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February 22 - March 14, 2019
He was not really asking me questions. He was probing me, to find out whether I was on board with him or not. This was my loyalty test.
Russian interference in our elections. This interference is ongoing, and it is not conjecture.
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 values the word of the Russian president more highly than the collective opinion of his own intelligence services.
The Bureau had a long tradition of ignoring organized crime.
In 1996, the New York field office had the largest organized-crime operation in the country.
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.
RICO allows the leaders of a racket to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to commit, or assisted others in committing, but did not carry out with their own hands. It is one of the most important laws enacted in the past half century, and it has global reach.
laundering itself was done by people who worked as legitimate professionals. The more that criminal money became entangled in legitimate business, and the more involved that formerly legitimate professionals became with organized crime, the more difficult it would eventually become for law enforcement to remove the criminal elements from the U.S. economy.
Russian criminals had so much money that if the money came here, whole institutions could be undermined.
one of the most important things I learned from him: If you see something that needs to be done, your whole job is to make your best effort to do it.
Criminal investigations are typically structured around proving the elements of a single criminal offense. RICO opened the door to prosecuting an entire organization.
The first major requirement of the RICO statute is to prove the existence of the enterprise that is the subject of investigation.
To satisfy RICO, the enterprise theory directs agents to collect association evidence: proof that people are associated with each other in a way that could qualify them as a criminal enterprise.
In the case of new or previously unknown organizations, enterprise proof can be harder to find.
The second major RICO requirement is to prove that each member of the enterprise participated in a “pattern of racketeering activity.”
No other U.S. agency has a pool of human sources bigger than that of the FBI.
The internet pervades human existence so thoroughly now that it can be hard to remember how recently life was mainly analog. When was the point of no return? Maybe around 2006. In July of that year, a microblogging platform called Twitter debuted for the public. In September, Facebook launched a new feature called “News Feed” and opened membership to all comers, where before you had to be part of a college or school network to join. In 2006, YouTube was barely a year old. The first iPhones didn’t go on sale until 2007.
The FBI does not have the luxury of assessing whether people are fully capable of doing what they suggest they might do. If you are inclined to film yourself firing an AK-47 while hollering about jihad, and if you are taking affirmative actions in line with those sentiments, then you have cast the die and have set yourself up for investigation.
Targeting is the Bureau’s preferred mode of counterterrorism investigation today.
High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
thirty-nine FBI agents have died in the line of duty,
Interviews help agents build relationships. Relationships nurture informants. The job is to create in someone’s mind a sense that you are worthy of trust. That you are competent. A professional. Doing the right thing. The challenge is demonstrating that your interests are in alignment—even if your ultimate goals are not the same.
Is terrorism a crime or an act of war? Should terrorists be tried in the justice system or handled by the military?
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.
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.
The job is teachable in only one way—by going through it. Crisis learning can’t be taught by a book.
It took us the entire day to arrive at wording we were satisfied with, and in the early evening we released a statement to the media.
we don’t investigate beliefs.
extremism. ISIS produced the most seductively packaged, ostentatiously violent, technologically savvy terrorist propaganda I had ever seen.
In this period, the percentage of communications that law enforcement could not see began to grow. It has kept on growing.
Law enforcement should never be allowed to unilaterally decide what sort of access we should have.
In Congress, almost no one seemed capable of hearing any story, or accepting any shred of information, that in any way departed from preexisting notions of what the truth was or of how things ought to be.
She had spoken her mind, done her job, and stood by her principles—a fatal trifecta in the eyes of this White House.
Each interaction between the FBI and the president seemed stranger and more inappropriate than the last. 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
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Reince Priebus asked me to speak with reporters to refute a story in The New York Times. When I told him I could not, because doing so would violate the FBI’s policy of not confirming or denying FISA coverage, he told me that I, personally, and the FBI as a whole, were “not being good partners.”
If they fail to initiate an investigation when the facts and the guide call for one, they are not doing their job.
Judges abhor witness tampering. They regard it as a crime committed against themselves and their court.
He is not just sounding a dog whistle, weighing in with a glancing suggestion that can be interpreted. He is lobbying for a result.
The president exposes himself as a deliberate liar, someone who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wishes.
The president, by calling the Russia investigation a witch hunt, is basically telling the judge, the system, and the investigators: This is what I want to happen.
Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. Federal policy, written by the Department of Justice, strictly restricts such contact.
The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.
There was fallout from his private Oval Office meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, in which he had disclosed classified information.
He did not go after me because Jill ran for office. He went after me because the FBI opened the Russia case, which led to the appointment of a special counsel.
that I have an obligation to stand up and say, You can’t do this. You can’t just continue to attack people with an endless string of baseless lies. No one should be able to do that.
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.
That is the language used by totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions to generate shock troops of core believers and sow the seeds of extremism.
Donald Trump, whose only value is self-seeking.
