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

by Andrew G. McCabe

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...