Ball of Collusion

The investigation into Clinton's emails ended not with a bang but with a press conference. In July 2016, FBI Director James Comey stood before cameras and delivered a curious two-part verdict: Clinton and her staff had been extremely careless with classified material — and no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges. McCarthy fixes on the strangeness of that combination. The FBI does not, as a rule, announce whom it has declined to charge, still less deliver a public scolding of the person it is clearing. And the charging decision belongs to the Justice Department, not to the Bureau's director.

His deeper objection is procedural. Comey's own draft statement, it later emerged, had originally used the phrase gross negligence — the exact language of the criminal statute — before it was edited down to extremely careless, a formulation that carries no legal weight. McCarthy reads that edit as the tell. To find gross negligence would have been to find a crime; to say extremely careless was to describe the same conduct while defining it out of existence. The verdict, in his telling, had been reverse-engineered from the desired outcome.

With Clinton comfortably ahead in the polls, McCarthy argues, a faction of intelligence and law-enforcement officials began worrying about the unlikely alternative — and decided they needed protection against it. The phrase he seizes on came from an FBI text message about wanting an insurance policy in the improbable event of a Trump win. Around that phrase he builds his account of how a counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign came to exist at all.

Its foundation was the dossier: a collection of memos alleging deep Trump-Russia ties, compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. McCarthy is careful to trace the money. The research was ultimately paid for, through a chain of law firms and opposition-research shops, by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. A document funded by one candidate to damage another was, he stresses, the seed of a federal probe into that other candidate — a fact its consumers inside the government understood.

Step back from the particulars and Ball of Collusion becomes a book about neutrality — specifically, about what happens when the institutions charged with being neutral decide they cannot afford to be. McCarthy's central claim is not merely that individuals behaved badly. It is that the FBI, the Justice Department and elements of the intelligence community allowed themselves to be pulled into the most divisive political contest in a generation, first on one side of it and then against its winner. The referee, in his metaphor, picked up a jersey.

The logic he attributes to them is almost reasonable from the inside. If you are genuinely convinced a candidate is a danger — to security, to the country, to the rule of law itself — then the ordinary rules of restraint can start to feel like negligence. Why sit on your hands when you alone can see the threat? McCarthy's answer is that this is precisely the temptation the rules exist to defeat. The power to investigate and surveil is trusted to these agencies only on the condition that they never turn it toward the political outcomes they personally prefer. Spend that trust once, and it does not easily come back.

By the time Ball of Collusion closes, its author has reversed the picture the country had been staring at. The collusion that mattered, in his telling, was not a conspiracy between a candidate and a foreign capital but an alignment much closer to home: a campaign, an administration and the agencies beneath them, moving in the same direction at the same time. The dossier, the exoneration, the warrants and the leaks are not, for McCarthy, separate scandals. They are chapters of a single story about power protecting the outcome it wanted.