Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

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JANUARY 23, 2016

363 DAYS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

HUMA ABEDIN AND ANTHONY WEINER’S APARTMENT, MANHATTAN—As Hillary Clinton campaigned in Iowa for the Democratic nomination, facing a surprisingly strong challenge from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina sent a message to a disgraced former congressman on Twitter. She had read about his public scandals and had become fascinated with him.

“We should skype sometime,” the girl said.

“Where do you go to school,” said the disgraced politician, Anthony Weiner.

The girl told Weiner the name of her high school—the first of several comments she made to him that clearly showed she was under eighteen.

“You are kinda sorta gorgeous,” Weiner said.

She sent him photos and he commented on her physique.

“Your body is pretty insane,” Weiner said.

“You really think so?” the girl said.

In the previous five years, Weiner had destroyed his reputation and his political career after he had been repeatedly caught sending sexually explicit messages to women online. His wife, Huma Abedin, had risen to become Hillary Clinton’s closest aide. Despite being embarrassed beyond belief by Weiner, Abedin had fought for the marriage and stayed with him. Given the prominence of her job with Clinton, he was potentially a political liability for the Clintons if he ever made a mistake again. But given how he had been humiliated and the fact that Abedin had remained with him, it was hard to fathom he would ever do anything again to embarrass himself, Abedin, or the Clintons.

As the primary crawled along in 2016, Weiner and the teenager continued to talk. The girl asked Weiner what he would do if she was eighteen. Weiner replied with a sexually explicit remark.

By March, contacts between Weiner and the girl had stopped. But evidence of their communications remained stored in the smartphones and other electronic devices they had used to chat with each other. What no one knew at the time was how those text messages would alter Clinton’s fate, Comey’s career, the FBI’s reputation, and the arc of American history.

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LATE JUNE 2016

SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

THE COMEY HOME, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA—For the first two years of Jim’s tenure as FBI director, he and Patrice Comey lived apart. During the week, Jim stayed in “dad’s bachelor pad”—or “Meadowlands” as the FBI code-named it—a modest, two-story 1950s-era house in McLean, Virginia, with a large kitchen, a small, cozy living room, and four bedrooms upstairs. On the weekends, Jim would fly home to Connecticut, where Patrice had stayed in their hulking seven-bedroom house, with a sprawling backyard, a pool, and a hot tub, as their children finished high school. In 2015, Patrice moved down to live with Jim full-time and they fell into a pattern for spending time together. During the week, they usually had a glass of wine after work (pinot noir in colder weather, sauvignon blanc in the summer). On the weekends, the routine doubled—coffee in the morning (half-and-half and no sugar for both), and then a glass of wine at night. Jim and Patrice usually sat in rocking chairs on the back porch. If the weather was bad, they would sit together and talk in the living room with a flick-on fireplace just inside the front door. The living room had a dull-looking gray rug, but Patrice had moved in a red loveseat and comfy lounge chair with a white and red floral print to brighten the room.

Their conversations typically centered on one of three topics: their kids, their jobs, and their role as foster parents. With Patrice taking the lead, the Comeys specialized in caring for premature babies, who, because of the trauma of being separated from their birth mothers, constantly need to be held to prevent developmental issues. When the Comeys first welcomed a new baby from a local nursery or neonatal unit, Patrice would put her own life on pause and devote herself entirely to holding and caring for the child for weeks or months until the baby was placed with adoptive parents. At night, the babies would sleep on her chest.

When Jim talked about work, he observed the bright line that separated the most sensitive parts of his job from the rest of his life. It’s hard to bifurcate one’s life, and have whole swaths of your experience that are off-limits to those you love most. But that’s the way it is when you have the kind of job that Jim Comey had. And so when he and Patrice would relax and catch up at the end of the long days, Jim almost always focused on the softer sides of his job, not the ins and outs of high-profile investigations or navigating the complicated politics of the bureau, the Department of Justice, and the White House. He loved to tell stories of how each week he would call FBI employees across the country to give them attaboys.

“It’s the director calling,” he would say earnestly to start those calls. Often, the employees on the other end of the line thought they were being pranked and would hang up. Jim would then have to call back and say, “No, really, it’s the director. I want to tell you what a great job you’re doing.”

The calls might have felt a bit faux folksy. But they were among dozens of ways that Jim changed things around when he took over the bureau as director. Despite receiving significant blame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI had largely regained the public’s trust. Yet on the inside, it was in bad shape. Not only was morale low and its relationship with Capitol Hill fraying, but the bureau’s headquarters—the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue—was actually falling apart. Days after Comey was sworn in as director in 2013, an employee brought him a piece of the building’s yellowed concrete exterior that had fallen off and plunged to the sidewalk.

Telling Comey that the building was literally disintegrating, the employee presented him with the concrete piece, on which he had written in blue felt-tip pen “Director.” Jim had noticed a netting that surrounded the top of the FBI building, believing it was some sort of security protection. No, the employee said: The netting was actually there to stop pieces of the building that broke off from braining passersby.

“The net was there to protect the public from us, not the reverse,” Jim later said.

Over those glasses of wine, Jim never brought up the Clinton email investigation, and Patrice knew not to ask, even as she could see in the media that pressure was building on the FBI and her husband. In his three decades working in law enforcement, without mentioning a word to her, Jim had indicted celebrities and gangsters, signed off on controversial government surveillance programs designed to catch terrorists, and deployed FBI agents on clandestine missions. Even when he had a showdown a decade earlier with Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush over a constitutionally dubious eavesdropping tool, and threatened to resign, he said little to his wife. This forced Patrice to go around Jim to his security detail to piece together clues about what her own husband was dealing with as he confronted a crisis in his career.

Despite avoiding the topic of the Clinton investigation, both Jim and Patrice were closely watching it unfold under the same roof but from vastly different vantage points, demonstrating their divergent views of politics. To her, politics was a good thing, a means to promote social progress. A lifelong Democrat, Patrice followed the news of the investigation through the lens of an enthusiastic partisan, rooting for the election of the first woman president. She admired Clinton and hoped that the Democratic candidate would soon be cleared by the investigation and on her way to the White House.