The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

by Andrew G. McCabe

Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law. Every person in the United States, from a murderer to the president, is subject to the rule of law. This has been true since the founding of the country. Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself. Organized criminal networks from other countries target the United States. Hackers steal our data, violate our privacy, and undermine our institutions. Terrorists target the innocent. Dirty money corrupts business and politics. Our own government officials use the power of public office to undermine legal authority and to denigrate law enforcement.

More than twenty years later, my last days in the FBI were spent investigating the Russian government’s interference in our 2016 presidential election, possibly with the knowledge and

involvement of that election’s winning candidate. In between, I took part in the ongoing fight against terrorist threats: plots to bomb airplanes, subways, the Boston Marathon.

The FBI has always been the nemesis of criminals. Today, the FBI is under attack by the president of the United States. The president assails the FBI because he resents or fears the Bureau’s independence, its fairness, it...

In 1993, McCABE received his J.D. from Washington University School of Law, in St. Louis, Missouri. Several professors at Washington University described McCABE as an average student but also noted that he displayed a strong interest in criminal law. Two indicated they expected he would seek employment as a prosecutor following graduation. Washington University School of Law confirmed the details of McCABE’s attendance and graduation. McCABE passed the New Jersey and Pennsylvania bars in the fall of 1993.

He said that an interim director might be appointed during the administration’s search for a new director, but for now they wanted me to run the FBI. He said, The FBI is a wonderful institution, and we’re going to need you to continue to run it effectively and make sure the mission is accomplished.

The first was to communicate with people in the Bureau. I said, I should probably send out some sort of an announcement to our workforce.

Everything about the decision to fire Comey had come across as improvised and slapdash. I walked back into the deputy director’s conference room. The people at the meeting I had left were still sitting there. Obviously they knew what had happened. They looked at me. The expression on their faces said, What do we do now?

The firing of Jim Comey gave new urgency to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections—that interference was a fact, not a supposition—and into possible collusion by the Russians with the Trump campaign. Comey’s firing would lead directly to the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to oversee that investigation.

Resolute desk, built from the timbers of a nineteenth-century British vessel that American sailors had rescued from the Arctic ice and returned to Britain.

I was aware that Director Comey had told the president he was not under investigation.

Whose side are you on?

He was probing me, to find out whether I was on board with him or not. This was my loyalty test.

And the loyalty that was demanded was personal loyalty, not loyalty to an office or a set of ideals.

segue

hollow. I knew that he had been aware of me since 2016, when he referred to me in terms that were not flattering at all. My wife, Jill, had run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Virginia state senate back in 2015, and she had received money, as other candidates did, from the state Democratic Party and from a political action committee run by the Democratic governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s.

Your only problem is that one mistake you made. That thing with your wife. That one mistake.

Mike Pence always says something nice. Whatever else might be said about the vice president, I will say this: Every time I have met him, he has conducted himself as a gentleman. And manners count for a lot.

Force. As soon as I became part of my first squad—from the first day—I thought, I’m never leaving this.

FBI is the combined strength, knowledge, experience, and dedication of tens of thousands of people in five hundred offices across the country

and around the world. They serve in war zones and other hostile environments with partners from the Defense Department and the Department of Justice. They are men and women of every race, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation. They are agents, analysts, scientists, forensic accountants, medics, auto mechanics, bomb technicians, linguists, locksmiths, hackers, ballistics experts, security specialists, administrative specialists, and secretaries. Some of them fly, some of them go underwater, and some of them know how to drive very, very fast. More than a few of them could be making a lot of money in Silicon Valley.

As deputy director, I had the ability to put agents on any doorstep in America in about two hours.

But after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI’s number-one priority became preventing acts of terrorism in the United States or against Americans anywhere. The FBI’s fundamental mission has never changed: to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.

It’s not all hearts and flowers. We don’t always get everything

right. Many types of thought and action converge to serve the FBI’s main purpose: investigation.

investigations are predictable ...

in a way that is faithful to both aspects of investigation I mentioned above: exploratory and procedural, open-ended and exacting, driven by individual curiosity and executed to the institution’s strict legal standards.

the FBI’s investigative techniques; the way it gathers and presents intelligence; and the set of ironclad authorities on which FBI investigations are based.

understand what the FBI really does, and why it matters, so that the citizens of this country can join together for the common good, to protect our common interests and our common concerns against very real and rising threats by those in foreign governments, and in our own, who intend to unravel the rule of law in the United States.

The president has compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany.

When the president of the United States attacks the intelligence community and demeans the people who have been charged with keeping the country safe—and when he embraces conspiracy

theories that politicize the FBI’s most critical work—it has a direct impact on our ability to collect, analyze, and present intelligence that is essential to the security of the United States.

The FBI must perform a balancing act. To keep the American people safe, the FBI must be independent of the White House. At the same time, it must maintain a close functional relationship with the White House. Since the start of the Trump administration, that relationship has been in profound jeopardy. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered the...

This is the record of a conversation: people whose job it is to enforce the law actually sitting down and talking with people suspected of breaking the law, or with witnesses to a crime, or with victims of a crime, or with those who simply might have some relevant information.

worked from then on with a sense that something was calling me to service, even as it gradually dawned on me that this job would entail risk and the sacrifice of much more than money.

Phase One was a series of standardized exercises meant to evaluate your intelligence and computational skills. It also included a personality evaluation. If you made it through Phase One, you would be recontacted by your field office and asked to submit an FD-140—an official Application for Employment in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Every FBI employee, by virtue of being an employee in good standing, holds a top secret (or “TS”) clearance. A TS clearance requires passing a stringent background investigation and polygraph examination.

Then the classes started, covering the law and techniques of investigation: how to conduct an interview; how to write up a 302; how to handle all the different kinds of documents an agent has to handle; how to dust for fingerprints. The difference between the valedictorian and the person who came in second in our class was a wrong answer on a single fingerprint ID question on a single test. Our forensics teacher was one of the agents who had searched the cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.”

Agents get a full-on physical education. Taking people into custody, defensive maneuvers, hand-to-hand combat. Everybody does some boxing. Everybody learns to clear a room. Everybody learns how to plan an arrest and how to make an arrest. An agent learns how to do all these things in many kinds of environments where you can imagine an arrest being made. A

restaurant, a bar, a bank, a trailer park, a motel, a school. Those environments are packed into the most famous part of the campus at Quantico—Hogan’s Alley, a fake town, a full-sized replica community made up of all the kinds of places I just mentioned, and more, populated and run by character actors who live nearby. Every special agent in training learns th...

firearms. Some in our class had never fired a gun before. Some had been marksmen in the military. No matter what their past experience, agents in training all start at the same level, learning the basic nomenclature, how to break a weapon down, and what every part and piece is called and how they work together. On the firing range, they learn sight alignment and trigger control. ...

Prioritizing obedience to process could create a type of groupthink that stifles creativity, independence, and critical thinking.

bureaucratic. It is a law-enforcement agency. It is paramilitary in nature. It also depends for its success on keeping records. It is run according to a clear and distinct chain of command. So there is a set of very basic concepts that lead to an understanding of where you stand in this big organization.

If you’re not early, you’re late.

Make it work.

That polo shirt was a symbol of dedication. It announced your priorities.

Hard conversations like these teach agents to articulate every decision they make. A decision that you can’t articulate is probably a wrong decision.

would spend the first ten years of my career focused on cases that grew out of two interlocking narratives: the evolution of organized crime in Russia and the export of Russian organized crime to the United States.

Russian organized crime today has deep ties to the Russian government. It saturates the internet. As most people are aware, the combination of crime, computers, and the Kremlin has in recent years taken aim at electoral politics—at American democracy itself.

jacked up tensions between President Bill Clinton and FBI Director Louis Freeh.