Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia
WASHINGTON — For much of the summer, the F.B.I.
pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American
presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump,
looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures,
searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and
even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a
possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump
Organization to a Russian bank.
Law
enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have
found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian
government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and
intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the
presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
Hillary
Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny
of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these
investigations. In recent days they have also demanded that James B.
Comey, the director of the F.B.I., discuss them publicly, as he did last
week when he announced that a new batch of emails possibly connected to Mrs. Clinton had been discovered.
Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have argued that Mr. Trump’s evident affinity for Russia’s
president, Vladimir V. Putin — Mr. Trump has called him a great leader
and echoed his policies toward NATO, Ukraine and the war in Syria — and
the hacks of leading Democrats like John D. Podesta, the chairman of the
Clinton campaign, are clear indications that Russia has taken sides in
the presidential race and that voters should know what the F.B.I. has
found.
The
F.B.I.’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue, as does the
investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma
Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D.
Weiner. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters argue that voters have as much right
to know what the F.B.I. has found in Mr. Trump’s case, even if the
findings are not yet conclusive.
“You
do not hear the director talking about any other investigation he is
involved in,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York,
said after Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress was made public. “Is he
investigating the Trump Foundation? Is he looking into the Russians
hacking into all of our emails? Is he looking into and deciding what is
going on with regards to other allegations of the Trump Organization?”
Mr.
Comey would not even confirm the existence of any investigation of Mr.
Trump’s aides when asked during an appearance in September before
Congress. In the Obama administration’s internal deliberations over
identifying the Russians as the source of the hacks, Mr. Comey also
argued against doing so and succeeded in keeping the F.B.I.’s imprimatur
off the formal findings, a law enforcement official said. His stance
was first reported by CNBC.
Senator
Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, responded angrily on Sunday
with a letter accusing the F.B.I. of not being forthcoming about Mr.
Trump’s alleged ties with Moscow.
“It
has become clear that you possess explosive information about close
ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the
Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United
States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Mr. Reid wrote. “The
public has a right to know this information.”
F.B.I.
officials declined to comment on Monday. Intelligence officials have
said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections
between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them
to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian
government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have
said that Mr. Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has
emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political
circle directly to Russia’s election operations.
At
least one part of the investigation has involved Paul Manafort, Mr.
Trump’s campaign chairman for much of the year. Mr. Manafort, a veteran
Republican political strategist, has had extensive business ties in
Russia and other former Soviet states, especially Ukraine, where he
served as an adviser to that country’s ousted president, Viktor F.
Yanukovych.
But
the focus in that case was on Mr. Manafort’s ties with a kleptocratic
government in Ukraine — and whether he had declared the income in the
United States — and not necessarily on any Russian influence over Mr.
Trump’s campaign, one official said.
In
classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials
also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties
between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused
particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a
mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the
Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have
longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.
F.B.I.
officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of
activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs
obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent
more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s
computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in
the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an
innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer
contacts.
The
most serious part of the F.B.I.’s investigation has focused on the
computer hacks that the Obama administration now formally blames on
Russia. That investigation also involves numerous officials from the
intelligence agencies. Investigators, the officials said, have become
increasingly confident, based on the evidence they have uncovered, that
Russia’s direct goal is not to support the election of Mr. Trump, as
many Democrats have asserted, but rather to disrupt the integrity of the
political system and undermine America’s standing in the world more
broadly.
The
hacking, they said, reflected an intensification of spy-versus-spy
operations that never entirely abated after the Cold War but that have
become more aggressive in recent years as relations with Mr. Putin’s
Russia have soured.
A
senior intelligence official, who like the others spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing national security
investigation, said the Russians had become adept at exploiting computer
vulnerabilities created by the relative openness of and reliance on the
internet. Election officials in several states have reported what
appeared to be cyberintrusions from Russia, and while many doubt that an Election Day hack
could alter the outcome of the election, the F.B.I. agencies across the
government are on alert for potential disruptions that could wreak
havoc with the voting process itself.
“It
isn’t about the election,” a second senior official said, referring to
the aims of Russia’s interference. “It’s about a threat to democracy.”
The
investigation has treated it as a counterintelligence operation as much
as a criminal one, though agents are also focusing on whether anyone in
the United States was involved. The officials declined to discuss any
individual targets of the investigation, even when assured of anonymity.
As
has been the case with the investigation into Mrs. Clinton, the F.B.I.
has come under intense partisan political pressure — something the
bureau’s leaders have long sought to avoid. Supporters of both Mrs.
Clinton and Mr. Trump have been equally impassioned in calling for
investigations — and even in providing leads for investigators to
follow.
Mr.
Reid, in a letter to Mr. Comey in August, asserted that Mr. Trump’s
campaign “has employed a number of individuals with significant and
disturbing ties to the Russia and the Kremlin.” Although Mr. Reid cited
no evidence and offered no names explicitly, he clearly referred to one
of Mr. Trump’s earlier campaign advisers, Carter Page.
Mr.
Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker who founded an investment company
in New York, Global Energy Capital, drew attention during the summer for
a speech in which he criticized the United States and other Western
nations for a “hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization,
inequality, corruption and regime change” in Russia and other parts of
the former Soviet Union.
Mr.
Page responded with his own letter to Mr. Comey, denying wrongdoing and
calling Mr. Reid’s accusations “a witch hunt.” In an interview, he said
that he had never been contacted by the F.B.I. and that the accusations
were baseless and purely partisan because of his policy views on
Russia. “These people really seem to be grasping at straws,” he said.
Democrats
have also accused another Republican strategist and Trump confidant,
Roger Stone, of being a conduit between the Russian hackers and
WikiLeaks, which has published the emails of the Democratic National
Committee and Mr. Podesta, the Clinton campaign manager. Mr. Stone
boasted of having contacts with the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange,
and appeared to predict the hacking of Mr. Podesta’s account, though he
later denied having any prior knowledge.
Mr.
Stone derided the accusations and those raised by Michael J. Morell, a
former C.I.A. director and a Clinton supporter, who has called Mr. Trump
“an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” In an article
on the conservative news site Breitbart, Mr. Stone denied having links
to Russians and called the accusations “the new McCarthyism.”
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