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Some parts of the bureau had been looking into allegations of collusion between the campaign and Russia even before the investigation began.
But on July 31, the FBI started the process that led to a million leaks, enormous damage to candidate Trump, and then President-elect Trump, and then President Trump, the abuse of the government's secret surveillance court to wiretap a low-level Trump adviser, efforts to impeach the president, more leaks, media hysteria, and, finally, the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, who could not establish that collusion — he called it "conspiracy" or "coordination" — ever took place, much less that Trump or anyone associated with him was involved with it.
It was a multi-year wild goose chase. And it did incalculable damage to the country. Certainly, some portion of the distrust of the FBI that exists today is the direct result of the bureau's fruitless pursuit of Trump.
But you say: What about all those convictions and guilty pleas Mueller won? Manafort, Gates, Papadopoulos, Stone, and more. Remember: Those were mostly crimes of personal corruption, such as tax evasion, or process crimes, such as lying to investigators. Mueller never charged anyone with playing any role in any Trump-Russia plot because he could never establish that any such plot existed.
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For that, the FBI sacrificed its standards and reputation. It did appalling things. One of the worst examples: In the fall of 2016, it hired Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the sensational and false dossier on Trump.
Steele had, of course, been commissioned and paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
But then the FBI hired him to continue his partisan, anti-Trump digging for the U.S. government.
For anyone concerned about the ethics of law enforcement, it was an astonishing moment. As it turned out, the FBI had to back out of the deal when it became clear Steele was talking to the press in a desperate attempt to publicize his false charges before the election.
But then the FBI established a back channel to Steele and kept using his material anyway. The top FBI officials involved in the anti-Trump effort showed inexcusable bias. In August 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, the leader of Crossfire Hurricane, FBI official Peter Strzok, was texting with the woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair, fellow FBI official Lisa Page.
Page texted to Strzok, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right?" Strzok responded, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it." Strzok later testified, under oath, that he could not remember saying that. No recollection at all.
But no matter. The inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, concluded that the text messages between Strzok and Page "raised serious questions about the propriety of any investigative decisions in which Strzok and Page played a role." Indeed, they did.
In January 2017, the FBI's actions led to one of the most atrocious scenes in recent political history, or perhaps all political history. The nation's top intelligence chiefs, including FBI Director James Comey, went to Trump Tower to brief President-elect Trump on the results of what was known as the Intelligence Community Assessment, that is, the investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.
As the briefing ended, Comey asked to speak to Trump alone.
When it was just the two of them, Comey relayed to Trump the most salacious, destructive, and ridiculous story in the Steele dossier: The allegation that, in 2013, Russian intelligence recorded a video of Trump in a hotel room watching prostitutes perform a "golden showers" routine on a bed that had once been slept in by President Barack Obama.
The person who fed Steele the story later said he thought it was a joke, the kind of thing people talk about in bars.
But Comey, and other top intelligence officials, took it seriously, even though, at that very moment, FBI experts were failing in efforts to verify the dossier. No mind: Comey confronted Trump with it anyway.
Trump, taken aback, denied that it had ever happened. Finishing the meeting, Comey raced downstairs to a waiting FBI car, where he wrote down his version of the conversation as he traveled across town to report what he had learned to other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team.
Within days, the story was leaked to the media, which reacted with a fit of hysteria, and the entire dossier was published on the internet. The Trump presidency, which had not even begun yet, suffered irreparable damage. And it went on and on.
Now it has been five years. Has anyone learned anything? It's hard to say. The FBI spent years stonewalling congressional investigators looking into Crossfire Hurricane. Mueller tried to act as if the Steele dossier never existed. Many Democrats continued to maintain they were right about collusion all along, no matter what Mueller failed to find.
And now, many Republicans, Trump supporters, and some people who are simply fair-minded, are deeply suspicious of the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community. If you want an example of that, just look at their reaction to the Justice Department's investigation of the Capitol riot and the cases prosecutors have made against more than 500 suspects.
It doesn't take a very long memory to recall the FBI relying on entirely fabricated information in a politically charged investigation. Why trust them now?
That's the kind of harm the FBI did to itself in the Trump era. It has now been five years since a key date in that self-harm, the founding of Crossfire Hurricane. And it is not clear whether the FBI will ever fully repair its reputation.
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