Fear: Trump in the White House

“I don’t believe in human sources,” Trump replied. “These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country.” He wasn’t buying. “I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies.”

This remark caused Brennan, whose CIA relied almost entirely on human sources, later to remark, “I guess I won’t tell the employees about that.”

This has also not been previously reported: The CIA believed they had at least six human sources supporting this finding. One person with access to the full top secret report later told me he believed that only two were solid.

Trump asked if there was anything more.

“Well, yes, there is some additional sensitive material,” Clapper said.

Do you want us to stay or do this alone? Priebus asked Trump.

Comey suggested, “I was thinking the two of us.”

“Just the two of us,” Trump agreed.

Though he could play the tough G-man, Comey somewhat soft-pedaled the summary he had. He explained that there was a dossier with allegations. He was passing it on. It was out there; he didn’t want the president-elect to be blindsided because it was in wide circulation, and certainly it, or parts of it, would surface in the media.

The dossier alleged that Trump had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and the Russians had filmed it. Comey did not mention the allegation in the dossier that Trump had prostitutes urinate on each other on the bed President Obama and Michelle Obama had once used.

Comey later wrote, “I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material. This whole thing was weird enough. As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia.”

Trump denied the allegations. Did he seem like a guy who needed prostitutes?

In A Higher Loyalty, Comey wrote, “The FBI was not currently investigating him. This was literally true. We did not have a counterintelligence case file open on him. We really didn’t care if he had cavorted with hookers in Moscow, so long as the Russians weren’t trying to coerce him in some way.”

This is what Comey wrote about how he conveyed this message to Trump at the end of their private meeting: “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.”

The private meeting lasted five minutes.

Trump later told his attorney that he felt shaken down by Comey with the presentation about the alleged prostitutes in Moscow. “I’ve got enough problems with Melania and girlfriends and all that. I don’t need any more. I can’t have Melania hearing about that.”

After the briefing Trump released a statement calling the briefing “constructive,” but he was clearly unswayed by the impact. Attempts by “Russia, China, other countries” to interfere had had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.”

Four days later, January 10, BuzzFeed published the 35-page dossier online.

This was when I read the document. On page 27, it said, “Two knowledgeable St. Petersburg sources claim Republican candidate TRUMP has paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities there but key witnesses silenced and evidence hard to obtain.”

It added, “all direct witnesses to this recently had been ‘silenced’ i.e. bribed or coerced to disappear.”

It made clear there was apparently no path to seek verification.

I was surprised, not at the allegations, which might be true, but that the intelligence chiefs, particularly the FBI director, would present any of this to Trump.

The core of their presentation on January 6 had been the intelligence community’s assessment on Russian election interference. It was a report they felt was one of the most important, well-documented, convincing assessments by the intelligence community in recent times. In Facts and Fears, Clapper called it “a landmark product—among the most important ever produced by U.S. intelligence.” The CIA, NSA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies had invested heavily in the intelligence gathering. They had also taken a risk by putting so much sensitive information in one report that could leak or be described.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Comey had introduced the dossier as if to say, by the way, here is this scurrilous, unverified, unsupported footnote with some of the ugliest allegations against you.

They wanted the formal assessment to be believed by the president-elect. Why pollute it with the dossier summary? They knew enough about Trump to know it would rile him up. It likely would have riled anyone up. Why would they accompany some of their most serious work with this unverified dossier?