Compromised summary

In early 2011, the African country of Libya descended into violence. In October of that year, its leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, was deposed and killed. A year later, in September, a mob gathered outside the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. They stormed the building and ultimately killed four Americans.

In the wake of this tragedy, many Republican lawmakers were outraged. They demanded to know if any responsibility lay with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To find out, the House of Representatives voted 232 to 186 to create the Select Committee on Benghazi in May 2014.

Over the course of the investigation, the Midyear team had realized a couple of things. One: there had definitely been mishandling of classified information. Two: there didn’t appear to be any evidence of behavior that the Department of Justice had previously charged for violations of criminal law.

The FBI has a high bar for opening mishandling cases. But the DOJ has an even higher bar for prosecuting them. And ultimately, the DOJ has the final say as to whether to bring criminal charges. It’s especially unlikely to prosecute cases where a person hasn’t knowingly or maliciously disclosed classified information.

On April 6, 2016, a staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee opened up an email that appeared in his inbox. It looked just like a security notification from Google, requesting the staff reset their passwords. They could do so using a link embedded in the email’s text.

In reality, the notification was anything but official. It had come from a specialized cadre within Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency. The password reset link was actually a hyperlink to a Russian website that could harvest the email password of the person holding the account. A similar link had already made a victim of Clinton campaign co-chair John Podesta. Fifty thousand of Podesta’s emails were promptly siphoned away by the Russians.

The Clinton case finally wrapped up in July 2016. Less than a month later, Strzok and his partner found themselves on a British Airways flight to an undisclosed European capital. A new investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, was only just beginning. Its implications and findings would shake the American public –⁠ and, indeed, the world –⁠ in ways no one could have imagined at the time.

So, what had sparked the investigation and brought Strzok overseas? Well, the FBI had gained new intelligence regarding Trump’s campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. In early spring 2016, Papadopoulos had spoken with Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer. Their conversation established that Papadopoulos had been working hard to create a rapport with the Russian government. But that wasn’t all.

All of the individuals that made up the FBI’s matrix had demonstrated ties to Russia that made them suspicious characters. In fact, while Strzok was in Europe, Manafort was busy having a meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian linked to Russian intelligence services. He was in Manhattan to receive polling data from Manafort.

This was far from an innocuous exchange of information. The data was valuable because it revealed where key voting blocs were located. Winning over voters in those areas could provide strategic benefits. So, who exactly was benefiting? Russia and its intelligence service, of course. The data was a blessing just as Russia had begun to place ads and targeted posts on US social media to win swing votes and reshape the election.

Just after November 8, Election Day, the Obama administration ordered the FBI, CIA, and NSA to conduct a comprehensive analysis of Russia’s attacks during the 2016 elections. Only a very small number of people would be privy to the study, which had a long title but eventually came to be known simply as the ICA.

A question that some have asked in the wake of the many Russia-related investigations is: why was all the information limited to such a small group of people? The answer was a sensible one. The intelligence agencies wanted to prevent their investigations from becoming public. Since they were intimately connected to some of Trump’s handlers, keeping the investigations private shielded the Trump campaign from harm.

After ringing in the New Year in 2017, it came time to deliver the ICA report to President Trump himself. The task of briefing the president was assigned to several high-ranking intelligence officials, including FBI director Comey. The ICA contained an enormous amount of counterintelligence information – Comey’s portion of the brief alone filled two large binders.

There was a bigger problem, however. The FBI was undecided as to whether it should include information provided by an FBI source and former British government employee named Christopher Steele. Steele’s information came to be known publicly as the “Steele dossier.” The material had been collected in service of a political client looking for derogatory information about Trump’s campaign. But it contained true information consistent with what the FBI already knew about the way Putin and the Russians were operating. Many other pieces of Steele’s material were either unconfirmed or patently false. If any of it were true, however, it would provide the Russians with plenty of kompromat.

The media soon caught wind of Flynn’s phone call to Kislyak, and the Washington Post ran a story about it on January 12, 2017. The weekend after the story ran, vice president-elect Pence announced that he’d spoken to Flynn about his phone conversation. He stated that Flynn’s conversations had nothing to do with the Obama administration’s sanctions.

The FBI knew that statement was false. Had Flynn lied to Pence? Or worse, did Pence know the truth and wish to cover it up?

The exchange about Flynn had, in Strzok’s mind, crossed the line. For weeks, he’d been arguing against opening an investigation into the president himself. It had always seemed highly unlikely that Trump was some sort of Manchurian candidate, a puppet for Russia. But he began to question this after learning about Trump’s apparent obstruction of the FBI investigations –⁠ an obstruction that would clearly benefit Russia.

For now, though, he kept quiet. He didn’t inform his other team members about Comey’s recent experience with the president, as Comey had requested. Telling them, after all, could have influenced the investigators’ independent assessment of the facts.

Spring and summer of 2017 was a busy period for the Mueller investigation. It required a truly staggering amount of investigative work, including 500 witness interviews; more than 2,800 subpoenas; almost 500 search warrants; over 200 orders for communication records; and nearly 50 pen registers. And then there was all the additional work needed to interpret all of that information.

Despite the extensive work being done, it wasn’t long before Trump began to attack Mueller and decry the special counsel investigation as a witch hunt. He also pressured White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. In short, Trump was attempting –⁠ and occasionally succeeding –⁠ at undermining the investigation at every turn. Eventually, Strzok himself became a victim of Trump’s contempt.