On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.
Her term having ended 15 minutes before, Rice was technically back in private life, where private people have private email accounts — even notepads if they want to scratch out a reminder the old-fashioned way. Yet, for at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier, at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done “by the book.”
Funny, though: The “by the book” thing about contemporaneous memos is that they are, well, contemporaneous — made at or immediately after the event they undertake to memorialize. They’re written while things are as fresh as they will ever be in one’s mind, before subsequent events motivate the writer to spin a decision, rather than faithfully record it.
An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done.
The Trump–Russia Investigation as of January 5
January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.Just as significant: January 5 was the day before these same intelligence-community leaders would brief President-elect Trump on the same report.
Also on hand at the January 5 White House briefing were Vice President Joe Biden and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. According to Rice, immediately after the briefing, President Obama had his two top law-enforcement officials, Yates and Comey, linger for “a brief follow-on conversation” with the administration’s political leadership: Obama, Biden, and Rice.
Let’s think about what was going on at that moment. It had been just a few days since Obama imposed sanctions on Russia. In that connection, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, had contacted Trump’s designated national-security adviser, Michael Flynn. Obama-administration leadership despised Flynn, who (a) had been fired by Obama from his post as Defense Intelligence Agency chief; (b) had become a key Trump supporter and an intense critic of Obama’s foreign and national-security policy; and (c) was regarded by Yates and Comey as a possible criminal suspect — on the wayward theories that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak could smack of a corrupt quid pro quo deal to drop the sanctions and might violate the never-invoked, constitutionally dubious Logan Act.
What else was happening? The Justice Department and FBI had gone to the FISA court on October 21, 2016, for a warrant to spy on former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page. That warrant relied largely on the Steele dossier, which alleged a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin involving (a) a cyberespionage operation against the 2016 election, (b) corrupt negotiations regarding the sanctions, and (c) the Kremlin’s possession of “kompromat” that would enable the Putin regime to blackmail President-elect Trump.
Significantly, by the time of this January 6 meeting with Trump, the 90-day surveillance period under the FISA warrant would have had just a bit over two weeks left to run — it was set to expire just as Trump was to take office. (Reporting suggests that there may also have been a FISA warrant on Paul Manafort around this time.) The Obama administration was therefore confronting a deadline if the FISA warrant was to be renewed while Obama was still in power. The officials in the meeting would need to figure out how the investigation could continue despite the fact that its central focus, Trump, was about to be sworn in as president.
Obama had incredibly claimed that he never intervened in cases under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI. He was emphatic in an April 2016 interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace: “I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line and always have maintained it.” Ever the cheeky Obama, he made this claim while in the same breath arguing against indicting Hillary Clinton.
Obviously, if Obama was having a “follow-on conversation” with Yates and Comey, what it was following on was the briefing he’d just received about an investigation implicating the Trump campaign in Russian espionage. (As Comey’s March 20 House testimony would later elucidate, Russia’s interference in the election was always seen by law-enforcement officials as inseparable from suspected Trump-campaign collusion in that interference.) There would be no reason to have such a follow-on conversation unless Obama wanted an update on what his law-enforcement officials were doing.
Consequently, Rice’s “by the book” bunkum is transparent: Obama officials claimed to adhere to a book that forbade consultations between political leaders and investigators. But here they were consulting. So Rice tried to cover the tracks in her email: She revises history such that the consultation morphs into a mere friendly reminder that Obama wanted everything done by the book. He was certainly “not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective,” no siree.
We might counter that people who have lived “by the book” for eight years would not have to remind each other to go “by the book.” It would go without saying.
‘We Cannot Share Information Fully as It Relates to Russia’
Let’s move beyond “the book.” Far more important are the last paragraphs of Rice’s email. She recounted that “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”There follows a blacked-out paragraph, clearly redacted because it either is classified or would expose investigative information — no doubt, some of the information that “we cannot share fully.” Rice then closes with Obama’s instruction to Comey to inform Obama “if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”
That is what Rice’s email is really about: not sharing with the incoming Trump administration classified information about the Trump-Russia investigation, such as the basis for seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
I wonder if it was flagged, “DO NOT DELETE THIS ONE”
Mostly discussions about golf, grandkids and yoga. Yeah… that’s the ticket!
Of course. Because that’s what Obama would have done… er, DID.
I think that is being very generous. At the time of this meeting, Strzok, who interviewed Flynn, a major player in the “collusion” narrative, had determined Flynn did not lie, though we don’t know what was/is now on the 302 form. If Comey ever had serious suspicions of Trump, they should have either been dispelled by his meeting with Trump or cast in serious doubt. No, this was not a pursuit of legitimate suspicions; it was a fishing expedition intended to LOOK damaging.