Episode transcript: Revisiting the 2016 ‘October Surprise’ Tuesday, September 29, 2020 - Devlin Barrett - WP
Episode transcript
Revisiting the 2016 ‘October Surprise’
���Martine Powers:From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is "Post Reports." I'm Martine Powers. It's Tuesday, September 29th. Today, the story behind the FBI's October Surprise. The cost of ordering online. And one more thing.
Devlin Barrett:October Surprise basically means a last-minute revelation that might scramble the race, change the polling numbers, and give the candidate very little time to react or adjust to whatever the revelation is.
Henry Kissinger:We believe that peace is at hand.
Bill Clinton:Today's disclosure that President Bush knew and approved of the arms for hostages deal with Iran not only directly contradicts the president's claims, it diminishes the credibility of the presidency.
George W. Bush:Obviously, there's a report out tonight that 24 years ago, I was apprehended in Kennebunkport, Maine, for a D.U.I. I think that's an interesting question -- Why now, four days before an election?
Reporter:Governor...
Devlin Barrett:My name is Devlin Barrett, and I cover the FBI and Justice Department for The Washington Post.
Martine Powers:In the last few decades, it seems like, almost without fail, something insane happened just weeks or even days before the election.
Devlin Barrett:Right. And then you get to 2016.
Hillary Clinton:I have now seen Director Comey's letter to Congress. We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes.
Martine Powers:Devlin has been working on a new book about what you might call the mother of all October Surprises.
Devlin Barrett:On October 28th, 11 days before the election, the FBI director at the time, James Comey, announced that he was reopening the Clinton e-mail investigation because of e-mails found. Although he didn't say it at the time, they were found on a laptop belonging to the former congressman Anthony Weiner.
Donald Trump:The FBI has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new e-mails pertaining to the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's investigation.
Devlin Barrett:So, the FBI investigation of her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state had really dogged and shadowed and just hung over her campaign all through her bid for the president in 2016. But then, in July, the FBI director publicly announced that he was shutting down the investigation because they had not found enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime. So, in October, by the time you get to October, everyone thinks the e-mail investigation is basically dead, as far as the FBI is concerned, but this suddenly opens it back up, and there's suddenly this prospect of, "Well, wait. Maybe the Democratic candidate for president really is in legal trouble." And what you saw in the polling, she was leading by about 6 percentage points before that letter, and after the letter, she was leading by about 3. Now, 3 is still a lead, right? But the challenge of a 3-point lead is that a 3-point lead is basically within the margin of error, meaning she is no longer in a comfortable position, particularly when it comes to the battleground states that were going to decide that election.
Martine Powers:So, why did you decide to go back to this moment and understand more of what was going on behind the scenes?
Devlin Barrett:You know, I have covered the FBI and the Justice Department for a long time and I just have never seen anything like what happened in 2016. And I think, frankly, most FBI and DOJ reporters would say the same, that the sequence of events that occurred in 2016 was just so unusual for the FBI and for the Justice Department. And I really felt that as much as people argued about it, as much as people agreed that the FBI's role was important, I often felt, as a reporter who covers this topic, that a lot of people didn't necessarily understand how it had gone down inside the FBI. I think it's important for people to understand what did and didn't happen inside the FBI that year, because I think, in a lot of ways, both the country and the FBI are still dealing with the consequences of Comey's decision.
Martine Powers:Hmm. So, where does that story start, this untold story of how this part of the investigation ended up coming out just days before the election?
Devlin Barrett:So, what happens is that in July of 2016, the FBI director announces, at a press conference, that he's closing the Clinton e-mail investigation.
James Comey:Good morning.
Devlin Barrett:That's obviously a big moment for both campaigns.
James Comey:We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.
Devlin Barrett:And then, in September of 2016, an FBI special agent named John Robertson is working on sex crimes in New York, and he gets the Anthony Weiner case. And the Anthony Weiner case is basically investigating whether this former congressman broke any laws by sending sexual messages to a 15-year-old girl in another state. But he comes across what seemed to him to be like huge volumes of e-mails to and from Hillary Clinton. And that's because Anthony Weiner was married to a woman named Huma Abedin. And Huma Abedin is one of Hillary Clinton's longtime close aides. Her in-box had basically been downloaded onto Anthony Weiner's laptop. The agent finds these e-mails on this laptop, knows that's not what his search warrant tells him to look for, but also knows that this could be a huge potential problem.
Martine Powers:So, then what does he do?
Devlin Barrett:So, he does what most agents would do, which is tell his boss, and he sort of expects that to create a huge, you know, commotion inside the FBI and that people will respond quickly and start investigating this. Instead, what happens is total silence. And it's total silence, but with some added complications, in that one of his bosses orders him to wipe his workstation while he's still waiting to hear back what they want to do about all these Clinton e-mails.
Martine Powers:Why do they ask for him to do that?
Devlin Barrett:The boss's argument was, "Look, we know that there are some classified material among Clinton's e-mails." Just generally speaking, that was what the old investigation had found. "You, Agent John Robertson, shouldn't be holding on to any classified material, so I just want you to wipe your workstation." That's a reasonable, I guess, logical way to approach things, unless you're John Robertson, because, at that point, the special agent starts thinking, "Well, what happens when someone asks me what I did with these files? Because I won't be able to show them, because my workstation will have been wiped. I mean, I can tell them, and hopefully they'll take my word for it, but do I know that?" So he starts worrying, if this becomes a political problem for the FBI down the road, it will just be him that takes the blame.
Martine Powers:So, then what does he do next?
Devlin Barrett:He starts talking about like, "Maybe I should go tell someone. I mean, if my own chain of command won't tell anyone, maybe I need to tell someone outside about what's happening so that someone will do something." And at that point, the prosecutors get alarmed. They worry that he's, you know, contemplating taking steps that would blow up his career. The two prosecutors take the issue to their boss and say, "Look, this agent seems to be really unhappy and really upset and really concerned. So I think we should raise this with folks in Washington and see what's going on," which they do. And while the agent doesn't really know this for a little while, that actually breaks a sort of bureaucratic inertia that was going on in this before. So then things start moving.
Martine Powers:And how do they start moving?
Devlin Barrett:The FBI in Washington starts asking questions and starts trying to figure out, "Okay, what do we need to do to look at these e-mails, because they were obtained for a different investigation." And, so, they brief the FBI director, James Comey, about what they think is on the laptop. And James Comey makes two decisions which are hugely important to the election. One is that he decides, "Yeah, we need to reopen this investigation." And, in some ways, more importantly, two, he decides, "We need to tell Congress right away that we're reopening this investigation."
Martine Powers:And, so, he's thinking at this time -- or at least what we know of his thinking at this time -- is that he feels like he needs to tell Congress because he doesn't want it to appear that he's sitting on this information or trying to prevent it from coming out that they are looking at the Clinton e-mails again.
Devlin Barrett:Right. At that point, the FBI starts worrying about, "What will people say about us if they find out that we knew this and didn't say anything before the election? Will we, the FBI, be accused of helping Hillary Clinton get elected?" And that was a very alarming prospect to Comey and the others in the room. Importantly, the prospect they didn't consider was whether or not Trump could win. They really didn't think there was much chance of Trump winning the election. They didn't believe that was -- there was much risk of that. But Comey also felt like, "Well, you know, we really shouldn't consider who might win. We should just not consider possible outcomes." But, obviously, a decision like this, an issue like this is going to have some effect on the outcome.
Martine Powers:So, looking at this timeline in its totality, what do you think is the part that something could have gone differently that would have changed the outcome of what Comey decided to do and what the ramifications were for reopening this investigation?
Devlin Barrett:So, in the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" category, the most obvious one is when Special Agent Robertson first raises this question in late September of 2016, if they had just done the investigative steps that they ended up doing instead in late October, they would have had their answer in early October, maybe the first or second week of October, and they would have known at that point, "Oh, well, you know what? We found some new e-mails, but they don't really change our understanding of anything." And at that point, in theory, even if you made an announcement, it probably would not have been that seismic, because what you would really be doing is saying, "Yeah, we found something new, we looked at it, but it turned out not to be much of anything." I'm not saying that would be a nothing announcement, but it would not be the sort of earthquake that hit the election 11 days out.
Martine Powers:So, now that we have a better picture of what was happening behind the scenes that created the circumstances the way that they did, what do you think is the lesson that's learned from here or, like, the takeaway of what was really the thing that went wrong here?
Devlin Barrett:One person has described Comey's letter as essentially opening Pandora's box, because what it really did was, it really showed how much of an effect the FBI and the Justice Department can have on an election if they choose to do something in late October. And what a lot of folks have been trying to figure out is, "How do you go back to a place where government agencies, especially one like the Justice Department or like the FBI, are just not that central in political campaigns, are just not playing such a front-and-center role?" And that is what a lot of senior officials have spent a good chunk of this year trying to do, trying to keep the FBI essentially out of the election this year. But one of the challenges is, because of the events of 2016, a lot of folks are trying to draw them into it and sort of re-create another October Surprise if they can. I think the bureau is trying very hard to get out of the way of the election. But the larger issue is that, you know, once you inject this level of sort of partisan suspicion and expectation almost of an October Surprise, those things can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you let them. And so I think there's a lot of folks who are bracing for some kind of October Surprise, not really knowing if it's going to happen or not, but just essentially still wary of what happened in 2016.
Martine Powers:Devlin Barrett covers the FBI and the Justice Department for The Post. His new book is out now. It's called "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election."
Abha Bhattarai:When the shutdown started in March, we saw a massive increase in online orders.
Robyn Smith:We were unprepared, I would say, because of the volume that was to come.
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