At the start of 2017, Steele’s claims weren’t the only ones that could no longer be sustained. Another element of the anti-Trump case was also collapsing. We now know that by Wednesday, January 4, 2017, FBI agents had drafted an order closing the case on Trump’s national security adviser, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, after finding no evidence to support any charges against him. We know that they were ordered not to close the case by FBI leadership. And we know that according to notes taken by the FBI’s Peter Strzok around the time of a White House meeting the next day—Thursday, January 5, 2017—Comey knew there was nothing incriminating in Flynn’s recent telephone calls with the Russian ambassador.
Strzok’s notes also show Vice President Joe Biden raising the idea of using the Logan Act against General Flynn, essentially proposing a stunning abuse of power. The law, more than two centuries old, is never enforced because it is likely unconstitutional. It was enacted way back in 1799 after George Logan, a Pennsylvania physician and farmer, conducted his own personal diplomacy in an effort to broker a peace agreement between the United States and France. His political opponents in Washington drafted the law, which purported to make it a crime for a private citizen to communicate with a foreign government to influence its conduct in a dispute with the United States. It has long been recognized as a clear violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. This is why no one has ever been convicted of violating it. Even in its own time the law was widely viewed as a paranoid overreaction to Logan’s peace initiative. Pennsylvania issued its own verdict on the matter by electing Dr. Logan to the U.S. Senate in 1800, the year after the law’s enactment.
If Strzok’s notes are accurate, there’s no excuse for Biden’s conduct—suggesting an unconstitutional criminal prosecution of the incoming White House national security adviser on the grounds that he didn’t agree with the policies of the Obama administration. But the Logan Act abuse seems to have helped keep the Flynn investigation alive. The FBI ended up fooling General Flynn into having a discussion about his recent calls with the Russian ambassador without telling Flynn he was the target of an investigation. Comey would later brag that he probably wouldn’t have gotten away with sending FBI agents into the Flynn investigation in a more organized administration. The government then prosecuted Flynn, claiming that he lied in suggesting to the FBI that he hadn’t discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador, even though FBI agents said at the time they didn’t think he had lied.
In truth it was none of the FBI’s business what policies the incoming national security adviser chose to discuss with foreign officials. And the 2020 release of the call transcripts showed that Flynn appeared to be mainly discussing the expulsion of diplomatic personnel, not the sanctions that had been announced around the same time. The Justice Department dropped the charges in 2020.
But back on January 5, 2017, as Strzok’s records make clear, the FBI had no reason to investigate General Flynn and senior officials knew they had no reason to investigate him. By then the Steele dossier had also been exposed as unfounded gossip or worse. The collusion case was dead. What happened next may be viewed as FBI director James Comey converting the anti-Trump investigative campaign into an anti-Trump media campaign.
That same day Comey and the intelligence chiefs briefed President Obama on their assessment of Russian activities related to the 2016 U.S. elections. The next morning, January 6, 2017, the group briefed congressional leaders on the same subject and then in the afternoon visited Trump Tower in New York to share the assessment with the president-elect.
After the briefing, the intelligence chiefs left, but Comey stayed behind and told Trump about outlandish Steele tales involving alleged Trump sexual activities. Now, why would Comey choose that moment to share dubious Steele claims with the president-elect? Trump had been elected in early November. In the two months since, the FBI had found nothing to corroborate the stories and numerous reasons to doubt them. Do agencies typically withhold information from the president until they can be confident it’s false?
According to an email Comey sent to colleagues after the meeting, the material he described to Trump was “inflammatory stuff.” He added that a news organization “would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports.” The inspector general notes, “In testimony before Congress, Comey has described this part of his email as communicating that ‘it was salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating in some way.’ ” Comey told the IG “that he informed President-elect Trump that the FBI did not know whether the allegations were true or false and that the FBI was not investigating them.”17
This last part was false. The FBI had indeed been trying to confirm the Steele claims and found only reasons to doubt them. But Comey was being honest about one thing: he clearly understood that no responsible journalist would publish Steele’s unverified material unless there was some concrete government action justifying coverage—such as intelligence briefings to the president and president-elect.
Four days after Comey met with Trump, CNN reported that the intelligence assessment included the Steele rumors in the addendum. The same day, January 10, 2017, a website called BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith admitted the information was unverified but justified publication on the grounds that the material was the subject of discussion among government officials.18
CNN merely described the dossier without publishing it but the