Fear: Trump in the White House

“You should read this,” Brennan told Clapper. The FBI already had a top secret counterintelligence investigation under way to see if there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. “This will add substantiation to what we are doing.” It was not proof, but it seemed to be on the same trail.

Clapper consulted with the FBI. How should we handle it with Trump?

The FBI was familiar with the document. Steele had shared portions of the dossier with them, and on December 9 Senator John McCain had shared a copy with FBI director Comey.

Andrew McCabe, the FBI deputy, was concerned. He thought if they failed to tell President-elect Trump about the dossier when they briefed him about the intelligence community report on Russia, it would make the FBI look as if they were back in the old days of J. Edgar Hoover—as if to say, we have dirt on people, and we’re keeping it to ourselves. Comey agreed. The Hoover legacy still cast a shadow over the bureau.

Clapper wanted to make sure they developed a consistent tradecraft model as they merged their intelligence into one report. The FBI and CIA have different standards.

The FBI conducts criminal investigations in addition to gathering intelligence. The bureau tends to be more rigorous in their sourcing and verification. What began as a pure counterintelligence investigation might morph into a criminal investigation, with intelligence becoming evidence that must stand up in court.

The CIA’s mission is to gather intelligence and disseminate it to the White House and the rest of the federal government. It does not have to be as solid because normally it would not be used in a criminal trial.

Just as the FBI was haunted by Hoover, the CIA had its own ghost. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA made a huge mistake. In part as a result of lies told by a key source—amazingly code-named “Curveball”—who claimed he had worked in a mobile chemical weapons lab in Iraq, the CIA had concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The case had been a “slam dunk,” according to a presentation CIA director George Tenet made to President George W. Bush. The alleged presence of WMD was the key justification for the Iraq invasion. No WMD were found, an acute embarrassment for the president and the CIA.

Clapper knew that mistake hung over much of what the CIA did and analyzed. One agency procedure was to polygraph sources as often as possible. While passing a lie detector test would never be considered complete proof, passing was a good barometer of truthfulness.

The sources that Steele used for his dossier had not been polygraphed, which made their information uncorroborated, and potentially suspect. But Brennan said the information was in line with their own sources, in which he had great confidence.

The dossier was in circulation among journalists, and Steele had given confidential off-the-record interviews to reporters. It had not yet been published.

On the second page it said: “According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

This was designed to obtain “ ‘kompromat’ (compromising material) on him,” according to the dossier.

It was a spectacular allegation. There was no available indication who Source D might be.

Since the FBI had the dossier, Comey said, he ought to present it to Trump after their core presentation of the intelligence community assessment. It would be an annex, virtually a footnote.

The 35 pages were reduced to a one-and-three-quarter-page summary that focused on the allegation of coordination between the Russians and the campaign.

Trump’s response to the growing chorus of news reports saying that the intelligence services had concluded Russia had interfered with the election was belligerence.

On December 9, Trump said those sounding alarm in the intelligence community were “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He later told Fox News, “They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody sitting in a bed some place.” He tweeted, “Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before the election?”