Much of the commentary about James Comey’s book has focused on the facts he reveals, the stories he recounts, and the opinions he expresses: He mocks Donald Trump’s appearance; he allows that he let his expectation that Hillary was a shoo-in shape his decisions about how she was to be investigated; he waxes woozy about the surreal experience of talking to a president-elect about prostitutes peeing; and—my personal favorite passage—he praises himself for being such a regular guy that he never cut in line at the FBI cafeteria. In other words, the book has been measured by what the former heir to J. Edgar has to say. Fair enough.
But what about what Comey doesn’t have to say?
What is one of the most consequential issues involving Comey when he was FBI director, an issue regarding Donald Trump when was candidate, president-elect, and president? The FISA “probable cause order” the FBI and Department of Justice requested and received and renewed putting Carter Page under electronic surveillance. This set of actions has proved to be among the most contentious in the whole Russia collusion probe. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have charged that the surveillance warrants were abusively and furtively won, with the Bureau and DoJ hiding key evidence from the FISA court. The feds built their application on the dossier assembled (if not fabricated) by former British spy Christopher Steele, but failed to mention to the FISA court that Steele’s work had been paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The GOP memo on “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuse at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation” calls into question “the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).”
Given that it is James Comey’s signature on three of the four warrant requests (the original and two of the three renewals), you would think that the former FBI director would want to take on the accusations.
Without using the acronym FISA or FISC, Comey is happy to talk about the surveillance court—but only in a generic day-in-the-life-of-an-FBI-director sort of way. “On my morning drives to work, I would read in the back of the fully armored black Suburban, preparing myself for the first two meetings of the day,” Comey writes. “But before any meetings, I would sit at my desk and read more, starting with the applications the Department of Justice was submitting to the court for electronic surveillance in FBI national security cases. Each application must be personally approved by the director or, in his absence, the deputy director. I would review the inch-thick applications, pulling from a stack that, on many mornings, was a foot high.” Yes, but we might be forgiven for being less interested in the daily stack of surveillance applications than we are in one very specific application brought before the FISC October 21, 2016. That is, the one asking for permission to target Carter Page.
And yet, search James Comey’s book high and low, and you will not find the name Carter Page. Nor will you find any discussion of the October 21, 2016 FISA warrant application Comey signed. Perhaps it will be argued that the FBI’s FISA business is classified and so Comey was not in a position to discuss the controversy. But when House Intelligence Committee Republicans released their report at the beginning of this February, the fact of the applications, warrants, and target were all declassified. Making changes or additions to a book two-and-a-half months before the pub date may be a stressful challenge, but many time-sensitive political books have even tighter production schedules than that. If Comey had wanted to make the case that he and his colleagues were in the right regarding the Carter Page warrant (as Democrats on the House committee have argued) he could have done so. Instead, he pretends that the controversy and Page simply don’t exist.
There’s something else missing from Comey’s book—any indication that the former FBI man ever read the dossier that has caused such a fuss. He seems to be fully up to speed on one part of the dossier, the assertion that Trump once partied with peeing prostitutes in a Moscow hotel and that video of the romp was in Russian hands. He recounts his terrible discomfort, disassociation really, at having to brief the president-elect about the allegation. “As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience,” Comey writes, “as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia.” Trump cut him off, dismissing the whole thing as untrue.
Why does this all suggest that Comey hadn’t actually read the dossier? Because if he had actually read and believed the dossier, he would have believed that Donald Trump was a fully willing partner in a monstrous 8-year-long conspiracy with Vladimir Putin. The dossier is made up of a series of memos, of which the pee-pee business is just the first (and the silliest). The following memos become far more serious, alleging that Trump and his henchmen had been in cahoots with Russia’s ruler for nearly a decade plotting methodically to throw a presidential election—a plot complete with accusations that Trump’s team of bag-men paid off the East European hackers who stole the DNC’s emails.
If Comey had actually read the dossier and believed it, he would not have gone into his first private meeting with Trump full of trepidation there would be awkwardness about the leaky working girls. No, he would have steeled himself to confront a dangerous incarnation of the Manchurian Candidate. He wouldn’t have been worried that Trump could be coerced into cooperating with the Russians by way of kompromat; he would have believed that the man who would soon be president had already long since become a willing and active Russian stooge. If the dossier is to be believed, that’s what you have to believe. If the dossier is true, the prostitute business is the least of anybody’s worries.
But you have to get past the pee-pee part of the story to see those rather more significant allegations. Comey seems not to have done so. Indeed, seems still not to have done so. Instead he harps on the awkwardness of being the guy who has to tell the louche Trump that his sexual antics might be on tape. And Trump was indeed outraged. Here’s how Comey describes calming the situation: “As he began to grow more defensive and the conversation teetered toward disaster, on instinct, I pulled the tool from my bag: ‘We are not investigating you, sir.’ That seemed to quiet him.”
Comey treated his new boss-to-be not as an outrageous usurper, but like a naughty overgrown child who needed to be quieted. That means Comey either never read past the first goofily salacious pages of the dossier, or he didn’t believe it.
Which brings us back to the Carter Page surveillance warrants based largely on dossier allegations. If Comey hadn’t read, or didn’t believe, the dossier, what business did he have signing off on the electronic surveillance requests?
That’s a question Comey might have found room in his book to address.
