Former FBI General Counsel James Baker said the bureau was worried that former FBI Director James Comey would appear to be “blackmailing” then-President-elect Donald Trump during a January 2017 briefing at Trump Tower on some of the most salacious allegations in the dossier written by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
Sitting down with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News for a “Skullduggery” podcast released on Wednesday, Baker said that prior to Comey’s meeting with Trump, the FBI was “quite worried” that it might seem like J. Edgar Hoover-style “blackmail” if Comey told Trump about some of the more salacious claims in the dossier, which Comey ended up doing.
“Jim [Comey] and I had talked many times about the Hoover days, especially the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., what was done there, the blackmailing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Baker said. “So yeah, we were quite worried about that, quite worried about how that would come off.”
Hoover was the very first director of the FBI.
The dossier, packed with unverified claims about President Trump’s ties to Russia, formed a key part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications used to justify surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Isikoff pointed out that Comey was “going to present to Trump the information from the Steele dossier that there are allegations that he was consorting with prostitutes in Moscow.” Isikoff said that was a “pretty sensational and salacious allegation” and he asked, “Was there a full discussion about the wisdom of doing that knowing that you had not verified that allegation?”
Baker said the FBI discussed it and that he believed Trump needed to be told about the allegations in the dossier. “I came down on it that it had to be briefed to the president-elect significantly because it was about to be disclosed in the press,” Baker said. “To me, that was sort of the driving factor at the end of the day.”
The meeting between Trump, Comey, and other top intelligence officials took place on Jan. 6, 2017, and it was quickly leaked to the press. On the afternoon of Jan. 10, 2017, CNN ran a story about the meeting titled “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” Later that evening, BuzzFeed posted Steele’s dossier online with the title “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia.”
Baker, who said that the FBI took the dossier “seriously … but not literally”, defended the decision to tell Trump about some of Steele’s unverified allegations. “We thought, I thought, it would be inappropriate not to brief the president-elect, because we knew about this information already to some degree,” Baker said. “And for him to find out later that we knew about this and when up there and give him a briefing on a related topic and didn’t at least alert him to the fact that this information was out there and that we hadn’t verified it yet.”
Isikoff pressed Baker on this, asking, “But did you talk about how this was likely to be received by Donald Trump himself knowing who he his and what his mindset is? You’re the FBI — you know, the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover blackmailing lots of people over many decades — that that is how this would come off?”
Baker said the FBI’s didn’t want the briefing on the dossier to seem like blackmail and that Comey tried to avoid that appearance. Baker said that “we were quite worried about the [J. Edgar] Hoover analogies and were determined not to have such a disaster happen on our watch.” Baker said that they tried to frame the dossier’s allegations like this: “Sir, we have this information, it came to us in a particular way, the press has it, it’s about to come out, you should be alerted to that fact, we don’t want to proceed on this basis without you being aware of these facts.”
Baker said Comey “did the best he could under extremely difficult circumstances with respect to that very challenging and difficult conversation.” Following the meeting with Trump, Baker said Comey “then created I think the first of his memos on his interactions with the president-elect and then the president.” After his firing, Comey would leak at least one of the memos to a friend to leak to the media in the hopes that it would prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Earlier this week, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Comey a “jackass” over his handling of the dossier and also compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Giuliani criticized Comey’s decision to tell Trump about some of the more salacious aspects of the dossier — like allegations related to prostitutes in a hotel room in Moscow — during their private discussion in January 2017.
“That whole thing with going up to Trump and telling him about the Steele dossier … that wasn’t being a Hoover?” Giuliani asked rhetorically.
The FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks, and there are at least three federal investigations into alleged FISA abuse and other matters related to the way that the FBI and DOJ handled the Trump-Russia investigation.
