The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  Some people began to question whether I should recuse myself from matters involving the Clintons. The standard for recusal is whether a person with knowledge of the facts would assume there to be a conflict. No one with knowledge of the facts would conclude that there was a conflict. If I recused, many would see the decision as an admission that the insinuations were true—and more important, would cast retrospective doubt on Midyear. None of that was true.

  On October 31, Comey and I had a quick chat about the second Wall Street Journal story, which clearly bugged him. He was concerned about falsehoods in the article that seemed to be coming from within the Bureau—the same ones that had compelled us to push back on the article. We were both frustrated with how the story had turned out. I also wanted to talk to Comey about the recusal issue. He advised me to discuss it with Baker and let him know what we thought. I later learned that he was more concerned about the donations to Jill’s campaign than he had let on. A couple of days later, I went to Comey’s office to make the case against recusal. Comey said that my legal argument was sound, but in light of the controversy he asked me to recuse. I did not think it was the right decision, but I did as he asked.

  On November 6, Comey sent Congress a second letter, saying that the FBI did not find anything new on Weiner’s laptop. November 8 was Election Day. As a matter of policy, the FBI does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.

  Beautiful Black Sky

  Everyone was surprised by the results of the election, starting with the president-elect. It would be months before we understood how utterly different the new team was going to be, if “team” is even the word. Many of the officials in the new administration had little or no familiarity with national government and were deeply distrustful of everything about Washington. They were wary of the FBI, though I believed that once they experienced firsthand our capabilities and professionalism, they would come to rely on us in the same way that the last team had, and the team before that. What I remember most vividly from the days immediately after the election is how quickly we in the Bureau just got on with it. We all suspected that what lay ahead was going to be more like a roller-coaster ride than a walk in the park, but I don’t think any of us anticipated that the cars would go off the rails. Looking back, I don’t know whether the best word to describe my attitude is hopeful or naïve.

  In any case, there was work to do. After the election, President Obama tasked the intelligence community—specifically, the CIA, FBI, and NSA—with synthesizing everything we knew about the possibility of Russian involvement in the 2016 election and putting it all together into one product. We referred to this internally as the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment.

  By this point, we already knew a lot. The Russia investigation had been initiated in the summer of 2016 and was conducted scrupulously, according to long-established procedures. Unlike the Clinton email investigation, which was inevitably public from the very start, and in that sense out of the ordinary for the FBI, the Russia investigation was pursued quietly, as virtually all Bureau cases are, for principled reasons. There would have been little the Bureau could say even if saying little were not Bureau policy: Much of what we knew was based on intelligence that could not be revealed without damaging sources or alerting unfriendly actors to their existence. Going public would have impeded the investigation itself. There was also a political issue, which President Obama and his advisers had to wrestle with. Sounding the alert in the middle of a national election, when the full picture was not yet known, could be perceived as an attempt to sway the electorate. At the very least, it would cause widespread confusion and dismay—doing the Russians’ work for them. The administration eventually did release an official statement, in October, explicitly fingering Russia for computer hacks and other forms of interference. The president spoke to Vladimir Putin. A few journalists received confidential briefings. Some in the White House, after the election, lamented that they had not done more, and done more sooner. But even in hindsight, it is hard to conclude with confidence that doing more would have been wise or effective. President Obama faced his own version of the choice between Terrible and Even Worse.

  But now the election was over. The unclassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment was eventually published as “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” We spent a lot of time on this during November and December. Near the end of December, the administration and the National Security Council prepared sanctions on Russia as punishment for their involvement in the election, and for some extremely aggressive surveillance and intimidation that Russia’s intelligence services had directed at American diplomats in that country. The sanctions were announced on December 29.

  The next day, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, issued an unusual and uncharacteristic statement, saying that he would take no action against the United States in retaliation for those sanctions. The PDB staff decided to write an intelligence assessment as to why Putin made the choice he did. They issued a request to the intelligence community: Anyone who had information on the topic was invited to offer it for consideration. In response to that request, the FBI queried our own holdings. We came across information indicating that General Mike Flynn, the president-elect’s nominee for the post of national security adviser, had held several conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in which the sanctions were discussed. This information was something we had from December 29. I had not been aware of it. My impression was that higher-level officials within the FBI’s counterintelligence division had not been aware of it. The PDB request brought it to our attention.

  An analyst shared it with me; I shared it with Comey; Comey shared it with the director of national intelligence, James Clapper; and Clapper verbally briefed it to President Obama. Many people were trying to figure out what to make of this. After high-level discussion at the relevant agencies and at Justice, the question arose: Was this a violation of the Logan Act? The Logan Act, passed by Congress in 1799, prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments that have disputes with the U.S. The FBI’s position was that we should consider this possible violation in addition to our continuing inquiries into General Flynn. We felt we needed time to do more work to understand the context of what had been found—we don’t just run out and charge someone based on a single piece of intelligence. We use intelligence as the basis for investigation.

  Justice was more concerned about doing something immediately. The department began pressing us to brief the president-elect’s team about Flynn. We were concerned that this might make it back to Flynn and destroy our ability to continue vetting the information quietly. I also had some concern about how open the president-elect would be to hearing what we had learned. In early January, when the unclassified version of the ICA was released, Trump called it “fake news” and suggested that the work of the U.S. government’s intelligence community was comparable to the way things were done in Nazi Germany. He made that comparison to Nazis more than once. On January 12, news of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak leaked out. In TV interviews, Vice President Elect Mike Pence vouched for Flynn. Pence said Flynn had told him that the contact was “not in any way related to the new U.S. sanctions.”

  At that point, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates felt very strongly that we should inform the new administration about what we had. She and I discussed it at length before the inauguration. She felt, based on the information in our possession, that there was good reason to believe General Flynn had lied to the vice president, which created a national-security vulnerability. The mere fact of a lie, Yates believed, made Flynn vulnerable to blackmail by Russians. This vulnerability seemed plausible, but it did not seem imminent enough to warrant disrupting the ongoing investigative work. We did respond to Justice’s sense of urgency by hastening the FBI’s own work. Four days after Trump’s inauguration, and after conferring with Comey, I called Flynn on the telephone. I r
emarked on how many people were curious about his contact with Kislyak, and I asked if he would mind sitting down with two agents that day to answer a few questions. He said, No problem at all—happy to. I said, Okay, let me know if you feel compelled to have attorneys there, whether White House counsel or your own attorney, that’s perfectly fine with us, but if you do, then I will have to ask someone from Justice to come down with the agents. He said, No, no, no, I don’t need to do that, it’s fine, just send your guys down here. I’m happy to talk to your guys. Okay, great, I said. We agreed on a time. The tone was as friendly, and as detached, as if we were planning a playdate for our kids.

  One thing he said stands out in my memory. When I told him that people were curious about his conversations with Kislyak, Flynn replied, You know what I said, because you guys were probably listening. To Flynn’s specific point, I had and have no comment. But I had to wonder, as events played out: If you thought we were listening, why would you lie?

  The two people we sent to see Flynn were accomplished, seasoned agents. After the interview, they came back to my office and described it to a small group of us. They said that Flynn had a very good recollection of events, which he related chronologically and lucidly. They did not feel he showed any outward behavioral signs of deception. He did not appear to be nervous or sweating. Not looking side to side. Displayed none of the mannerisms commonly associated with dissembling or lying. They said he related his comments in what appeared to be a very credible fashion.

  However, what he said was in absolute, direct conflict with the information that we had.

  It was a very odd conversation. The agents kept saying, It seemed like he was telling the truth. The rest of us kept saying, Yes, and it completely contradicts the information that we have. And their response was, Yeah, we know, it’s weird. They weren’t saying they believed him, and they weren’t saying they didn’t believe him. They struck me as being mainly surprised by the encounter. Surprised at the difficulty of resolving their observations. As if they had just met a man who seemed completely normal, even when he glanced out the window and remarked, at noon, and then again an hour later, and a third time shortly after that, What a beautiful black sky.

  After Sally Yates was briefed on this interview, she decided the time had come for the White House to know everything we knew about Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak. She went to see Don McGahn, and then McGahn asked her to come back to see him a second time. On Monday, January 30, she and Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for national security, pulled Comey and me aside after the morning meeting on the President’s Daily Brief. McCord told us how they had walked through the Flynn details with McGahn and other White House staff members. Yates explained to McGahn how the Russians’ awareness of Flynn’s deception could make Flynn vulnerable. I was shocked to learn that McGahn hadn’t known Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI until Yates told him—apparently Flynn did not mention it to the White House counsel.

  Later that same day, Yates was fired, ostensibly because she found the president’s executive order banning entry to travelers from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations to be unlawful. Yates disagreed with the legality of the order. The disagreement could have been aired, and in some fashion resolved, if the order had gone through a customary interagency process before it was issued. Her dismissal stood out for another reason. She had spoken her mind, done her job, and stood by her principles—a fatal trifecta in the eyes of this White House.

  Tiny Shakes of No

  When a new president and vice president take office, everyone who works for them becomes a potential surveillance target for foreign intelligence services. To help those people protect themselves, the FBI provides defensive briefings. On February 10, I helped give a defensive briefing to a fairly large group of the vice president’s staff—between twenty and thirty people. As I was leaving, a call came in from the White House counsel’s office. McGahn wanted to see me. I found my way to his office, and his secretary said, They want to see you now in the vice president’s office. Someone walked me down there. The vice president’s office is not an oval—more of a square. The walls are blue. I was shown to a seat. Vice President Pence sat in a chair to my left. McGahn, Reince Priebus, and some other staffers sat on two large sofas. News played on a TV. Pence was courteous but reserved. After saying hello, he barely spoke. He has a very controlled presence. I sat down, and Priebus asked me about our information concerning General Flynn. We want to see it, he said in a very demanding tone, and then they all got distracted by something that was on a television news program. Everyone turned toward the screen, and they all began to talk about the story, which they said had been leaked. I don’t remember what the story was, only how much it upset them. They had a heated conversation. I waited for that to finish. When it was done, attention returned to the topic of General Flynn. Priebus said, again, that they wanted to see the information. I said, That’s fine, I can arrange that for you whenever you want. Priebus said, We want it now—we want to see it right now. I said, I don’t carry it around with me, so I don’t have it at the moment, but I can get it for you. Priebus said, How soon can you get it? I said, It’s in my office, so just as long as it takes to get to my office and back. Priebus said, Where’s your office? I said, the Hoover building. He said, Where’s that? I thought, Are you kidding me? I said, It’s five blocks away.

  I stepped out of the office and called Jim Baker to get clearance for the briefing. He said, As long as you observe classification restrictions, and everybody has clearances, you’re fine. A colleague retrieved the material for me, and we met in the West Wing and walked down to the Situation Room, next to the White House mess. We waited for the vice president and the others to arrive. I took out the information, and I explained it to the vice president, the details around it, and he started reading. The opening passages were not very interesting or germane, and Pence was saying things like, Oh, this is fine. No problem with this. Fine, fine, fine. I said, Keep reading. He reached the part that we had been focused on, and immediately his face changed. His expression turned very cold. It hardened. His reading became very focused. His head shook, but barely—tiny shakes of no. He spoke very little. He said a few things along the lines of I can’t believe this, and This is totally opposite, and It’s not what he said to me.

  Moments later, Pence and the others returned what I had brought them, they stood, and then Mike Pence composed himself, ever the gentleman, and shook my hand and thanked me. Three days later, Flynn resigned.

  The day after Flynn’s resignation, President Trump asked Comey to drop the Flynn investigation. Since Election Day, Trump and his associates had, on an almost daily basis, made decisions and statements that raised serious questions about his desire to faithfully execute the duties of president of the United States. 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 to manipulate the functions of government mainly for their own interests.

  Through the winter into spring there proceeded a series of odd interactions with the White House. I was invited to brief Jared Kushner one day, and then was suddenly uninvited; the official who had invited me explained the change of plans by saying that Kushner is “a private person.” The day after I briefed Vice President Pence about General Flynn, I heard—thirdhand—that Ezra Cohen-Watnick, at the time an official at the National Security Council, had questioned my “commitment to the Trump administration,” as well he might—the commitment of an FBI agent is to the Constitution and the American people, not
to one administration. (Cohen-Watnick later became the national security adviser to Attorney General Sessions.) The week after my commitment was questioned, 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.”

  In March, during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey made the first public acknowledgment that the FBI had been investigating the Russian government’s sustained efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the White House, in the FBI, and elsewhere, the problem of leaks had been growing, and so the issues of surveillance and information security seemed to be on everyone’s minds. Trump’s accusation that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” had jacked up the drama.

  On March 17, the FBI press office got a call from a reporter at Circa News, which is owned by the right-wing media powerhouse Sinclair Broadcast Group. The reporter said that sources had told her that I had announced in staff meetings that I hated the president. Said I was out to get Michael Flynn. Said that when Flynn got fired, I slapped high fives with everyone in the room. The reporter made my staff meeting sound like the towel-snapping scene in Top Gun.