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

by Andrew G. McCabe

Briefers know this country’s most sensitive intelligence as well as or better than anyone else. When people left that role, I always tried to steer them into jobs in counterterrorism or counterintelligence.

He was focused on the work in the way you’d expect a good attorney to be. I also never thought of Holder as someone I needed to educate or for whom I needed to provide background information. He had been acting attorney general under George W. Bush, deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia before any of that. Also, he was firmly in charge as attorney general when I started briefing him, which would not be the case years later when I briefed President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

Holder made lots of decisions I disagreed with. Fine. The ball bounces. But I admired his generosity, his sense of responsibility, his magnanimity, and his intelligence.

Florsheims

Cole caught me for a second and said, You know, I did not agree with you today, but I respect the way you advocate for your position, and I thank you for that.

Loretta Lynch is gracious and considerate. She comports herself in a way that is controlled at all times. She speaks in the measured tones of an NPR broadcast:

positive but not peppy, concerned but not angry. I

never went into a meeting with her afraid of what I was going to hear. Edges, though, are useful for a leader. It’s okay for a leader to have limits that others do not want to test. That can be motivating. Lynch seemed to loathe conflict. Oftentimes she and her people would have little to say in the President’s Daily Brief. We had a run of very intense counterterrorism events in 2016 and 2017 when Lynch was attorney general, and I don’t remember her asking many specific questions. Sometimes I wondered if she spent...

Sessions changed the venue for the Bureau’s meetings. He asked that instead of holding them in the Hoover building, we come over to the Justice Department’s operations center in the Robert F. Kennedy building, where his own office was.

attorney general of Alabama for two years and U.S. attorney for Alabama’s southern district from 1981 to 1993.

The National Security Division was not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye when he was a U.S. attorney. (The National Security Division of the Justice Department was created by the USA Patriot Act, in 2005.)

Sessions had never received the PDB.

he needed to be able to register at a glance the author, source, and subject. It’s not hard to learn to read those documents. But it is a skill. And it was all the more important to learn the shape of this information because the substance was largely unfamiliar to him, too.

Sessions believed that Islam—inherently—advocated extremism. The director tried to explain that the reality was more complicated. Talking about religion was Comey’s way of trying to connect with Sessions on terrain familiar to them both.

Leading the Justice Department is one of the biggest responsibilities a person can have in this country. Getting up to speed on intelligence, and categorizing it properly in memory, is a basic part of the job. Sessions did not compartmentalize the new knowledge he acquired.

He would say, I saw in the paper the other day … and then would repeat an item that we had briefed him on a few days e...

Sessions was confusing classified intelligence with news clips. It was an early sign that this transition would be m...

observed him to have trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues, none of which directly concerned national security. He seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement. He also seemed to have little interest in the expertise and arguments that others brought to the meetings, or in some long-standing commitments by Justice and the Bureau. I observed his staff to be somewhat afraid of him—reluctant to voice opinions because they did not want to make him angry.

major interest in any given topic tended to be the immigration angle, even when there was no immigration angle. Before disruptions of U.S.-based counterterrorism cases, we would brief him. Almost invariably, he asked the same question about the suspect: Where’s he from? The vast majority of the suspects are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.

In February 2017, less than a month after he was sworn in as attorney general, Sessions began sending requests for the FBI to analyze our counterterrorism cases through the immigration lens. This was the period when the Trump administration was revising the president’s first executive order on immigration, “Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals,” which had provoked

many legal actions and had resulted in a hold on the action by a federal judge. Sessions wanted answers to questions like these: How many counterterrorism cases did we have against immigrants? How many people from outside the country had we arrested?

FBI does not keep those statistics ...

It’s very hard to provide a true count in answer to a question like that. It is also incredibly labor-intensive to come up with an answer, even one that is inadequate or even wrong. It would require taking analysts who are working substantive issues and telling them, instead, to start counting the angels on the head of a pin.

apoplectic.

interdictions.

Trying to interest Sessions in matters that he was not predisposed to care about was a lost cause. One of those matters was the disappearance of Robert Levinson.

Sessions did not seem to see the importance. He asked, How much longer are we going to do this? How much money are we going to spend on this? Sessions questioned not only the search for Levinson; he questioned why the federal government bothered to search for other Americans detained or taken hostage overseas. The implication was that some of these people had it coming: If you traveled to Iran and then found yourself locked up, it was your own damn fault.

In recent history, though, when Americans have gone missing overseas, the federal government’s response has been guided by a broader set of values than cold expediency. We do not abandon people. We work to find them and bring them home, even if they have been irresponsible and stupid. We do everything possible to bring them home. We are in this together.

Many of Sessions’s questions were awkward. He would ask a question that was implicitly critical of the Department of Justice and look at those of us from the FBI expectantly, as if we could or s...

The difficulty of dealing with Sessions personally was compounded, I believe, by the political nature of the Department of Justice. Political, meaning staffed with officials who are appointed and are therefore cautious—not political as in partisan. When a new attorney general comes in, survival instincts are triggered. People try to figure out where they stand. No one wants to say anything controversial.

Another reason they were so quiet may have been that they weren’t reading the briefing material. Most people who received the PDB still got a hard copy, but by this time the attorney general and the deputy attorney general were receiving theirs on secure tablet computers. One day one of the briefers came to me, concerned, and said, I don’t know what to do about this—we keep getting the tablets back, and they haven’t been opened. The tablets were sent out with a passcode that had to be entered to get access to the briefing information. The machines kept logs of when they had been opened. The logs were empty.

More than that, it was demoralizing. The work of these briefings is important. The President’s Daily Brief is how the intelligence community joins in a communal understanding of what is most important to the national security of this country. To blow that off sends the wrong message.

Attorney General Sessions devoted to criminal matters, such as immigration and narcotics: very important things. But in time it became impossible to avoid the overwhelming evidence that the attorney general had little use for serious discussions of national security. And an attorney general can’t ignore that conversation. Engaging on counterterrorism is not optional.

President Trump appears not to

be paying attention, or not to care, or not to trust the intelligence community. Although it may be that both these men don’t understand the importance of this information or don’t understand how it is different from other information, it may also be that they do not appreciate the pains that are taken to acquire and process it.

On a briefing of such importance, it would be customary for the FBI director to attend, and at this time I was the acting director. There had been a lot of back-channel signs during the spring that the president and the administration saw me as a kind of enemy.

Briefings to any president are assiduously prepared, with oversight from the director as needed, and if the director is not present, the senior official in attendance comes back to the director to report. This is because, in normal circumstances, the president would provide direction—assign us a task, request more information, or ask questions that the director should be aware of.

the president talked nonstop. That day, North Korea was on the president’s mind. North Korea had recently conducted a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, potentially capable of striking the U.S.—Kim Jong-un had called the test a Fourth of July

But the president did not believe it had happened. The president thought it was a hoax. He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.

The current administration comes to everything—not just the FBI, but everything—with a mentality of, You’re with us or you’re against us. That’s incredibly corrosive to an organization responsible for protecting people’s liberty. The FBI has to be independent and guided only by the truth and the Constitution.

A functional relationship between the FBI and the White House is paradoxical, as Jim Comey told his senior leaders at the Bureau many times. Comey also tried to explain this to President Trump. He explained that some presidents tried to bring the attorney general and the FBI director close to the White House, believing this would protect them from the sort of problems that usually come from Justice.

A president needs the attorney general and the FBI director to be independent. He needs them to have the credibility that comes from that known independence. The FBI and Justice need to have the political independence to be honest brokers in all situations. Obama probably came closest to that ideal. The current administration is the furthest away—it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Proliferating terrorist groups and techniques made coordination of U.S. intelligence work even more important. Cooperation among the relevant agencies—staffed by individuals whose defining characteristics include reticence and skepticism and, on our worst days, paranoia—did not come naturally. Adapting to meet new threats, agencies had to cross red lines of their own. People stopped concentrating so much on protecting their lanes and started thinking about how to share resources and information.

He, like all directors after Hoover, fiercely guarded the FBI’s non-partisan integrity. Mueller protected the FBI from congressional partisanship by following the standard rules for dealing with radiation: minimize your exposure time, don’t get too close to the fissile material, keep something in between you and the danger. Time, distance, and shielding.

The only thing I saw members of Congress learning, during these early Benghazi briefings, was that the way to gain the upper hand in a confusing situation was to keep on repeating yourself, louder and louder, and never to listen, never to rest.

SIOC operates in a constant state of readiness. This is where the FBI coordinates federal responses to major incidents like the 9/11 attacks. Connected to the top secret computer network linking the White House with Defense and other agencies, SIOC also allows FBI officials to watch faraway events in real time, events such as the initial search of the Benghazi compound—via aerial surveillance assets over Libya.

Crisis learning happens only in relationship: by being part of the group whose job is to manage such urgent, gigantically intricate, high-stakes responses.

Authority was an important part of my experience as a special agent of the FBI. An orientation to authority is unfashionable. Many people see authority as inherently suspect, even alien to their experience.

It is a necessary element of meaningful civic life.

legitimate, contemplative authority, which serves as a pillar of any institution or community—authority exercised within a system built on respect and accountability. This kind of authority can deliver a warning. It can