The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

On July 14, barely a month after Mr. Patel told millions of podcast listeners about a supposed vault of dirty secrets, Todd Gilbert became the interim U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Hours after he was sworn in, Mr. Gilbert got a phone call from Mr. Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new U.S. attorney was told by Mr. Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.

Mr. Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of F.B.I. headquarters.

Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Mr. Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James B. Comey, who was the F.B.I. director at the time, and John O. Brennan, who had been the C.I.A. director. Mr. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.

His call to Mr. Gilbert was unusual. F.B.I. directors do not typically assign U.S. attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Va. It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a U.S. attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

But the administration had good reason to think of Mr. Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s G.O.P. leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become the U.S. attorney.

The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Mr. Comey and his allies had concocted the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Mr. Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.

To Mr. Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials.

To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein’s monster — a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life.

From the start, F.B.I. leadership wanted near-daily updates on the case — a level of attention usually reserved for national crises. The Virginia prosecutors were confused why the case received so much interest from Mr. Patel and so little from their actual boss, the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who had been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.

Mr. Gilbert tried repeatedly to get advice and instruction from Mr. Blanche, even driving to Washington unannounced to try to speak to him. Instead, one of Mr. Blanche’s deputies, Aakash Singh, urged Mr. Gilbert to pursue the case aggressively. But Mr. Singh did not address many of Mr. Gilbert’s legal and factual questions. One senior Justice Department official said Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Blanche eventually did speak about the case.

Mr. Gilbert’s team decided that the law gave his office jurisdiction over only one of the issues Mr. Patel had directed him to investigate — whether the documents in the burn bags had been mishandled as part of a criminal scheme to hide them.

The other two prongs he was assigned — whether Mr. Comey had lied in congressional testimony in 2020 about leaks and Russia-related intelligence, and whether Mr. Brennan had lied to Congress about a 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference that referenced a dossier compiled by a former British spy — had no legitimate venue in western Virginia, they concluded.

Mr. Gilbert angered the administration by resisting pressure to impanel a grand jury to investigate the burn bag case, since he and his team did not believe there was yet a sufficient factual basis for that step.

A related disagreement over personnel assignments in his office also hurt his standing. In mid-August, Sergio Gor, a powerful White House official, called Glenn Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican governor, and told him that Mr. Gilbert was going to be fired and that the governor should not try to stop it.

Mr. Gilbert lasted just 37 days as a U.S. attorney. After his departure, prosecutors in his office wrote a lengthy legal analysis, called a declination memo, detailing why no criminal charges were warranted in the burn bag case. The senior F.B.I. agent on the investigation endorsed the memo’s conclusions.

At that point, a number of current and former law enforcement officials concluded that the administration had embarked on a new kind of fishing expedition — not for dirt on the people they did not like, but to find a prosecutor willing to file charges based on the threadbare evidence they already had.

How the Drive to Find a Conspiracy Against Trump Rocked the Justice Dept.