Crossfire Hurricane by Josh Campbell

Author:Josh Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-11T20:54:43+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Witch Hunt

The Mueller investigation posed an existential threat to the White

House the moment it began. It marked a turning point in the presidency

of Donald Trump. For the first time in the history of the country, the US

Department of Justice had established a special team to independently

investigate whether people associated with a sitting commander in chief

had col uded with a hostile foreign government to win an election. Robert

Mueller had not only inherited the FBI’s legacy Trump campaign investi-

gation, but also the part that dealt with whether Trump himself posed a

national security threat. Mueller may now be a household name, but it is

important to remember just how unprecedented it was at the time to have

government investigators assigned to determine whether a president and

his associates had conspired with a foreign adversary.

From the very beginning, Trump made no secret of his disdain for the

Mueller team. Where more strategical y adept politicians might have seen it

as advantageous to insist publicly that a thorough investigation would ulti-

mately prove their innocence, Trump took a different approach. He kicked

his campaign of attack against the FBI and the intelligence community into

high gear. “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American

history!” Trump tweeted the day after Mueller was appointed, bulldozing

any quiet confidence the White House might have wanted to project. The

gloves were off.

The phrase “witch hunt” was one the president would promote early and

often. As someone more comfortable on offense rather than defense, he had

apparently made the calculation that declaring victimhood and trashing

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Josh Campbell

the Justice Department would be personal y and political y helpful, even if

it meant the wholesale destruction of the reputations of thousands of public

servants who had dedicated their careers to finding the truth. All he had

to do was convince a large enough segment of the population that he was

being targeted by corrupt and out-of-control law enforcement officers. In

doing so, he may have figured, he might also convince them that whatever

Mueller’s investigators unearthed was also manufactured by people out to

get him.

From our vantage point inside DOJ and the FBI, Trump’s motives were

transparent. Anyone who has worked a criminal investigation knows that

guilty defendants often attack the government when their chips are down.

The problem here was that Trump was not just any ordinary potential

defendant. He was the most powerful person in the world, whose every

utterance was amplified many times over. I had countless conversations

with senior FBI leaders and buddies in the field, who all expressed grave

concerns at what Trump’s relentless campaign of attack might do to the

agency’s ability to secure public trust in other investigations. With each new

attack, even many of the most stridently conservative FBI agents I knew

began shifting from a place of frustration to one of building anger.

Despite the president’s bluster, however, Mueller had begun to quietly

assemble an armada of experts with a diverse array of investigative spe-

cialties. He needed prosecutors, special agents, intelligence analysts, and

forensic accountants to work the case, not to mention a host of security and

IT specialists to get the operation up and running. Apart from the members

of the team

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