Leading the Justice Department is one of the biggest responsibilities a person can have in this country. Getting up to speed on intelligence, and categorizing it properly in memory, is a basic part of the job. Sessions did not compartmentalize the new knowledge he acquired. He would say, I saw in the paper the other day … and then would repeat an item that we had briefed him on a few days earlier, intelligence from the PDB. Sessions was confusing classified intelligence with news clips. It was an early sign that this transition would be more challenging than we expected.
As time went on, I observed many things about Attorney General Sessions that gave me pause. I observed him to have trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues, none of which directly concerned national security. He seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement. He also seemed to have little interest in the expertise and arguments that others brought to the meetings, or in some long-standing commitments by Justice and the Bureau. I observed his staff to be somewhat afraid of him—reluctant to voice opinions because they did not want to make him angry.
His major interest in any given topic tended to be the immigration angle, even when there was no immigration angle. Before disruptions of U.S.-based counterterrorism cases, we would brief him. Almost invariably, he asked the same question about the suspect: Where’s he from? The vast majority of the suspects are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. If we would answer his question, Sir, he’s a U.S. citizen, he was born here, Sessions would respond, Where are his parents from? The subject’s parents had nothing to do with the points under discussion. We were trying to get him to understand the terrorist threat overall. Trying to explore the question, Why are Americans becoming so inspired by radical Islam and terrorist groups such as ISIS that they’re going out and planning acts of terrorism against other Americans right here in this country? That question cannot be exhaustively explored by reference solely to immigration policy.
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 without context can be wildly misleading. But then what would be the point of gathering those numbers anyway? The attorney general’s questions about immigration and terrorism were troubling to us. We knew what thin ice they would put us on, in terms of accuracy. It’s very hard to provide a true count in answer to a question like that. It is also incredibly labor-intensive to come up with an answer, even one that is inadequate or even wrong. It would require taking analysts who are working substantive issues and telling them, instead, to start counting the angels on the head of a pin.
‘How Much Longer?’
The briefers set a goal. They wanted to engage the attorney general’s attention. They took note of things that interested him, aside from immigration. He was very interested in narcotics trafficking—an important issue for the country, but not usually central to the kinds of national-security issues that are the focus of the President’s Daily Brief. Still, to try to get his attention, the briefers started putting updates about narcotics shipments from Colombia in the book.
Someone had told Sessions that even if we knew in advance about every drug shipment destined to leave Colombia by boat or ship, the U.S. wouldn’t allocate enough vessels to intercept them. This made Sessions apoplectic. Drugs were flooding into the U.S., he believed, simply because we weren’t making the necessary interdictions. Many times, when he was briefed on narcotics trafficking, he would burst out with questions: Why don’t we have more boats down there? Why don’t we put more boats in the water? Is that all we need—more boats? This is ridiculous! I’ll go talk to the White House chief of staff. I’ll get us more boats. Sometimes he went on like this for fifteen minutes. He seemed to think that the FBI had some kind of navy at its disposal, and that this navy was off doing other things. We had to tell him, We don’t have the boats in Colombia. We are not able to do that. That’s not us.
Trying to interest Sessions in matters that he was not predisposed to care about was a lost cause. One of those matters was the disappearance of Robert Levinson. A former agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, Levinson worked as a private investigator after he retired from government service. In 2007 he went to Kish Island, off the coast of Iran, where he disappeared. The circumstances have never been fully explained. Aside from some pictures of him that came to light in 2011—wearing an orange jumpsuit, as a prisoner would—there has been no sign of Levinson since then. Many people believe he is being held by the Iranian government.
When Levinson disappeared, the FBI started trying to find him and bring him home. This is an important issue to FBI agents. It was important to Attorneys General Holder and Lynch, and to Directors Mueller and Comey. I was present on several occasions when Director Mueller told Levinson’s wife, Christine, that the FBI would never stop looking for Bob. I was present when Jim Comey told her the same thing. In each of my many meetings with her, with her children, and with her sister, I conveyed the same message: The FBI is committed to this search.
Sessions did not seem to see the importance. He asked, How much longer are we going to do this? How much money are we going to spend on this? Sessions questioned not only the search for Levinson; he questioned why the federal government bothered to search for other Americans detained or taken hostage overseas. The implication was that some of these people had it coming: If you traveled to Iran and then found yourself locked up, it was your own damn fault.
I see a glimmer of brutal logic there, up to a point. In recent history, though, when Americans have gone missing overseas, the federal government’s response has been guided by a broader set of values than cold expediency. We do not abandon people. We work to find them and bring them home, even if they have been irresponsible and stupid. We do everything possible to bring them home. We are in this together.
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.
Maybe they were so quiet over there because they, too, brought limited experience to the table. That was fine. It could have given us the opportunity to engage. But no one ever gave us an opening. I would look at the line of them and think, Pitch in here, be the translator, help me out. Show me how to get through to him or help him understand. To be fair, they may have had their own difficulties charting the byways of his mind. You never knew when you’d bump into some distorted perception. On one occasion Sessions launched into a diatribe about whom we were hiring at the FBI. Back in the old days, he said, 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?
The difficulty of dealing with Sessions personally was compounded, I believe, by the political nature of the Department of Justice. Political, meaning staffed with officials who are appointed and are therefore cautious—not political as in partisan. When a new attorney general comes in, survival instincts are triggered. People try to figure out where they stand. No one wants to say anything controversial.
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 security. And an attorney general can’t ignore that conversation. Engaging on counterterrorism is not optional.
The PDB, or Putin?
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.
Whatever the reason, this profound disengagement sends a very clear signal back when briefers go in and try to talk to the president about the topic they’ve been told to talk to him about, and the briefing goes off the rails—when the principal, as he’s called, slams you with questions about totally unrelated things and makes all kinds of bizarre statements and pronouncements, and you come back to the Bureau thinking, My God, where do I even begin? The Bureau gets feedback like, He wants more video. But you can’t tell every story in a video. Sometimes you need a written narrative. Sometimes you need empirical data and statistics. These interactions have a debilitating impact on our capacity to process and present the intelligence that’s essential for the most crucial decisions concerning national security. It affects the way our analysts think about what they need to produce and present.
In July 2017, the White House requested a briefing for the president on the Russian dachas—two Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States, one on the Maryland shore and the other in New York. Both of them were closed in December 2016 at the direction of the Obama administration, as part of the sanctions placed on Russia for Moscow’s sustained interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. By the following July, the sanctions were about to expire, and the Trump administration had to decide whether to allow the Russians back into these properties or not. This was an important issue to the FBI, because we believed the Russians had used the dachas for intelligence purposes, not just as sites for diplomatic recreation.
On a briefing of such importance, it would be customary for the FBI director to attend, and at this time I was the acting director. There had been a lot of back-channel signs during the spring that the president and the administration saw me as a kind of enemy. Just a couple of days before the dacha briefing, an administration official told a member of my staff that I should not attend. For good measure, the official added that “they”—unnamed powers in the White House—had decided to get rid of me as soon as a new director was in place. That was the phrase that was reported to me about their plans: “get rid of.”
Based on these signals, and on my knowledge that senior staff from other agencies would be in the briefing, I decided that I would delegate the job. The briefers returned to the Hoover building when the meeting was over, and one of them came to my office to tell me how it went. This is standard practice. Briefings to any president are assiduously prepared, with oversight from the director as needed, and if the director is not present, the senior official in attendance comes back to the director to report. This is because, in normal circumstances, the president would provide direction—assign us a task, request more information, or ask questions that the director should be aware of.
But when this official came into my office, where a number of us had gathered, he was dumbfounded. I remember asking, How did it go? and watching him shake his head in response, then explain that the briefer on the dachas spoke for no more than a few minutes. For practically the whole rest of the meeting, the president talked nonstop. 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 PDB briefer told the president that this point of view was not consistent with any of the intelligence that the United States possessed. The president said that he believed Putin.
Then the president talked about Venezuela. That’s the country we should be going to war with, he said. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door. He continued on, rambling and spitballing about whatever came to mind.
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 stat
e 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?
A lot has been said about the president’s demands for loyalty pledges—loyalty pledges to him personally, which were demanded from Jim Comey and from me. We did not make such pledges. One of the things that has been most startling is the starkness of the difference, just night and day, between how the former administration and the current administration expected to deal with the FBI. 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.
A functional relationship between the FBI and the White House is paradoxical, as Jim Comey told his senior leaders at the Bureau many times. Comey also tried to explain this to President Trump. He explained that some presidents tried to bring the attorney general and the FBI director close to the White House, believing this would protect them from the sort of problems that usually come from Justice. This tactic expresses an instinctive feeling: I need this guy protecting me, I need this person on my team and in my corner. What presidents should do is the opposite, Comey believed. A president needs the attorney general and the FBI director to be independent. He needs them to have the credibility that comes from that known independence. The FBI and Justice need to have the political independence to be honest brokers in all situations. Obama probably came closest to that ideal. The current administration is the furthest away—it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
The Threat Page 14
