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What the Feds Did

First, we’ve learned that the federal investigation started much earlier than was publicly known.

In late 2015, European intelligence agencies picked up contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence operatives. Communications intercepts by U.S. and allied intelligence seem to have continued throughout 2016. We know now that by July 2016, the FBI’s elite National Security Division in Washington had started investigating whether the Trump campaign and the Russians were coordinating to influence the election. They have also been looking into Paul Manafort’s financial ties to pro-Putin oligarchs.

In the summer of 2016, according to the Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and they received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President Elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration. By the spring of 2017, a federal grand jury was issuing subpoenas to business associates of Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after lying about his Russian contacts.

We’ve also learned a lot about how various parts of the U.S. government reacted differently to the intelligence coming in over the course of 2016 about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The CIA seems to have been most alarmed and was also convinced that the Russian goal was to help Trump and hurt me. As early as August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Moscow and warned him to stop interfering in the election. Brennan also individually briefed the “gang of eight” congressional leaders and shared his concerns. This explains why Harry Reid sought to galvanize public attention on the threat in his August letter.

We’ve learned that the FBI took a different approach. They launched an investigation in July 2016, but Director Comey didn’t inform congressional leaders, was slower than Brennan to come to the conclusion that Russia’s goal was electing Trump, and refused to join other intelligence agencies in issuing a joint statement on October 7 because he didn’t want to interfere close to an election—something that certainly didn’t stop him when it came to trumpeting news about the investigation into my emails. Sources within the FBI also convinced the New York Times to run a story saying they saw “no clear link to Russia,” countering Franklin Foer’s scoop in Slate about unusual computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. This is one of the stories the Times’s ombudsman later criticized.

It wasn’t until after the election that the FBI finally came around and joined the rest of the Intelligence Community in putting out the January 2017 assessment that Russia had, in fact, been actively helping Trump. And in March 2017, Comey finally confirmed the existence of a federal investigation into possible coordination. Tyrone Gayle, one of my former communications aides, summed up how most of us felt hearing that news: “That sound you just heard was every ex-Clinton staffer banging their heads on the wall from California to D.C.” Part of the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed.

While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway.

I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare. “We weren’t able to put all of those pieces together in real time,” Ben said.

Mike McFaul, Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, summed it up in a concise tweet:

FACT: Russia violated our sovereignty during the 2016 election.

FACT: Obama exposed that attack.

OPINION: We should have focused on it more.

I understand the predicament the Obama administration faced, with McConnell threatening them and everyone assuming I was going to win regardless. Richard Clarke, President George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor on 9/11, has written about how hard it can be to heed warnings about threats that have never been seen before, and certainly it was hard to imagine the Russians would dare to conduct such a massive and unprecedented covert operation. And President Obama did privately warn Putin directly to back off.

I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We’ll never know. But what we do know for sure is that McConnell and other Republican leaders did everything they could to leave Americans in the dark and vulnerable to attack.