The FRONTLINE Interviews
Ben Wittes
Editor-in-chief, Lawfare
Ben Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the editor-in-chief of Lawfare.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 14, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Intervention in the U.S. Election
When [news of the hacking] comes out, what do you make of the potential of it being a Russian-motivated hack?
I actually didn't think that much about it, honestly.I've been living in an environment for several years now in which data breaches by foreign actors are more norm than exception.The idea that some foreign actor would want to breach the DNC [Democratic National Committee] struck me as perfectly plausible and very likely.And why wouldn’t you target the DNC, right, if you were the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation] or the GRU [Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation]?
I was surprised that other foreign actors hadn't done the same thing.I sort of scratched my head and said it doesn’t seem like that big a deal, actually.It seems like the kind of thing foreign intelligence agencies do.
The thing that changed that for me, which is not something that foreign intelligence agencies do, is when they started releasing the material.That was a very different thing.To me, the Russians breaching the DNC and stealing the material is not really that different from the reports that NSA targeted [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel when she was the opposition leader, right?You kind of want to know who’s running for office and what they're thinking about.That strikes me as legitimate foreign intelligence.It's always, of course, unpleasant when it’s done to us.
But I'm enough of a realist about these things to say hey, you know, that’s the sort of thing we should expect.But the idea of foreign intelligence agencies doing something like theft-driven journalism, merging the WikiLeaks model with the active-measures intelligence-gathering model, that struck me as something very new.That only emerged over the course of the summer.
That's right.It's not espionage. We're all OK with espionage, or at least we expect it to happen.I suppose it’s when it gets into the political realm that it lights up warning signs that haven’t been lit up before?
Yeah, and the question of whether it’s illegitimate, of course.An answer will emerge as we proceed and find out whether it’s normalized and whether there's state accountability for it, right?Because it’s not like you're going to prosecute individuals for this.You're very unlikely to do the attribution at that level, although there have been—in the Chinese context, there have been state-actor attributions at the individual level.That’s what the UglyGorilla case is.
But they're unlikely.In any event, you're not going to get custody of the individuals except in a very limited set of circumstances, and you can't count on them.So the real question is what price, if any, does Russia as a state pay for this sort of behavior, and does it incentivize that price?Does it incentivize not doing this sort of behavior in the future, or is it treated as a tolerable cost of some very attractive outcomes that they accomplished?I think the verdict of that is yet to be determined, honestly. …
Putin and Trump
You know and have written about Comey’s aspect, life in general.Can you imagine the Comey who’s your friend?What's he like at that moment [when he tells President-elect Trump about the hacking], do you think?
He is thinking very hard about making sure that everything he does, says and conveys is exactly what he wants it to be: very controlled, very proper, and that he’s not impulsive and that he remembers every single thing that is said, because he knows that these conversations are important.He knows that a lot hangs on them.Some part of him, I suspect, knows that he will be accountable for his side of it at some point.I think he wants to make sure that there is a record, a real memory, and that when there is accountability that he’s satisfied with and confident in the propriety of his own behavior.
I say that just as a character description, not reflecting any particular knowledge that I have of what he was thinking about.But I think that's—I’m confident in it.
Couple of days after the inauguration, the famous moment where … the president of the United States calls upon Jim Comey to walk across the room and shake his hand.Describe the scene you saw. We've all seen it. Describe it for [us], will you?
Well, my description of it is not what I saw.I don’t watch television, and I never saw it until after Jim described it to me.After I had a conversation with Jim about it, and after the president fired Jim, I went back through my memory of our conversations, and I remembered his description of that event, and then I pulled the video to compare it to my memory of what he described.So my trajectory is a little bit different from—
I like yours. It's certainly more authentic in lots of ways.
Well, it happens also to be true.Look, I was aware that that event had happened because there had been a lot of activity on Twitter about the closeness that Trump showed to Jim in that setting, how gross that was given Comey’s role in Trump's victory, supposed role, reality of role, whatever.
… I don't remember offhand whether this was a phone conversation—or it’s possible it was a phone conversation, or it’s possible that it was in one of the times we got together. I want to say it was a phone conversation.He was mortified by the incident, and the reasons are both general and specific.He was mortified by—so first of all, he just doesn't believe the president and the FBI director should be palling around.He was one of the very few, despite being 6’8”, he always refused to play basketball with Obama.And by the way, Obama was very respectful of that. I think [he] always got it.They had a very cordial, very good relationship, as best as I can tell, despite some significant differences. It was never personal.That's a reflection of the way Jim imagines the proper relationship between the political leadership and career law enforcement, and it is a positive reflection on Obama that he always respected that.
Part of the issue was the president had invited Jim to a reception, or an event, at the White House. That's exactly the sort of thing Jim doesn’t generally want to do.Now, in addition, there were some exacerbating factors here.One of them was that a lot of people blamed, particularly Democrats, blamed Jim for the fact that Trump was president, so any kind of show of them being in the same room in shows of closeness with one another were particularly sensitive.
I now believe in light of The New York Times’s reporting and another factor was that five days earlier, Jim had been in a private dinner with the president, asked to pledge loyalty, which he had been extremely uncomfortable about and had written a memo about.That was not conveyed to me at the time.But his discomfort with the invitation was extreme. He went.If you look at that video, and he was very clear to me that this was intentional, he is standing literally as far away from Trump as it is possible to be in that room.He is standing in a blue blazer against blue drapes.That was not an accident; that was a decision to be as inconspicuous as possible.When you're 6’8”, it is hard to be inconspicuous.
He told me that he really had thought he had gotten away with it.He’d sort of blended in and been just another law enforcement face in a crowd of law enforcement faces who were being thanked for their role in the inauguration, until Trump called him out by name in a fashion that Jim regarded as particularly calculated to undermine him in the eyes of Democrats, who already suspected his role in the election.And that is the president said something like: “Oh, there's Jim. He's even more famous than I am.”
And he was—the word I've used for it is “disgusted” by it.What he told me was as he walked across the room, he really made up his mind that there was not going to be a hug, that there had to be a handshake.It was bad enough that he was there at all, but he really wasn't going to allow there to be an unnecessary show of closeness.If you watch the video, he kind of pre-emptively extends his arm, and Jim’s arms are very long, and the president grabs it and tries to pull him into a hug.And the hug is entirely one-sided.Jim felt implicated and compromised in a very public way by that, and he was furious about it.
There is the, as you mentioned, another event.That's the loyalty dinner.How did he feel about that?
Nobody believes me when I say this, but it really is true.I knew nothing about the loyalty dinner until I read about it in The New York Times.The reason I came forward and talked to [journalist] Mike Schmidt about my interactions with Jim and the things he had told me was because I had learned about the loyalty dinner.So the extent to which I knew about any of that was that Jim had told me that “The president was uncomfortable with me because he had asked for my loyalty, and I said I could only give him honesty.”But it was not told in the context of a dinner, a dramatic scene in which the president—I mean, that's a dramatic story, and I was not privy to any of it except the substance of what was communicated.
I'm afraid that [in] actually lacking the drama of the scene and the setting and the events, I didn't understand fully the magnitude of the substance until I read the full account of it.Look, Jim was clearly very disturbed by it, and that was clear to me, that when we talked and he reported to me that this request had been made of him and he hadn’t been able to comply with it, and the president had been uncomfortable with him ever since, was the way he described it.
That was a matter of ongoing discomfort and anxiety for him, not that the president was uncomfortable with him—that made his job hard—but that he had been asked. That really bothered him.This is somebody who served at senior levels of two administrations of opposite party, who had a previous famous encounter with President [George W.] Bush over a substantive issue.I've never heard him talk about President Bush as somebody without honor or without decency.
There was something he was willing to resign over there and take half the Justice Department with him, but I'd never heard him speak disparagingly about President Bush.President Bush never put him in a position like this, and at the end of the day, when they had that confrontation, if you go back to Comey’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee back in 2006 or 2007, whenever it was, they had a meeting, and he explained his position to Bush and that he really felt strongly about it, and Bush listened, right?
This is somebody who has had hard interactions with a president before, but I don't think has ever, at least not that I've ever been able to discern, walked away saying, “These are people without honor whom you need to interact with on that basis.”And that is the way he regarded four months of trying to manage the Trump administration.
Yeah, it’s amazing when you watch it and you put the dates up.It feels like a rolling thunder coming.You look at the Oval Office meeting in early February where everyone is excused except Mr. Comey, including Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions.Once again, it’s like the screws are being put—I’m not sure what—what did he think was going on?
I don't know.I think there would be no way for me to ask that question or learn that without asking him about the substance of investigative matters that I, although apparently not the president, would never ask him about.To know his true feelings about that, you would have to have an understanding of what his hypotheses were about the underlying investigation, as in is this something that fundamentally doesn’t touch the president?There are some discreet issues here that may affect Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Gen. [Michael] Flynn, but there's nothing really here about the president.
… I think to know what he really thought was going on and what he thought the president was attempting to do, you'd have to have more insight into that underlying set of questions than I do.I have never interacted with him.
One of the roles I play in life is that I'm a sometime journalist.I'm a weird animal. I do some journalism; I do a lot of policy work. I do a lot of editing and writing that’s sort of analytical legal writing.I also advise people, and I've never made a secret of that.I get involved in substantive issues sometimes, and my interactions with Jim have never been on the basis of the sometimes journalism that I sometimes do.They're on the basis that we're friends; we've been friends for a long time.They're on the basis that in more recent years, although our relationship is much older than that, they're on the basis that he runs an agency, or he ran an agency, that has a lot of interactions with the issues that we do analytical work on.
So sometimes we've—and that, by the way, ranges. People always say, well, you know, the going-dark stuff or the encryption stuff is stuff that Wittes has done a lot of work on.But I also kept the FBI folks up to date on work we were doing on sexual extortion online, and there's just a lot of issues that we work on both in Susan [Hennessey, the managing editor of Lawfare] and my Brookings capacities and in our Lawfare capacities that just interact on a daily basis with activity going on in the bureau [FBI].So we're in touch on a regular basis.Both he and I have been in touch because we're friends, but that's not just at the director level.
But what I'm not there doing is trying to get as much information as I can. There's just a lot of questions that I don’t ask.
… [Comey] has made an announcement early to the president-elect: “I want a hands-off kind of relationship with you.”Why is Trump pursuing him, by his understanding?
That I know the answer to.In their first, not their first private interaction, but their first private interaction when Trump was president, the president asked for loyalty, and he didn't get it.The interaction was extremely awkward, and there are these series of subsequent interactions.Jim described that in his written testimony—and I'm sure these words were carefully chosen—as an attempt to engage Jim in a patronage relationship.
Jim would not have said that without thinking about it hard.There are these subsequent interactions in which Jim felt that the president was probing whether they could reboot that and whether he could get him in a client-patron relationship.The phone call when he was trying to get on a helicopter is a good example of that.You know, Jim’s assumption when the phone rings and the White House tells you the president wants to talk is that there's some exigent situation going on. In fact, the president just wanted to chitchat.The way he described it to me is that the president has this way of talking to you that aims to make you a kind of co-conspirator in his way of thinking.He’ll say outrageous things about himself that then if you contradict it’s really awkward, right? But if you don’t contradict, then you're part of—then you’ve assented.
He believed that a lot of these interactions, these shows of closeness in public, were efforts to make it look like that arrangement existed in a fashion that would compromise Jim and thus force him into that relationship.But in private, these efforts to implicate him in Trump's way of thinking and being were efforts to create the reality that he had offered, or suggested, in the first loyalty dinner.
I think the most telling example of that in Jim’s statement is the last conversation, I believe on April 11 or April 12, I can't remember which—
I think it’s 11th.
—in which the president says something like he wants to get this out, that he’s not under investigation, and [Trump] says, “You know, because I've been very loyal to you.”I didn't know anything about that interaction.It actually took place after the last time Jim and I had lunch, which was at least while he was in office, which was March 27, I believe.But I think that maps very neatly onto this larger pattern, which is a pattern of discomfort at the absence of the loyalty patronage relationship he had tried to establish on Jan. 27, and an effort to probe Jim’s willingness to revisit that question.
“Am I being investigated?,” he wants to know, I suppose, huh?
“And can I count on you? And for what?”These are questions you just don’t ask Jim Comey.I mean, he's not unique in that regard.
But why not Jim Comey?
Look, Jim has many detractors, and I would be the last person to say there aren’t significant errors that he’s made in his career, including in the last year of his career.If you talk to 100 people around town who dislike Jim Comey, and there are many who dislike Jim Comey, you will hear the following words over and over and over again: “self-righteous,” “prissy,” “convinced of his own moral rectitude.”I could go on.One word you will not hear is “malleable.” No one’s going to say, “Comey’s the kind of guy who will roll over under political pressure.”
In fact, what you might hear among his critics is that he will look for opportunities to stand up to you and make a stand.Now, I think that's quite unfair.But you'd be much more likely to hear that, that he's made a show of his own independence than that he has lacked for independence.
So the idea that of all people, you're going to go to Jim Comey and say, “I'm the new boss in town; kneel and kiss the ring,” and that he’s going to kneel and kiss the ring reflects a very deep misunderstanding of who he is and what motivates him and what side of the lines he will err on.It’s just not who he is.
If you had told me six months ago that this set of interactions would have happened, I would have told you within a reasonable degree of accuracy how Comey would have behaved, and I would have told you he’d get fired at the end of it.And in fact, I can say that with a lot of confidence because that's what I wrote on Nov. 10; that Trump is going to have a Comey problem, and one of the things you’ve got to look for is whether he’s going to fire him.Susan Hennessey and I wrote that within two days of the election because it actually is knowable, how these two personalities were likely to interact.
So the Feb. 14 meeting in the Oval Office, where lots of people are disinvited, one of the things that the president says to Mr.Comey is: “You’ve got to help me with Flynn. I mean, he's a good guy.”
Well, two things about that.First of all, I knew nothing about the specific ask at the time.Again, I learned about that from The New York Times.What I did know about was a pattern of inappropriate investigative inquiries.I didn't know the details of any of them, but Jim, when we had lunch on March 27, he made very clear that the White House had required—the word he used was “training”; that they had had to be educated about the proper mode of interacting with the FBI, which is to say that, as a general matter, the proper amount on investigative matters was zero, and that any inquiries that you had to make had to go through the Justice Department.
What he made clear to me was that he thought that that process of training had taken place and that they were in a good place at that point.Of course, this was before the April 11 call.But he also made clear that it was going to be a very long few years, and he really expected to have to spend a lot of time over the next few years policing the lines that he had established.
He was upset about it, and he joked with me—I have this hashtag I sometimes use on Twitter, #notesfromundertrump, which is followed by the day of the Trump presidency and then some snarky remark.He knew what day it was, and he said, “You know, your ticker’s going very slowly.”I took that as that he anticipated having to spend four years being the line that protected the FBI against these encroachments.What we now know is that he made sure the team didn't even know they were taking place, but that means he was absorbing all that pressure himself with a small leadership team, now which exists without him.
That's a tough environment operationally for him, and that stress was very obvious.
He gets fired. How does he react?
I don't know that I want to talk about that.There are interactions that we've had that circumstances have, in my judgment, required me to talk about.I've never pretended that we're not in touch. We actually had lunch yesterday. We email, text and chat on a periodic basis pretty commonly.But I sort of feel like if it’s not necessary for me to talk about [this], it belongs in the box of stuff that should be private to him and that I should respect.
OK, how about this?How important is it that the president of the United States fired the director of the FBI, James Comey?
In my opinion?
Yeah.
It’s tremendously important. It reflects a moral crisis of the presidency.It may be a criminal obstruction of justice or part of a pattern of criminal obstruction of justice.It is certainly an abuse of power.It put at risk, although I think the risk has been managed, a set of investigations that I believe are important to the security of the country and that if you didn't also believe that, you wouldn’t be making the film that you're making.
It’s fair to say that's consistent with what he would say given what we read and what we saw in his testimony.
I think if you read his testimony, a few salient reactions to his firing jump out at you.One is at a personal level.This is a mission-driven human being.One day he was severed from an organization that he really believes in that organization’s mission as well as the individual missions of a lot of individual components of it.He said that he will miss that, and I am very confident that that is the case.
I'm also confident that the manner in which he was removed, which was very sudden—I believe he was never allowed back into the building, and he was almost prevented from flying home on the plane, the FBI plane, that he had flown to Los Angeles in.That added measure of personal humiliation is inexcusable.
In addition—and he talked about this in his testimony—this is somebody who had a lot of real relationships in that building.When I used to go to lunch with him in the building, we would go to the cafeteria.He wouldn’t order from the cafeteria and have it brought to the director’s office.You'd walk down there and go to the cafeteria.He knew everybody, and he would stand in line, in the sandwich line, and talk to whoever was in front of him or in back of him.
The first time we did that, it was just this huge, big deal that the director had just walked into the room.The last time we did it on March 27.It was a little bit more than me walking into the Brookings cafeteria, but it wasn't a lot more than that.That's because everybody knew him, and everybody expected him to be there.
There are these therapy dogs that sometimes come to the FBI cafeteria to hang out, and people come over and pet them, and they're very calm.They're a calming presence in a high-stakes environment.Jim knew the ladies who were there holding the therapy dogs.I mean, that's the level at which he knows everybody.
I think at a personal level—and you see this in the emotional opening statement to his testimony—he never got a chance to say goodbye. I think that upset him and angered him.It was compounded by the frank lies told both about the bureau and about him personally, which you cannot watch that testimony without seeing dripping off of him.
Then finally, and this is, of course, last, but it’s the most important thing, there's concern about the future of the bureau.When you remove somebody like Jim Comey, and you do it for reasons related to the Russian investigation, which is what the president has said, both publicly in that Lester Holt interview and privately to the Russians in the Oval Office, you have to worry if you're the person who got removed about what comes next.He’d be insane if he didn't worry about that.
We have more clarity on that now than we did a few weeks ago, but one problem with removing the FBI director for corrupt reasons is that it raises the question of what you're going to do with the bureau afterward.Now, I have no reason to mistrust [Andrew] McCabe, who has had a very distinguished career and who, among other things, has a long career in law enforcement, but I do think it’s worth asking the question of anybody who would take that job after what happened to Jim.
What's he going to say when the president asks him for loyalty?What's he going to do when the president makes serial investigative inquiries about matters in which he’s personally invested?And how is he going to handle the repeated and grotesque improprieties in the way the president interacts with professional law enforcement?I'm not criticizing him. I'm not saying he's not up to that, but I'm saying that's a question one needs to ask of any individual who would take this job under these circumstances.I think if you're in the shoes of the person who has been removed for having not done what we would not want somebody to do under those circumstances, that must be a pretty acute question.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
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