What did Comey tell President-Elect Trump about the Steele dossier?

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On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.

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January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Just as significant: January 5 was the day before these same intelligence-community leaders would brief President-elect Trump on the same report.

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Also on hand at the January 5 White House briefing were Vice President Joe Biden and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. According to Rice, immediately after the briefing, President Obama had his two top law-enforcement officials, Yates and Comey, linger for “a brief follow-on conversation” with the administration’s political leadership: Obama, Biden, and Rice.

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The officials in the meeting would need to figure out how the investigation could continue despite the fact that its central focus, Trump, was about to be sworn in as president.

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Let’s think about what was going on at that moment. It had been just a few days since Obama imposed sanctions on Russia. In that connection, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, had contacted Trump’s designated national-security adviser, Michael Flynn.

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Far more important are the last paragraphs of Rice’s email. She recounted that “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

There follows a blacked-out paragraph, clearly redacted because it either is classified or would expose investigative information — no doubt, some of the information that “we cannot share fully.” Rice then closes with Obama’s instruction to Comey to inform Obama “if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”

That is what Rice’s email is really about: not sharing with the incoming Trump administration classified information about the Trump-Russia investigation, such as the basis for seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

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The dilemma was that the Obama administration had placed “the incoming team” — in particular, President-elect Trump — under investigation. Remember, Obama’s law-enforcement agencies believed the Steele dossier. No, the FBI had not been able to corroborate it; but, as former FBI director Comey told Congress, the bureau deemed its author, Christopher Steele, to be a reliable source. Steele, moreover, had collaborated on the project with Nellie Ohr, the wife of Bruce Ohr, Yates’s top aide at the Justice Department. Even if the Justice Department and the FBI could not prove Steele’s allegations, at least not yet, they still believed that Trump was compromised and that the Russians could be blackmailing him.

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Trump’s Very Limited Briefing on the Dossier
We’ve heard the story a million times: After President-elect Trump was briefed by agency leaders on the intelligence community’s Russia report, Comey met privately with Trump to brief him on the Steele dossier.

But is that what happened? I don’t think so. I believe Trump was briefed only on a sliver of the dossier.

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This understanding — that Comey gave Trump only a narrow briefing on the dossier — is consistent with the conversations between Comey and Trump that followed.

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Comey’s description of what he told Trump about the dossier, and what by Trump standards was the president’s remarkably tame reaction. It is completely consistent with the notion that Comey described a single, perverse allegation, and Trump confidently denied it. It is not at all consistent with the combustion that would surely have followed a full and detailed briefing on the dossier.

Imagine what would have happened, what we’d have heard from Trump, if Comey had said something along these lines:

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Since Trump would have the power to shut down the investigation, the trick was to avoid making him feel threatened by it. Therefore, the strategy was to withhold information that illustrated Trump’s centrality to the investigation, assure him that he was not a suspect, and gently admonish him about the need to respect law enforcement’s independence (on pain of being accused of obstruction).

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That is why Comey kept deflecting Trump’s entreaties that Comey tell the public Trump was not suspected of wrongdoing. In reality, Comey did suspect the president of wrongdoing and calculated that, at some point, the FBI would find the proof. The director therefore declined to absolve the president publicly, which eventually cost him his job.

But Comey only gave the private assurances that the president was not “personally under investigation” in order to discourage Trump from interfering in the probe. The real objective of investigating Page and Manafort was to uncover corrupt ties — if there were any — between Russia and Trump. Thus, Trump was always under investigation even if he was not personally targeted for FISA surveillance.

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