DEEP STATE

Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law

By James B. Stewart



During the 2016 presidential election, one of the two major candidates labored under the shadow of a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. That candidate was Hillary Clinton. As we now know, though voters had little reason to apprehend it at the time, there were actually two investigations underway — and, while the probe into Clinton’s mishandling of emails played out in public, the more serious probe of Donald Trump’s secret political and financial connections with Russia remained largely unknown until well after the voting had concluded.

In “Deep State,” James B. Stewart, a columnist for The New York Times and the author of “Blood Sport” and “Den of Thieves,” among many other books, tells the story of both investigations. His account produces few new facts, nor a bold new thesis, that would dramatically alter our understanding of either. Instead, his contribution is to combine the two accounts into a single chronological narrative. He shows how the twin investigations turn out to be closely linked, and not just because an election pitted their subjects against each other.

The F.B.I. agents investigating Clinton’s use of a personal email account realized early on that they would never have a prosecutable case. While Clinton had violated laws pertaining to the handling of classified material, she had apparently done so out of a combination of technical ineptitude and convenience, and the government had never charged an offender without establishing nefarious motives. As a result, the bureau concluded it didn’t “have much on the intent side.”

You might think this decision made life easier for the F.B.I., which would be spared the ordeal of having to insert itself into a presidential campaign. Instead, it made life harder. The reason for this: The bureau contained what some Department of Justice officials considered “hotbeds of anti-Clinton hostility,” especially in the Little Rock and New York offices. Stewart describes how F.B.I. officials encouraged colleagues investigating the Democratic nominee with messages like “You have to get her” and “You guys are finally going to get that bitch.” James Comey, the F.B.I. director during the Clinton email probe, went so far as to tell Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton.” Those agents leaked regularly to right-wing media sources that the bureau was turning a blind eye to what they saw as Clinton’s criminality.