By Leonid Bershidsky
JAMES Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee centered on his interactions with President Donald Trump. But, in case anyone has forgotten, the underlying issue being investigated is the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election campaign and the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and “the Russians.”
Though Comey wasn’t asked too many questions about it, and wasn’t willing to discuss the investigation itself in a public hearing, his remarks provided a useful, if somewhat disappointing, insight into the US intelligence community’s thinking on these matters.
Comey left no doubt he believed that Russia had meddled with the election: The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that.
Quizzed by Senator Richard Burr, Comey said he believed the Russian government was behind the cyber intrusions into the Democratic Party’s networks, the subsequent publication of the stolen data and the hacking of electronic voter rolls, revealed by a recent National Security Agency leak. He claimed Russia had conducted “a massive effort to target government and nongovernmental, near governmental agencies like nonprofits”—up to 1,000, or at any rate hundreds, of them. That, he said, was “a long-term practice” of Russian spies, only “stepped up a notch in a significant way in ‘16.”
At the same time, asked whether he was sure no votes cast in the election were altered, Comey said, “I’m confident.”
Comey confirmed that the FBI didn’t independently collect any evidence to connect Russia to the Democratic Party breaches. “We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work,” he said, almost certainly referring to Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company the Democratic National Committee had hired. That firm’s reports about the cyberattack, and other efforts to pin hacks on Russian intelligence services, haven’t always been convincing.
The senators didn’t choose to question that slippery bit of testimony or to ask Comey how he knew about the Russian targeting of hundreds of US organizations during the election. Some of them—above all, Democrats—appear to have decided to accept a Russian intelligence role in the hacks and leaks as fact.
While Burr, a Republican and chairman of the committee, referred to “possible” Russian interference, vice chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat, spoke as if that part of the investigation was already over: “We are here because a foreign adversary attacked us right here at home, plain and simple. Not by guns or missiles, but by foreign operatives seeking to hijack our most important democratic process, our presidential election. Russian spies engaged in a series of online cyber raids, and a broad campaign of disinformation, all ultimately aimed at sowing chaos to undermine public faith in our process, in our leadership, and ultimately in ourselves.”
Perhaps Democratic senators are satisfied with the classified evidence he’s been given, we just don’t know yet. In any case, they’re making no effort to educate the American public about precisely how Russia’s alleged interference occurred. That has been left to the media and their anonymous sources.
With that out of the way, all that remains for the investigation to establish is whether the Trump team colluded with the Russian government or its agents. On this point, Comey’s testimony held some unpleasant surprises for those who are already convinced that collusion occurred.
The ex-FBI chief made it clear he didn’t consider Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to be an intelligence officer—a claim that has been made about him by unnamed US officials quoted by various media outlets. Comey said it was not improper for an incoming national security adviser to be in touch with a foreign diplomat. He also said, twice, that a story in a February issue of The New York Times, headlined “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” and quoting unnamed officials, was gravely flawed. And he stated that closing the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak wouldn’t be likely to impede the overall investigation into Russian interference; the two investigations, he added, were “touching but separate.”
All of these statements, strewn throughout the testimony, paint an intriguing picture. At least while Comey was still the FBI director, investigators apparently didn’t see Flynn as a key figure in any putative Trump-Russia plot. Nor did they have much evidence of communications between Trump surrogates and Russian intelligence, otherwise Comey wouldn’t have denied a newspaper report that specifically talked about such communications. He has proved reluctant to discuss other newspaper reports.
Combined with Comey’s confirmation that, during his tenure, Trump himself wasn’t the subject of a counterintelligence investigation, this means the collusion part of the inquiry hasn’t turned up much of interest so far. Comey also revealed in his written testimony that Trump had told him he’d welcome any findings about members of his team, another indication that he’s confident that this particular line of investigation doesn’t lead back to him.
The lack of substance in the collusion narrative must be why the Comey hearing was so overwhelmingly centered on Trump’s alleged attempts to ensure the FBI chief’s loyalty and a respite for Flynn. The senators are happily looking under the spotlight of Comey’s memos about his meetings with Trump because it’s easier than digging around in the dark of the disappointing collusion inquiry.
As I feared, the investigation—at least the part of it that’s run by the Senate Intelligence Committee—appears to be losing its focus on the fundamental issue of whether Trump accepted Kremlin help in winning power. No matter how damning Comey’s testimony seems, the nature of the questions he was asked should be reassuring to Trump. If his enemies try to get him for anything less than cooperation with Russian spies, it will always look like just another polarizing, partisan attack rather than a serious effort to protect US national security against a hostile power.