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

by Andrew G. McCabe

You go back to what you know. What I know, from years of experience interviewing people, is that in situations of massive reorientation, you never show concern or make hasty judgments. You accept the facts that have been disclosed. You keep your feelings about those facts to yourself. In the moment, you act like a professional.

The president’s thoughts were frenetic. It’s a disconcerting experience to attempt a conversation with him because he talks the whole time. He asks questions but then immediately starts to say something else. Almost everything he says he subsequently rephrases two or three times, as if he’s stuck in some holding pattern waiting for an impulse to arrive that kicks off the next thing he wants to say. It all adds up to a bizarre encounter.

All of the country’s intelligence agencies are in agreement about this. The occupant of the Oval Office resists this assessment, calling it a “hoax.” Whether that man or his campaign solicited or cooperated with Russia’s activities remains the focus of intense scrutiny by the FBI and a special counsel.

Let me state the proposition openly: The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president. He and his partisan supporters have become corrosive to the organization. In public remarks and on social media, he has continued to beat the drum about the “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!” On

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 president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. His unpredictable, often draconian behavior is dangerous—a threat to both the Bureau and the nation.

There is no effective distinction, in Russia, between organized crime and government, so kryshas have proliferated to where they block out the sky. Everyone lives under protection. The transformation has been systemic. It cannot be attributed exclusively to the actions of any one individual. But under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, the cohabitation of crime and government became the norm. Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.

What I learned, in my appearances on the Hill, was that the goal of every trip up there was survival. There was no convincing anyone of anything. Everyone walks into the room with predrafted talking points and questions. Success is coming out with a sound bite that will advance an agenda. A congressional hearing is not fact-finding. It’s theater. As the witness, you have one goal: Get out alive.

These days, another person who derives little benefit from the PDB is the president. Like former attorney general Sessions, 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.

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 “gift” to “the arrogant Americans.” 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 president of the United States has, traditionally, been an indispensable participant in these conversations. 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?

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.

take a different view. I value authority, and I believe we all need it. It is a necessary element of meaningful civic life. I am not talking about egocentric authority, authority for its own sake—the punitive force of compulsion, exerted to gratify the individual who exercises it. I am talking about 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 discriminate between right and wrong. It can discern. It can punish. It can praise. Authority is activated by a crisis. And it must be earned, as Mueller had earned his. It keeps us solid when things are falling apart.

There’s not a letter, not a comma, not a change of any kind to that document that Comey did not read, reread, ponder, weigh, and approve. Comey agreed with and approved the suggestion to change “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” He accepted the suggestion because it clarified his statement. Comey

Now that he had asked the FBI to drop the case against Flynn, his friend and associate, he was demonstrating an intention to apply a standard in unqualified contradiction to what the Bureau stood for. 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 FBI press office would receive inquiries about fictional scenarios from right-wing news outlets; we would shoot them down; the news outlets were unable to go forward. Then the story would appear on some fringe, alt-right website, without a byline. Once it was picked up by the blogosphere and on social media, an outlet such as Sinclair would have cover to repeat it, which would enable Fox News to get on board, and then Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham would talk about it for weeks. This is a practiced, intentional strategy of news circulation. The stories may be fictional and the information false, but the consequences of this strategy are real.

I am not aware of another president who has weighed in against ongoing criminal prosecutions in the overt, hostile, and unrelenting way that President Trump has. This is a breach of propriety and of historical norms. Presidents don’t weigh in on those things. They don’t try to tip the scales of justice for or against a particular defendant. In our system, intervention from the outside is not only considered inappropriate—it is inappropriate. It undermines the operation of a fair system of justice. It sows seeds of mistrust.

President Obama was rightly castigated for a single offhand remark, when he said of the Clinton investigation that he thought there was nothing there. The political world exploded: Was he trying to telegraph something to investigators? Was he sending a coded message to the attorney general? It was not a smart thing to say, as Obama surely realized. And yet it was not even in the same universe as what President Trump does on a daily basis—casting doubt on the legitimacy of the prosecution of Paul Manafort, as he has done since June 2018, and calling the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt,” as he does all the time.

If the principle of noninterference with the wheels of justice holds for a president as a broad, general matter, it is a hundred times more important that he not weigh in on anything that affects him personally. 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. He does both of these things almost daily—and directly and repeatedly—to millions of followers on Twitter and viewers on television. He is not just sounding a dog whistle, weighing in with a glancing suggestion that can be interpreted. He is lobbying for a result. He is telling the judge, the defendant, and the world his preferred outcome.

But now, with President Trump, we are being battered every day. Every day brings a new low. A new ridiculous assertion. There are literally hundreds of examples. 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. In a press conference with British prime minister Theresa May, he directly denied saying what anyone can hear him saying in an interview recorded the day before. 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. He is doing two kinds of damage. There’s the head-on-collision damage: the “phony Witch Hunt,” “FBI corruption,” in-your-face insult damage. And there’s the much more insidious damage that results from remarks like the ones he made before Manafort’s hearing. They continually lower the bar on presidential conduct, now and for the future.

I can’t speak for every agent and employee of the FBI. But the overwhelming majority of people in the Bureau liked and admired Director Comey. They liked his personal style, the integrity of his conduct, the changes that he instituted. For many of us, myself included, it was a point of pride that the FBI had such a leader, who honorably represented us in the world. Many other agencies struggled because they lacked capable people at the top. We felt lucky. We had someone who would stand up for us and always try to do the right thing.

But I will say this. 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?

The president of the United States is actively pushing the citizens of this country in that direction. He exhorts his supporters to think of themselves as true Americans, and to consider anyone who disagrees with them as being treasonous, like criminals—people who should be in jail, as he has explicitly urged. The president tells one group of citizens: You are the good ones. No one else is equal to you. All the others are not as significant, not as important. They should not have the same rights. They should be treated as less-than. They are alien. They should be stricken. That is the language used by totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions to generate shock troops of core believers and sow the seeds of extremism.

I have seen in him no evidence of any capacity for introspection, self-criticism, or good-faith resolve. He will never back off that sort of rhetoric.