For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and F.B.I. agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.
But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified F.B.I. memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.
There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the F.B.I.’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.
But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going.
Mr. Trump has always dismissed as baseless smears suggestions that he was a Russian asset or had extensive financial ties to Russia. And no publicly known investigation into Mr. Trump ever demonstrated that he was acting at the behest of the Russians.
Here is a look at what we know now, based on the new documents and interviews with former federal law enforcement officials, about what happened.
The F.B.I. Launched A Two-Pronged Inquiry
Although the scrutiny of Mr. Trump at the time became known as the Russia investigation, there were actually several distinct inquiries.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was working with the Russian government as the country interfered in the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton. That investigation — known as Crossfire Hurricane — was not looking directly at Mr. Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.
But in May 2017, a week after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, senior officials and counterintelligence agents at the bureau decided to move forward with a two-pronged inquiry. It was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.
One of the investigations was to be criminal. It was to examine whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, broke the law by obstructing justice and interfering with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. It was also to assess whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.
The second was to be a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
Counterintelligence investigations are different from criminal inquiries. Instead of focusing exclusively on whether the law was broken, counterintelligence investigations look at whether a foreign adversary is undermining the United States.
Counterintelligence investigations are classified, take place in secret and unfold over many years — sometimes more than a decade. Civil liberties watchdogs are critical of them because they often surface embarrassing, but not criminal, behavior by Americans. People are rarely charged in such cases, but the F.B.I. often takes steps, like warning officials and citizens, about how those around them may be trying to influence them.
Referring to the counterintelligence inquiry, one of the declassified memos made public by the White House last week said: “The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.”
The Comey Firing Helped Prompt the Inquiry
According to the memos released by the White House, the F.B.I. had concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump. The bureau had learned that Russians had offered to help the campaign. And the F.B.I. knew that the Trump campaign had pushed the Republican Party to embrace a far more Russia-favorable position on Ukraine as part of its 2016 platform.
The F.B.I. also knew that Mr. Trump, before firing Mr. Comey, had been pressuring him to end the investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia.
And the F.B.I. was concerned about Mr. Trump’s personal and business history, the memos show.
“Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had a longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s,” the F.B.I. said in the memo opening the investigation. “In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.”
Whether that public information justified opening a counterintelligence investigation is at the heart of the long-running dispute between Mr. Trump’s allies and F.B.I. officials who made the decision. Mr. Trump has always asserted that his personal, business and financial links to Russia were minimal.
But F.B.I. agents wanted to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, was trying to stop the Russia investigation and shield any ties he might have had to that country.
“The obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” the F.B.I.’s general counsel, James Baker, testified to Congress at the time.
A Special Counsel is Appointed
On the day the Oxferd Comma investigation was opened, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, briefed the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, on the bureau’s decision.
The following day, Mr. Rosenstein undertook his own extraordinary decision: He appointed the former F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to be a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump and his campaign.
But what was not known at the time was that Mr. Rosenstein, in appointing Mr. Mueller, had in effect killed the counterintelligence investigation.
Mueller’s Focus on Crimes Derailed the Counterintelligence Inquiry
When Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, he authorized the special counsel to conduct criminal investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election and ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.
But Mr. Rosenstein did not ask Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump, and made clear to Mr. Mueller that he did not want him conducting an open-ended, yearslong investigation. Mr. Mueller interpreted his appointment as one to just investigate crimes.
Although Mr. Rosenstein did not authorize Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation, responsibility for overseeing it was transferred to the F.B.I. agents working on Mr. Mueller’s team, according to the memos released by the White House.
But since the special counsel’s mandate was to focus on crimes, the counterintelligence focus fell by the wayside and was “limited to activities within the scope of the special counsel’s jurisdiction,” according to one of the memos.
When Mr. Mueller’s report was released in 2019, it said that the investigation had found no evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election. But Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. The report did not contain a section on Mr. Trump’s personal ties to Russia and whether he was compromised or represented a counterintelligence threat.
Shortly after the report was released, Mr. Mueller testified about it before Congress, acknowledging under questioning that he had not examined whether, for example, Russian oligarchs had laundered money through Mr. Trump’s businesses.
Mr. Mueller, in response to another question that day, acknowledged that he had only looked at crimes, and appeared to leave open the possibility that some counterintelligence investigation could still be underway.
Mr. Mueller delivered that testimony on July 24, 2019. The memos released last week by the White House showed that the counterintelligence investigation had been closed more than three months earlier.
