The Threat

Andrew G. McCabe, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” St. Martins Press, 2019, 264 pp.

How’s this for a beginning: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.”  McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I., was just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. He was briefly the F.B.I.’s acting director, after the dismissal of James B. Comey. The president, Donald J. Trump (the "J" stands for genius), went on Twitter: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard-working men and women of the F.B.I. — A great day for Democracy.”  McCabe is, or was, a registered Republican for the entirety of his adult life.  This wasn’t the first threat he received from Trump:  During the Christmas holidays, 2017 Trump tweeted: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits.  90 days to go?!!! 

 “The Threat” is a concise account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack.  Just like Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty”, which I reported on earlier, it is an indictment of Trump’s moral behavior.  McCabe writes. “The work of the F.B.I. is being undermined by the current president.”

The book follows McCabe’s experiences chasing the Russian mob, the Boston Marathon bombers and others.  McCabe’s accounts of his baffling interactions with Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, would be high comedy if they were not so alarming.  Sessions seemed not to read his daily briefings. He had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”  Sessions concentrated almost solely on the immigration aspect of any issue, McCabe writes, even when there was no immigration aspect. Similarly, “Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the F.B.I. plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty.”  “The portrait of Sessions is of a man for whom merely ordering lunch seems to be above the timberline of his intellect and curiosity.”

Mueller is, in this book, the Mueller we have come to know: punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.

McCabe’s memoir joins a roster of recent and alarming books by high-ranking members of the United States’ justice and intelligence communities, each pushing back sharply against the president’s war on facts and competence.

McCabe recounts the attacks on his credibility, by Trump and others, after his wife, Jill, ran for Virginia’s State Senate as a Democrat in 2015.

My Notes:

Pg. 18:  In the 110 years of the FBI’s history, a significant shift in emphasis occurred after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  The number-one priority of the FBI became preventing acts of terrorism in the US or against Americans anywhere.  However, the FBI’s fundamental assignment remains “to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.” That is the mission statement—those very words. 

Pg. 20:  All of the US intelligence agencies agree that Russia has hacked and is still hacking our voting systems and databases, the release of private communications into public view in order to favor a particular candidate, and manipulate social media in order to poison public debate.

Pg. 26:  Every FBI employee, by virtue of being an employee in good standing, holds a top-secret clearance. 

Pg. 34:  McCabe spent the first ten years of his career focused on cases that grew out of two interlocking narratives: the evolution of organized crime in Russian and the export of Russian organized crime to the US.  Russian organized crime today has deep ties to the Russian government.  It saturates the internet.   The Kremlin has in recent years taken aim at electoral politics—American democracy itself.  Under the presidency of Putin, the cohabitation of crime and government became the norm.  Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.

Pg. 54:  In 1970 the Organized Crime Control Act included the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations provision (RICO).  Now, for the first time, the leaders of an organization could be held responsible for the crimes they had ordered others to commit. 

Pg. 87:  The internet made it much easier for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and susceptible Westerners to connect and share information with one another.  New social media platforms, in particular, gave everyone from hardened terrorists to innocent teenagers, tools to make spectacles of themselves, for good and for ill. 

Pg. 106:  Obama believed the War on Terror had led the US in the wrong direction.  He believed the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, amounted to outright torture and had compromised our values as a nation...  He believed other interrogation methods fit our values and were, in fact, more useful.  (McCabe agrees as do other experts).  From now on only techniques from the US Army Field Manual and those used by federal law enforcement, which had been compiled to be in conformity with the Geneva Conventions, would be allowed.  A High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was formed and McCabe was put in charge of it to ensure humane methods were followed.

Pg. 133:  Attorney General Sessions stated that back in the old days you all only hired Irishmen.  They were drunks, but they could be trusted.  Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos—who knows what they’re doing?  Also, each day a Presidential Daily Briefing is prepared and given to Sessions on a secure table computer.  It appears that the tablet was never opened—the machine kept logs of when it was opened and the log was empty.

Pg. 140:  In October of 2011 it was discovered that the Iranians had sought to hire Mexicans from the Los Zetas drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US at a restaurant in D.C.

Pg. 142:  On the night of September 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, a mob attacked a US diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA base.  Four Americans were killed, among them J. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya.  The Obama administration offered two different explanations for the violence.  Susan Rice said it was part of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim video that had been produced by an American.  Others said that the attack was a planned terrorist attack.  With a presidential election less than two months away, Republicans seized on the idea that Benghazi was an al-Qaeda attack as a way to discredit Obama on the issue of national security.  The FBI concluded that the attack was for both reasons.

Pg. 174; Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco:  When the Benghazi committee asked for Hillary’s emails they quickly discovered that the State Department had none.  Clinton’s emails were kept on a private server.  So Clinton’s staff downloaded some sixty thousand emails of Hillary’s.  They then sorted the emails into personal and state business (some 30,000 each).  The personal emails were destroyed and the others were sent to the committee. 

Pg. 191:  In July 2016, three days after the Republican Party nominated Trump and three days before the Democratic party nominated Clinton as its candidate, WikiLeaks released more than nineteen thousand emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee, in a hack for which twelve intelligence officers of the Russian government would later be indicted.

Pg. 198:  Results of the intensive investigation of Russian interference in the US presidential election were released on December 29, 2016, along with the sanctions.  The next day, Putin issued an unusual and uncharacteristic statement, saying, that he would take no action against the US in retaliation for those sanctions. Information was then found that General Mike Flynn, the president's nominee for the post of national security adviser, had held several conversations with the Russian ambassador in the US in which the (Obama) sanctions were discussed.

Pg. 257:  During the Christmas holidays 2017 Trump tweeted: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits.  90 days to go?!!!  In January 2018, Chris Wray called McCabe and demanded that McCabe leave the position and announce he was stepping aside voluntarily. McCabe refused to issue this false statement and went out on voluntary leave, intending for his leave to last until his retirement.  He was then terminated by Sessions (on TV) 26 hours before his retirement.  Trump marked the moment with a tweet: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard-working men and women of the FBI.  A great day for Democracy.  Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy.  He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!”