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

by Andrew G. McCabe

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.

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? The FBI does not keep those statistics in that form. In the course of an investigation, we may uncover someone’s immigration history. That immigration history may or may not prove to be significant. We do not keep aggregate figures on how many Syrians were arrested this month. And there are so many ways of construing the how-many-immigrants question that we would not know how to answer it. Do you mean how many people arrested? How many people convicted of terrorism offenses? Do you mean people who came here from Syria as immigrants? If yes, at what age? What if they came at age five with their parents? Because those people are not Syrians, they’re Americans—they’ve become citizens by now and spent their whole conscious lives here, but yes, technically they did come here as Syrians, thirty years ago. Any one of those numbers presented with...

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 should answer the question with our Justice colleagues sitting right there in the room. We would simply say, That’s not our area of responsibility. An example: He expressed frustration that many U.S. attorneys, in cases where the death penalty was an option, were not recommending or pursuing the death penalty. It’s nonsense, he would say. We have this law, and if we have the law then we’ve got to start using it. Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the FBI plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty—that’s a job for Justice. All the people on Sessions’s side of the table would look at their laps. No one would chime in and try to answer his questions, calm things down, redirect the conversation. We were always hanging out on a limb.

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. It is possible that the attorney general and the deputy attorney general had been reading the hard-copy version. It was my impression, however, that Sessions arrived at the briefings unfamiliar with the book. The lack of interest was confounding. 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. We tried to interpret that choice as revealing no more than the intense degree of focus that 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...

As my colleague told this story, he was sitting at the conference table, his hands out in front of him, palms open to the sky. When the meeting was all over, he said, he got into the car with the analyst who had prepared to brief the president on the dachas. He said the analyst was distressed. Overwhelmed by the experience. Thought she had somehow screwed up, that it was in some way her fault that the president had failed to learn anything about a matter of critical importance. My colleague tried to reassure her: I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to see that. That didn’t have anything to do with you. It’s not your fault. Every time something like this happens, the concern becomes more real, the question becomes more urgent: What is going on here? The fields of law enforcement and intelligence, when stripped to their essentials, are both driven by human conversation. Law enforcement is a conversation about how to order and safeguard society. Intelligence is a conversation that aims to describe the true state of the world. 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.

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first day on the job as acting director, I arrived at the office early, went through the morning meetings, did my briefs, and by 10 A.M. I was sitting down with senior staff involved in the Russia investigation, many of whom had also been involved in Midyear Exam. As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. This was highly unusual. Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. Federal policy, written by the Department of Justice, strictly restricts such contact. 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. The FBI does have frequent, routine, and direct contact with the White House by way of the National Security Council and other facets of the national-security structure, but when it comes to topics that do not concern national security, the FBI is supposed to go through Justice, which then makes contact with the White House counsel’s office. And vice versa: If the president or any other senior White House official needs to get a message to the Justice Department or the FBI, that message is supposed to go through the White House counsel to the deputy attorney general before it gets to us. The reason for all this is simple. Investigations and prosecutions are delicate and complicated, and can affect the lives of many people; they need to be p...