, those plans came to a screeching halt after an interview with Clinton’s two attorneys. They revealed the existence of two laptops that the attorneys had used to sort Clinton’s State Department emails from her personal communications.
The team was furious that no one had mentioned these laptops before. No one believed that anything on them was likely to change their general understanding of the case. But nonetheless, the FBI had to obtain the two computers. Reviewing them was a necessary step in concluding the investigation thoroughly and completely.
However, for reasons still unknown, an attorney connected to the case was stubbornly refusing to turn over the laptops. This refusal created a frustrating delay – one that threatened to overshadow Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016. It wasn’t until three months later that the laptops were subpoenaed and handed over to the FBI.
After the delay, the final pieces of the investigation soon fell into place. As expected, an analysis of the laptops revealed nothing new. A final interview with Clinton herself also changed nothing. The FBI ultimately concluded to recommend that the DOJ not press charges against Clinton.
Meanwhile, as the FBI had been waiting for the laptops, another force – namely, Russia – had been working quietly in the background.
The Russians used cyberattacks to weaken the US and help elect Donald Trump.
On April 6, 2016, a staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee opened up an email that appeared in his inbox. It looked just like a security notification from Google, requesting the staff reset their passwords. They could do so using a link embedded in the email’s text.
In reality, the notification was anything but official. It had come from a specialized cadre within Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency. The password reset link was actually a hyperlink to a Russian website that could harvest the email password of the person holding the account. A similar link had already made a victim of Clinton campaign co-chair John Podesta. Fifty thousand of Podesta’s emails were promptly siphoned away by the Russians.
The key message here is: The Russians used cyberattacks to weaken the US and help elect Donald Trump.
In mid-November of the same year, a new Twitter account appeared called @Ten_GOP. It purported to be the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans.” Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., followed it, and eventually retweeted messages from it. In time, so would Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and campaign digital director Brad Parscale.
But, the account wasn’t managed by Tennessee Republicans at all. It’d actually been created by Russian hackers working for the Putin-backed Internet Research Agency, an organization whose job was to sow dissent and chaos via social media. The @Ten_GOP Twitter account primarily spread misinformation about things like crowd sizes at Trump rallies. It also circulated conspiracy theories about President Obama.
Around the same time, the Russians also registered a web domain as DCLeaks.com. It went live on July 8, one day after Hillary Clinton declared victory in the Democratic primaries in five states. The week after, the site posted all the stolen DNC emails as well as hacked records from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. It also included a small number of stolen GOP email messages. The site was part of a Russian active measure – but that fact wasn’t yet apparent.
The leaks were intended to reach as wide an audience as possible. The Russians wanted to sway the US presidential election away from Hillary Clinton and sow political divisions within the country to weaken its power. They were also working to compromise their primary target, Donald Trump himself.
Crossfire Hurricane revealed suspicious ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The Clinton case finally wrapped up in July 2016. Less than a month later, Strzok and his partner found themselves on a British Airways flight to an undisclosed European capital. A new investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, was only just beginning. Its implications and findings would shake the American public – and, indeed, the world – in ways no one could have imagined at the time.
So, what had sparked the investigation and brought Strzok overseas? Well, the FBI had gained new intelligence regarding Trump’s campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. In early spring 2016, Papadopoulos had spoken with Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer. Their conversation established that Papadopoulos had been working hard to create a rapport with the Russian government. But that wasn’t all.
The key message here is: Crossfire Hurricane revealed suspicious ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
During his conversation with Downer, Papadopoulos remarked that the Russians had obtained damaging information about Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama. He added that the Russian government had offered to assist the Trump campaign. This would be done through a coordinated release of the damaging material.
So who did Papadopoulos get all this information from? Later, it became known that Papadopoulos’s informant was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor. But at the time, the FBI was still in the dark.
To locate the person who would complete its picture of what was going on, the FBI began to compile a matrix. It included every known element of the allegation and the spectrum of individuals who could fit into it.
Unsatisfying though it may be, Strzok and his partner’s interviews in Europe are still classified information. But within a week of that meeting, the Midyear team had created a shortlist of people who the FBI thought may have received the Russian offer of assistance.
One of the individuals on the list was, of course, Papadopoulos himself. The others were Paul Manafort, who was one of Trump’s campaign managers; Carter Page, who was serving on Trump’s foreign policy team; and former US Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who had taken on the role of Trump’s senior advisor on national security matters.
Crossfire Hurricane had started as a narrow investigation into just one person. But it had revealed a much larger web of connections between Russia and the prospective president, just a few months before the election.
The FBI was forced to reopen Midyear Exam one month before the 2016 election.
All of the individuals that made up the FBI’s matrix had demonstrated ties to Russia that made them suspicious characters. In fact, while Strzok was in Europe, Manafort was busy having a meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian linked to Russian intelligence services. He was in Manhattan to receive polling data from Manafort.
This was far from an innocuous exchange of information. The data was valuable because it revealed where key voting blocs were located. Winning over voters in those areas could provide strategic benefits. So, who exactly was benefiting? Russia and its intelligence service, of course. The data was a blessing just as Russia had begun to place ads and targeted posts on US social media to win swing votes and reshape the election.
All of this would eventually become known to the FBI. But before that could happen, the Midyear Exam investigation was suddenly thrust back onto Strzok’s plate.
The key message here is: The FBI was forced to reopen Midyear Exam one month before the 2016 election.
Investigators were searching the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner when they made a surprising discovery. Weiner’s laptop contained what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of emails related to the closed Midyear investigation.
It was, yet again, unlikely that there was something significant about those emails that the team hadn’t already uncovered. Nonetheless, the team had to reopen the investigation. The real issue, in this case, was whether to notify Congress about the reopening.
FBI director Comey knew that notifying Congress would draw the public’s eye back to the investigation. It would provide ammunition for Trump against Clinton. And it would even potentially help him win votes in the election. But if the FBI didn’t tell Congress about reopening Midyear, it risked the appearance of a cover-up or concealment. Aside from that, considering the election would introduce inappropriate political influence into the FBI’s investigative decision-making.
The rest is history. A month before the election, Comey announced that the FBI was reopening Midyear.
Initially, the team suspected that the new review would take months. But against the odds, it finished before Election Day, on Sunday, November 6. There was a palpable sense of relief as Strzok and his partner briefed the executive team. The review hadn’t turned up any new information.
Midyear, it seemed, was over – again. But Crossfire Hurricane was still ongoing.
The ICA concluded definitively that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
Just after November 8, Election Day, the Obama administration ordered the FBI, CIA, and NSA to conduct a comprehensive analysis of Russia’s attacks during the 2016 elections. Only a very small number of people would be privy to the study, which had a long title but eventually came to be known simply as the ICA.
A question that some have asked in the wake of the many Russia-related investigations is: why was all the information limited to such a small group of people? The answer was a sensible one. The intelligence agencies wanted to prevent their investigations from becoming public. Since they were intimately connected to some of Trump’s handlers, keeping the investigations private shielded the Trump campaign from harm.
In any case, the intelligence community put the final touches on the ICA during the winter holiday period of 2016. It had unexpected effects, to say the least.
The key message here is: The ICA concluded definitively that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
In response, the Obama administration decided to impose sanctions on Russia. The White House expected the Kremlin to retaliate with sanctions of its own. But strangely enough, Putin did nothing.
The media and the FBI soon learned why. Without notifying the Obama administration, Trump’s newly-appointed national security advisor, Michael Flynn, had made a phone call to Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn asked Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming administration, that Russia not impose any sanctions in response to Obama’s sanctions.
The Russians listened to Flynn’s request. But the call had potentially broken the law, which forbids an unauthorized person from negotiating with a foreign government having a dispute with the United States. Yes, members of incoming administrations often need to establish contacts with foreign governments to ease their transition to power. But this was hardly the case here. There was evidence that Flynn had conducted a hidden negotiation with a foreign power that had just attacked the American elections.
Flynn’s secret request, and Russia’s acquiescence, compromised the incoming administration. It provided potential kompromat over Flynn, and possibly even over the president-elect. Flynn was now in debt to Russia, and he needed Russia’s complicity to keep his request a secret. This made him vulnerable to Russian coercion. But he wasn’t the only one over whom Russia held kompromat.
Allegations against Trump gave the Russians an endless stream of kompromat.
After ringing in the New Year in 2017, it came time to deliver the ICA report to President Trump himself. The task of briefing the president was assigned to several high-ranking intelligence officials, including FBI director Comey. The ICA contained an enormous amount of counterintelligence information – Comey’s portion of the brief alone filled two large binders.
There was a bigger problem, however. The FBI was undecided as to whether it should include information provided by an FBI source and former British government employee named Christopher Steele. Steele’s information came to be known publicly as the “Steele dossier.” The material had been collected in service of a political client looking for derogatory information about Trump’s campaign. But it contained true information consistent with what the FBI already knew about the way Putin and the Russians were operating. Many other pieces of Steele’s material were either unconfirmed or patently false. If any of it were true, however, it would provide the Russians with plenty of kompromat.
The key message here is: Allegations against Trump gave the Russians an endless stream of kompromat.
Steele’s information, as a whole, was difficult to assess. Previously, it had supplemented the FBI’s applications for a FISA warrant, a type of highly invasive wiretapping warrant, against Carter Page. It had also been included in an appendix to the ICA report, although it hadn’t been used to draw any conclusions. But the material contained salacious accusations against Trump, including unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been present at a Moscow Ritz event involving prostitutes.
These allegations lent a tawdry feeling to the report. But ultimately, the team decided it needed to brief Trump. That way, the FBI would be giving the president the full picture of what it knew.
When Comey privately briefed Trump about the allegations, the president didn’t react as planned. He displayed no angry denial or positive confirmation. Instead, he merely asked which year the Ritz-Carlton event was alleged to have occurred. According to Comey's memos, Trump commented "there were no prostitutes" and that he was "the kind of guy who didn't need to go there."
What was significant about the allegations wasn’t so much that Trump may have had relations with prostitutes. Instead, it was the fact that if they were true, Trump’s denial would give the Russians coercive leverage over him. It would be a classic example of kompromat. Whenever Trump lied, and Putin knew about the lie, Trump was wittingly or unwittingly providing the Russians with leverage.
President Trump attempted to help General Flynn conceal his criminal actions.
The media soon caught wind of Flynn’s phone call to Kislyak, and the Washington Post ran a story about it on January 12, 2017. The weekend after the story ran, vice president-elect Pence announced that he’d spoken to Flynn about his phone conversation. He stated that Flynn’s conversations had nothing to do with the Obama administration’s sanctions.
The FBI knew that statement was false. Had Flynn lied to Pence? Or worse, did Pence know the truth and wish to cover it up?
The FBI needed to figure out what was really going on. To that end, Strzok and another agent were instructed to interview Flynn at the White House. At their meeting, Flynn repeatedly lied about things the agents knew he was lying about. And yet, Flynn showed no body language consistent with a liar. Was Flynn deep in denial? Had he truly forgotten his conversations with Kislyak? Or was he simply unaware of how much trouble he was in?
The key message here is: President Trump attempted to help General Flynn conceal his criminal actions.
Late in the afternoon of February 10, 2017, Strzok received a call from superior and assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap. He needed him to pull the Flynn material for him. Vice President Pence was waiting for Priestap because he was now worried that Flynn had lied to him about discussing sanctions with Kislyak.
This was a relief because it meant that Pence hadn’t knowingly been covering for Flynn. A few days after the briefing, Flynn resigned. He later pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI.
The day after Flynn’s resignation, Comey traveled to the White House for a routine counterterrorism briefing. After everyone else had left the room, Trump pulled Comey aside and, allegedly, said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” He appeared to be pressuring Comey into ceasing the investigation of Flynn.
After Trump’s request regarding Flynn, Comey decided to brief Strzok and some other agents about his interactions with Trump. Comey had been secretly documenting his private conversations with the president in a series of classified memos. He passed these along to the agents, too – a decision that turned out to be prescient.
The FBI opened an investigation into Trump after his actions crippled the Russia probe.
The exchange about Flynn had, in Strzok’s mind, crossed the line. For weeks, he’d been arguing against opening an investigation into the president himself. It had always seemed highly unlikely that Trump was some sort of Manchurian candidate, a puppet for Russia. But he began to question this after learning about Trump’s apparent obstruction of the FBI investigations – an obstruction that would clearly benefit Russia.
For now, though, he kept quiet. He didn’t inform his other team members about Comey’s recent experience with the president, as Comey had requested. Telling them, after all, could have influenced the investigators’ independent assessment of the facts.
But then, the unthinkable happened. While Comey was in the middle of a speech to FBI employees in LA, he caught a glimpse of a television screen broadcasting the news. It read, in capital letters: Comey Resigns. Then, the message suddenly changed. It now read: Comey Fired.
The key message here is: The FBI opened an investigation into Trump after his actions crippled the Russia probe.
The day after he fired Comey, Trump held a meeting at the Oval Office with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak. According to a transcript of the meeting, Trump announced to them, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job.” Then, he continued, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
It got even worse from there. He told the two Russian officials that he wasn’t concerned about Russian interference in the 2016 election because the US did the same sort of meddling in other countries. In essence, Trump had absolved the Russians of their crimes against America’s democracy.
Just days later, the discussion of whether to open an investigation into Trump himself finally arose at the bureau. Doing so was a legal minefield. Yet, the FBI could no longer ignore Trump’s suspicious behavior regarding the Russians and its probe. The case was officially opened on May 16, 2017. It wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly.
However, only two days went by before the investigation was curtailed. On May 18, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein phoned deputy director McCabe. Rosenstein reported that he’d just appointed former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel for the Russia investigation. The special counsel would take over as an independent third party to complete the probe.
Trump relentlessly used Twitter to spread conspiracy theories and attack the FBI.
Spring and summer of 2017 was a busy period for the Mueller investigation. It required a truly staggering amount of investigative work, including 500 witness interviews; more than 2,800 subpoenas; almost 500 search warrants; over 200 orders for communication records; and nearly 50 pen registers. And then there was all the additional work needed to interpret all of that information.
Despite the extensive work being done, it wasn’t long before Trump began to attack Mueller and decry the special counsel investigation as a witch hunt. He also pressured White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. In short, Trump was attempting – and occasionally succeeding – at undermining the investigation at every turn. Eventually, Strzok himself became a victim of Trump’s contempt.
The key message here is: Trump relentlessly used Twitter to spread conspiracy theories and attack the FBI.
In late July, the inspector general’s office had begun reviewing the Clinton email investigation in response to Republican demands. The IG needed to interview Strzok to determine whether some of the text messages sent from his bureau-issued device indicated improper political bias.
He was happy for his texts to be reviewed. He knew, after all, that he’d always conducted himself with complete professionalism, despite privately expressing his distaste for Trump.
Nonetheless, after a discussion with some of his superiors, Strzok agreed it was best if he left the special counsel investigation. He was placed in the FBI’s Human Resources department, hoping that once the partisan storm had passed, he could return to his operational work.
But that never came to fruition because his texts eventually became public. Once that happened, Twitter exploded with claims about a deep-state plot to unseat Trump. And of course, Trump himself joined in the name-calling.
But one day, Trump took it a step further: he accused Strzok of committing treason. Strzok had spent his entire life fighting for the US, in both the army and the FBI. And now, his own president was accusing him of a crime punishable by death.
This is what authoritarian regimes do, according to Strzok. They assassinate the character and the lives of those who disagree with them. They undermine the public’s faith in the federal agencies sworn to protect them. And they use fear and intimidation to achieve their ends. Strzok asserts that it’s time for America to judge Trump for who he really is: a compromised man.
Final summary
Partisan media has relentlessly spun false narratives and conspiracy theories about the FBI’s Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane investigations. Though the investigations were marred by some flaws, they were in large part conducted with the utmost professionalism and reverence for the US Constitution. This is borne out by the inspector general’s findings that none of Strzok’s actions during Midyear or Crossfire were affected by political bias. Regardless, the White House has continued to distort the facts and obscure the truth. This has cast doubt on America’s democratic institutions, destroyed the lives of respected intelligence officers, and compromised Trump to America’s Russian adversaries.