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

by Andrew G. McCabe

Every person in the United States, from a murderer to the president, is subject to the rule of law.

He said he was interested in Joe Lieberman—a great guy.

Let me state the proposition openly: The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president.

Then he made sure we had our professional liability insurance paid up.

There is no effective distinction, in Russia, between organized crime and government,

Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.

To prove the existence of a RICO enterprise, criminal investigators conduct surveillance, talk to witnesses, and target the group with human sources—the same techniques national-security investigators use to track a foreign adversary.

if the FBI finds out that someone who is definitely associated with a domestic political campaign has made a comment to a high-ranking government official from another country about possibly colluding with a foreign adversary in the course of that campaign, the FBI is obligated to look into that. The foreign counterintelligence implications of this information are obvious. The Bureau would be guilty of dereliction of duty if it did not open an investigation and look into the matter.

I floored it in the black Chevy Tahoe, tinted windows up, speeding into Manhattan. Bureau radio on, I listened to the chatter, tracking calls to rally—first at an intersection right next to the towers, then in Chinatown. The bridges were closed. When I got near the Triborough Bridge, the on-ramp was a parking lot. I drove on the shoulder, lights and sirens on, trying to maneuver around the cars, and there were orange construction barrels in the way. When the other drivers saw the lights and sirens, a bunch of them jumped out of their cars and started lifting the barrels out of the way so I could get through. When I made it up onto the bridge and drove across, my car was the only car on the bridge. It was like that scene in Vanilla Sky. Southbound on the FDR, again I was practically the only car on the road. By then the first tower had fallen. I took the right-hand exit at the Brooklyn Bridge, and I saw a crowd of people walking the other way on the FDR, away from downtown. They were all white, covered in dust. Not excited, not talking. Calm, dazed, a crowd of ghosts walking along.

would be fortunate to have a great deal of interaction with Mueller. He is not—and I think he would admit this, probably while feigning slight resistance for comic effect—Mr. Casual. He is not a charming communicator, the way Jim Comey can be. Mueller was a Marine lieutenant commanding a platoon in Vietnam. He achieves change through force of will.

Work in counterterrorism means you’re always at an elevated state of alert, and all personal plans, no matter how important, are subject to change.

Ali went back to England, paid cash to buy a little apartment, and started experimenting. He and his friends bought plastic bottles of a sports drink called Lucozade—a British version of Gatorade—and they worked on turning each one into a handheld bomb. They would drill a small hole through the plastic nub in the bottom of the bottle. They would let the liquid drain out from that hole. They would use a hypodermic needle to inject the empty bottle with explosive ingredients. Then they would seal the hole with epoxy. Properly assembled, each device was powerful enough to blow through the cabin wall of a commercial passenger jet.

There’s always a tension between the desire to keep collecting intelligence and the need to disrupt a plot before anyone gets hurt.

some analyst would observe that a shift in the wind had been recorded in Tajikistan at the precise moment when sixteen chickens in Alabama had simultaneously laid green speckled eggs, and then go on to suggest that the intersection of these events, in all likelihood, pointed to California

Working with the Brits, who have a more realistic risk tolerance, also helped a lot. They know their population includes extremists. They accept that fact.

4 Interrogation ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS, AND ASKING THE RIGHT WAY

The team immediately thought it might have found enough of the peroxide-based explosive TATP to take down the entire building. So on an already full day, Denver had to cordon off the area, lock down the apartment complex, evacuate the building, and bring in bomb-recovery personnel. It turned out that the bucket the agents had left in place contained … five gallons of flour.

Most suspects who decide not to talk on the day they’re arrested do talk eventually. And rapport building—the relationship-building process of getting to know suspects, breaking down their defenses positively, building trust—gets you higher-quality, better intelligence than scaring the hell out of them or beating them into telling you anything you want to hear to make the beating stop.

But when a president is incapable of listening, or at least unwilling to listen, to any voice but his own, how can the other participants in that conversation go on doing their jobs?

Though his manners were more informal than Mueller’s, Comey shared the previous director’s larger-than-life sense of rectitude. In their own times and their own ways, each had shown true courage in protecting the rule of law against the encroachment of politics.

They had to go back and review the old emails to try to figure out if the information was, in fact, theirs, and if it was, what was its classification status. As it turned out, none of the emails bore clear classification markings—headers, footers, or paragraph markings indicating confidential, secret, or top secret content. According to the inspector general’s report on Midyear, only a handful of emails bore paragraph markings indicating confidential content.

Did people know they were discussing classified matters in their unclassified email exchanges with Secretary Clinton?

Consistently, time and time again, what the team was finding was, No, we’re not finding much of anything here. No smoking gun. No sign of any vast conspiracy to trick the House committee, the State Department, or the American people. By March or April, we all knew in what direction the investigation was heading. It was clear to the whole team.

Had I thought this whole thing through more skeptically, had I been more resistant to Comey’s idea that he could make this statement in a way that connected with people both inside and outside the organization, had I made a more realistic appraisal of how many of those people would not have accepted anything short of seeing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs being dragged off to the Metropolitan Detention Center, then perhaps I would have said to Comey, Don’t do it.

Since Election Day, Trump and his associates had, on an almost daily basis, made decisions and statements that raised serious questions about his desire to faithfully execute the duties of president of the United States.

After Comey’s conversation with the president, he called me on the phone to tell me what Trump said. This was the moment when I realized that the president and his administration were not just inexperienced, not just unfamiliar with the established norms of democratic government. They wished to manipulate the functions of government mainly for their own interests.

The fact is, plenty of people in Washington are cowed already: such as the Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom believe that the president is unfit for office but are afraid to stand up to him.

Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on a criminal prosecution but to comment on one that potentially affects himself.

People don’t appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability.

During a fund-raising speech in Missouri, he revealed that he got into an argument with Justin Trudeau and started citing statistics to the Canadian prime minister he acknowledged he had just made up.

The president exposes himself as a deliberate liar, someone who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wishes. If he were on the box at Quantico, he would break the machine.

The president is trying to destroy what Americans have long assumed about who we are and how the justice system works.

There should be no direct contact between the president and the FBI director, according to the White House contacts policy, except for national-security purposes.

At what point is it appropriate to answer the president with a flat no? At what point is it appropriate to say to the president, Your perception is disconnected from reality?

How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact?

He went after the FBI, and continues to do so, because its work has led to more than thirty indictments—with more likely to come—of individuals associated with Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Donald Trump would not know the men and women of the FBI if he ran over them with the presidential limo, and he has shown the citizens of this country that he does not know what democracy means. He demonstrates no understanding or appreciation of our form of government. He takes no action to protect it. Has any president done more to undermine democracy than this one? His “I hereby demand” tweet in May 2018, ordering Department of Justice investigations of the investigators who are investigating him—I can barely believe that I just wrote that phrase—is a clear example. His demand for documents identifying confidential informants does harm to the men and women of the FBI on a fundamental level. It undermines their ability to build the trust that allows law-enforcement investigations to take place, in ways that, I want to believe, he does not comprehend.