A CONVERSATION WITH THE PRESIDENT—AND WHAT IT MEANT
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Whenever James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was gone from the office for an extended period, my position as deputy director effectively cast me in the role of acting director. On this Tuesday morning in May, Jim was in the middle of a trip that would take him to field offices in Jacksonville and Los Angeles. I hustled through a challenging day, right up to the last block on the schedule, what we called the wrap meeting—a 5 P.M. gathering of the heads of each division. About twenty minutes later, my secretary pulled me out of that meeting and informed me that Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanted to talk to me. Immediately I thought there must be a problem—the attorney general did not call routinely. I asked, What line is he on? The secretary answered, He’s not on the phone, he wants to see you in person. That meant it wasn’t just a problem—something was really wrong.
I grabbed my coat, threw my notebook in a lock bag—a black bag with a key lock on the zipper for transporting classified documents—and left with my security detail, a longtime FBI agent. The walk from my office to the attorney general’s took less than ten minutes: down the elevator, through the courtyard, left onto Tenth Street, and across Pennsylvania Avenue. At the corner, I noticed a couple of news trucks, which was odd. There had been a press conference about a big criminal case earlier that day, but the news trucks should have been gone.
The attorney general’s office is a complex of several rooms, with a bedroom and shower upstairs. The attorney general even has his own dining room, across a hallway from the inner office, which, like most places in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, is elegantly appointed. The building itself—classical exterior, art deco interior—stands in contrast to the brutalist architecture of the FBI building, and the contrast captures something of the reality. The J. Edgar Hoover Building represents the instrumental aspects of justice, the Robert F. Kennedy building represents the ideal.
A secretary walked me to the door of the attorney general’s private office and we waited for another ten minutes or so, making small talk—awkward, pleasant—about Alabama. She, like Sessions, came from there. I walked into an oddly formal scene. Sessions was standing up, in front of his desk. He wore his suit coat. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and his chief of staff, James Crowell, stood there, too, both also wearing suit coats. The three of them looked at me with expressions of wariness or expectancy—it was hard to tell. For an instant it felt even like suspicion. Whatever was on their minds, their demeanor elevated my concern: What the hell was going on?
Lock bag in hand, I said, Good afternoon, and Sessions said, Thanks for coming over. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve had to fire the director of the FBI.
Time stopped for a moment. I should not have been shocked, but I was. One moment you are in an environment that you understand and know how to navigate. Then the lights turn off and turn back on in half a second, and you’re standing in a completely different place. What do you do now?
You go back to what you know. What I know, from years of experience interviewing people, is that in situations of massive reorientation, you never show concern or make hasty judgments. You accept the facts that have been disclosed. You keep your feelings about those facts to yourself. In the moment, you act like a professional.
I answered the attorney general: No, I had not heard that.
He said, So we’re going to need you to be the acting director for some period of time.
Yes, sir, I said, I’ll do that.
He said that an interim director might be appointed during the administration’s search for a new director, but for now they wanted me to run the FBI. He said, The FBI is a wonderful institution, and we’re going to need you to continue to run it effectively and make sure the mission is accomplished.
I said I would do exactly that. I would await his guidance, and I would do whatever it took to ensure that we continued moving forward. I would assist the new director, interim or permanent, in any way necessary to help that person get off to a good start. I remember using words that come from the FBI’s mission statement: I said we would carry on and protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.
He said, Thank you, and then asked, Do you have any questions?
Yes, I had questions. Starting with, Why did this happen? I also needed time to think. I answered, I do have questions, but I’m not prepared to ask them now. And the meeting was done, it seemed. A very short conversation.
As I was about to leave, I started reviewing all the things I would have to do. The first was to communicate with people in the Bureau. I said, I should probably send out some sort of an announcement to our workforce. Sessions and Rosenstein looked at each other, as if they hadn’t thought of that. Rosenstein said, We don’t want you to put out anything until we hear what the White House has to say. That was fine, I said, but I would need to say something internally. Rosenstein said, Don’t do anything until you hear from us, and do not say anything about this to anyone, not even to your wife, until we get back to you.
The news of Comey’s firing was on TV by the time I got back to the Hoover building, at about 6 P.M. So much for confidentiality. Listening to the news was how Comey found out about his dismissal—not in a phone call from the attorney general but from a CNN report that aired while he was speaking with FBI agents in Los Angeles. Everything about the decision to fire Comey had come across as improvised and slapdash. I walked back into the deputy director’s conference room. The people at the meeting I had left were still sitting there. Obviously they knew what had happened. They looked at me. The expression on their faces said, What do we do now?
I told them exactly what I had heard. I knew that people would be anxious, scared, or upset during this period, and I sought to confront those emotions with candor. If I kept people in the loop about what was happening, it would limit the amount of time they spent wondering and worrying about what was happening. At least on the margins.
The director’s secretary brought me an envelope for Jim Comey that had been delivered from the White House earlier that day. It had not been opened, and I opened it. Inside the envelope was Rod Rosenstein’s three-page memo that purported to explain the cause for Comey’s termination—his alleged mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The memo came with a letter of transmittal from the attorney general to the president, and the president’s letter to the director, firing him. I remember holding the letter from the president in my hand and reading that conspicuous line in the middle—“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.” I wondered, Why would you put that in there? The answer would become clear as the weeks unfolded. The firing of Jim Comey gave new urgency to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections—that interference was a fact, not a supposition—and into possible collusion by the Russians with the Trump campaign. Comey’s firing would lead directly to the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to oversee that investigation.
In the conference room I told the team that we needed to figure out what to do in the next hour. After figuring that out, we would need to figure out what to do in the following hour. And then we would figure out the following twelve hours, and then the following twenty-four hours. That was my automatic response to the situation. It was a response that grew out of the cumulative experience of handling crises through my years in the Bureau: all the times I had overseen a course of action in situations with high stakes, where people’s emotions and responses were highly charged and volatile. So I handled this as I had handled all those other crises. I jumped in with my team to build a plan. We had to start by identifying the most important things to do.
The first task was communication. We set a mandatory SVTC that night—a secure video teleconference. This one would connect all of the Bureau’s SACs—the special agents in charge of our fifty-six field offices—so I could tell them this: There are a lot of things going through your heads right now. The absolute most important thing is that you keep your folks focused on their jobs and not on the firing of the director. Every one of you needs to get physically in front of every one of your employees first thing tomorrow morning and stress to them that we all need to stay the course. As we were sketching all this out, I got the message that the president wanted to see me at six thirty—in less than half an hour.
I had been to the White House for meetings hundreds of times, and during my two decades of service to the FBI had met two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, in the course of official business. I had not yet met Donald J. Trump. Before I went over, and while I was in my office, Jim Comey called me from his cell phone. His voice was easy and unhurried as always, with a faintly Fawlty Towers inflection on the final vowel of his Hello! Classic Comey: Never let them see you sweat. The first thing I said to him was, What did you do now? He laughed. He said, I have no idea, but I must’ve really hosed something up.
The situation felt so crazy that the only correct response was to say, This is crazy. We’re spinning here, I told him, trying to figure this out. He answered with equanimity, as if nothing unusual had happened. He said, You’ll be fine, you will get through this. With an almost biblical intonation, he added, Have no worries.
Immediately upon becoming acting director, I was given a twenty-four-hour security detail—I was no longer allowed to drive anywhere by myself and could only ride around in the back of a fully armored black Suburban. At the White House, I bailed out of the Suburban at the little portico on the side of the West Wing, a door I’d passed through many times for meetings in the Situation Room. But I had never been inside the Oval Office.
A uniformed Secret Service officer made a phone call, and before long President Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, came down to meet me. Schiller, a big guy from the Bronx, has a résumé that’s pretty well written in his buzz cut—Navy, New York Police Department, Trump Organization security director. Earlier that day, Schiller had been the one who had hand-delivered Comey’s termination letter to the Hoover building. He introduced himself and walked me to the door of the Oval Office, then handed me his business card. Hey, he said, if you ever need anything, give me a call. I thanked him, puzzled—what did he think I might need from him?—and took his card. I stood there for a second, and then they let me in.
The president was behind the massive Resolute desk, built from the timbers of a nineteenth-century British vessel that American sailors had rescued from the Arctic ice and returned to Britain. He stood up and came around to the side. We shook hands. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, was there, and the chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, and Vice President Mike Pence. None of them said a word. No one was sitting comfortably in couches or armchairs. A row of little wooden chairs was lined up in front of the president’s desk, and the three men were seated in the chairs like schoolboys who’d been called to the principal’s office. One chair was empty, and I took it.
The president was sitting on the front edge of his desk chair, leaning forward, with his arms in front of him on the desk. He is tall, and very large, and when he spoke he started to make blunt gestures with his hands—kinetic, coming at you. He started off by telling me, We fired the director, and we want you to be the acting director now. We had to fire him—and people are very happy about it. I think people are very happy that we finally got rid of him. I think there’s a lot of people in the FBI who are glad he’s gone. We had to do it because of all that—you know, the Clinton thing last summer and all his statements and everything, he really mishandled that. He had to go, because of those decisions he made, and for a lot of other reasons.
The president was referring to the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and whether any of her thousands of emails had contained classified material. In July 2016, Comey had announced that criminal charges were not warranted and that no reasonable prosecutor would have pressed charges, but he had also chided Clinton for being “extremely careless.” Then, in late October, he had sent a letter to Congress saying that new emails had turned up and would have to be examined—only to conclude a week later, once again, that criminal charges were not warranted. That was a few days before the election, and the controversy in all likelihood contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss. In his termination letter to Comey, which I had just seen, the president had pointed to Rosenstein’s three-page memo and (as Sessions put it in his own letter) “the reasons expressed by the Deputy”—specifically, the director’s handling of the email investigation—to explain the dismissal. I had been involved in that investigation and in Comey’s decisions. Was the president’s rationale just a pretext? I didn’t quite know what to say.
The president asked if I knew that Comey had told him three times that he himself was not under investigation. I said I was aware of that—meaning, I was aware that Director Comey had told the president he was not under investigation. I could not remember exactly how many times the director had said that to the president. And at the forefront of my mind was the president’s termination letter to Director Comey, which I had just read—I kept thinking about that oddly prominent mention of this concern the president was now raising, again, about whether he was being investigated.
A question was in the air: had I disagreed with Comey’s decisions on the Clinton case—mainly, Comey’s conclusion that Hillary Clinton should not be charged with a crime.
I said, No, sir, I didn’t. Jim and I worked together very closely, and I was a part of those decisions.
The president claimed there had been a rebellion inside the FBI and asked me if it was true that people disliked Director Comey. I replied that some people were frustrated with the outcome of the Clinton investigation last summer, but the general feeling in the FBI about this director seemed positive. He looked at me, with a tilt of the head, an expression of dismay or disagreement, or both. I had not given the answers he expected or wanted. The subtext of everything that he was saying to me, clearly, came down to this: Whose side are you on?
Later I often thought about how much stronger my responses to the president could have been. But I was making my best efforts in the moment to say things that were accurate and reflective of my thoughts without flatly contradicting him. I felt it would be unhelpful in this traumatic moment to tell the president that I expected a fair proportion of our workforce to have feelings that verged on hysteria the next day, when all thirty-seven thousand of them came to work and had no idea what was going on because the director had been fired. In any case, my candor would have been irrelevant in this conversation, because we were not having a conversation. 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.
I knew that loyalty tests were important to him. Jim Comey had been pressed the same way in the same office by the same man on more than one occasion, as Comey himself had told me. And the loyalty that was demanded was personal loyalty, not loyalty to an office or a set of ideals.
The president asked me to tell him a little bit about my background in the FBI, and I gave him a brief overview of my assignments. He took this as a segue back to monologue: about searching for a new director, talking to great people, it was going to be great, they were going to get somebody great, the FBI was going to be great again, and now here I was, and wasn’t it great? He said he was interested in Joe Lieberman—a great guy. They were also talking to other FBI people, he said. He loved law enforcement and the FBI. He thought police people loved him …
I found myself looking at the desk—baroque and bulky, intricately carved. Sitting there, I wanted to touch it, wanted to feel the nooks and crannies, the bas-reliefs, the little portraits. There’s a hinged door in the front, which Franklin Roosevelt had installed to close off the opening in the desk that is left for a person’s knees—so people in front couldn’t see his leg braces. I remember having to tell myself: Pay attention. Stay in the moment. Don’t be looking at the furniture.
The president’s thoughts were frenetic. It’s a disconcerting experience to attempt a conversation with him because he talks the whole time. He asks questions but then immediately starts to say something else. Almost everything he says he subsequently rephrases two or three times, as if he’s stuck in some holding pattern waiting for an impulse to arrive that kicks off the next thing he wants to say. It all adds up to a bizarre encounter.
Toward the end, he said to me, So now you are acting director, and we have great hopes for you, you are going to do a good job. We may bring in somebody else to serve as interim director until the permanent director is confirmed. But we don’t know. But we’re going to look. We’re going to get somebody great—it might even be you. It’s going to be terrific. We’re going to turn that place around.
The embedded assumption of all these superlatives piled up in the future tense seemed to be: The Bureau was a mess. If he believed that to be true—and it was not—then I bore a good part of the responsibility. Why, then, was he flattering me? He spent most of this meeting spewing stock phrases he often uses—You’re great, you’re terrific—all of which rang hollow. I knew that he had been aware of me since 2016, when he referred to me in terms that were not flattering at all. My wife, Jill, had run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Virginia state senate back in 2015, and she had received money, as other candidates did, from the state Democratic Party and from a political action committee run by the Democratic governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. Because the following year I was involved in the FBI’s email investigation, the president during the campaign decided to allege that I had been bribed to look the other way. He tweeted a headline from The Wall Street Journal that insinuated as much—CLINTON ALLY AIDED CAMPAIGN OF FBI OFFICIAL’S WIFE—and on the campaign stump expanded the insinuation into a conspiracy theory, in which Clinton directed McAuliffe to make campaign donations to Jill as a quid pro quo. So I was disregarding all of his You’re great, You’re terrific verbiage, letting it flow past, like the blather it was.
Then he said, Your only problem is that one mistake you made. That thing with your wife. That one mistake.
I understood that he was referring to the fact that my wife ran for office.
He said, Yes, that was the only problem with you. You know, I was very hard on you during my campaign. That money, from the Clinton friend—I was very hard, I said a lot of tough things about your wife in the campaign.
I know, I told him. We heard what you said. My wife is a wonderful, dedicated, brilliant physician, and she decided to enter public life because she felt deeply about trying to help her community. I completely supported that decision at the time, and I support it today.
He looked slightly uncomfortable. His tone shifted. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he said. She’s great. Everybody I know says she’s great. You were right to support her in that. Everybody tells me she’s a terrific person.
Good luck to you, he said at last. He got up and slapped me on the back, and I assured him I would continue to lead the FBI in the best way possible. Before I left, Mike Pence stepped forward and shook my hand, and he said something nice. Mike Pence always says something nice. Whatever else might be said about the vice president, I will say this: Every time I have met him, he has conducted himself as a gentleman. And manners count for a lot.
I started my life in the FBI in New York in 1996, chasing Russian mobsters as a member of the Organized Crime Task Force. As soon as I became part of my first squad—from the first day—I thought, I’m never leaving this. I never lost that feeling. In a twenty-one-year career, I had just about every job an agent could have, and I always held on to a belief that this organization is unique. Its capabilities are incomparable. Today’s FBI is the combined strength, knowledge, experience, and dedication of tens of thousands of people in five hundred offices across the country and around the world. They serve in war zones and other hostile environments with partners from the Defense Department and the Department of Justice. They are men and women of every race, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation. They are agents, analysts, scientists, forensic accountants, medics, auto mechanics, bomb technicians, linguists, locksmiths, hackers, ballistics experts, security specialists, administrative specialists, and secretaries. Some of them fly, some of them go underwater, and some of them know how to drive very, very fast. More than a few of them could be making a lot of money in Silicon Valley. The range, quality, and difficulty of the jobs they do would be hard to overstate. They perform feats of immense exactitude, such as recovering wreckage of a downed airliner from the sea off Long Island and reconstructing the plane in a hangar. They keep company with Americans who are coping with incalculable losses, as when, after a mass shooting, the FBI brings trained comfort dogs to sit quietly with family members of the victims. As deputy director, I had the ability to put agents on any doorstep in America in about two hours.
In the course of my career, the Bureau has undergone one of the more significant shifts of emphasis in its 110-year history. The mandate to investigate remains bedrock. But after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI’s number-one priority became preventing acts of terrorism in the United States or against Americans anywhere. The FBI’s fundamental mission has never changed: to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That is its mission statement—those very words. To see the full force of the FBI deployed, as I did on 9/11, as I did after the Benghazi attack, as I did after the Boston Marathon bombing, and as I did in countless ways from the perch of deputy director, is to be astonished by this institution’s mastery. It’s not all hearts and flowers. We don’t always get everything right. Many types of thought and action converge to serve the FBI’s main purpose: investigation.
FBI investigations are predictable and orderly. FBI investigations are also fraught with surprise and wrought by improvisation. Special agents do a lot of listening and a lot of open-ended exploration. They also do a lot of strictly organized documentation, assessment, briefing, and negotiation. Investigations gather facts. Then investigators use legal techniques to discern patterns in these facts—stories about human behavior. Stories of the things that people do, how and why they choose to do those things, and the consequences of their actions. When these stories suggest that people may have broken laws, agents work with prosecutors to build cases. Cases go to court. Judges make decisions. People are found guilty or innocent, they are punished or they go free, and the rest of us go about our lives in peace.
The process of law enforcement helps to hold society together. The place of FBI investigations in this process is fundamental. Along with state and local law enforcement, we do the investigations that the rest of the system uses as the basis for the bigger decisions. The role of agents is to say, Here are the facts, here is what we found. Not, This guy’s good and that guy’s bad, but rather: This guy’s dead, that guy had a gun, here’s a list of phone calls that guy made, and here’s a money transfer from this one to that one the day before the death. That’s the agent’s role. That’s the job that I have loved.
In the scheme of things, it’s easy to solve a crime involving one live guy and one dead guy—or at least, it’s usually easier than much else the FBI has done in recent years. During my time as an agent, the FBI applied this country’s legal investigative techniques to fight new forms of organized crime, terrorism, and online criminal activity, including cyber threats to national security. It has also been called upon to investigate matters that are unprecedented and pose existential dangers to our life as a democratic nation—most significantly, Russian interference in our elections. This interference is ongoing, and it is not conjecture. The evidence is incontrovertible: hacks of voting systems and databases; the release of private communications into public view in order to favor a particular candidate; widespread manipulation of social media in order to poison public debate. 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.
This book will tell how some of these investigations have worked, in a way that is faithful to both aspects of investigation I mentioned above: exploratory and procedural, open-ended and exacting, driven by individual curiosity and executed to the institution’s strict legal standards. I will tell the human story of how it looked and felt and smelled to do the work I did, alongside the men and women I have been honored to work with. I will also highlight a few specific elements of how we work as an institution that, in my view, more citizens should be aware of: the FBI’s investigative techniques; the way it gathers and presents intelligence; and the set of ironclad authorities on which FBI investigations are based.
It is a point of urgency for Americans to understand what the FBI really does, and why it matters, so that the citizens of this country can join together for the common good, to protect our common interests and our common concerns against very real and rising threats by those in foreign governments, and in our own, who intend to unravel the rule of law in the United States.
Let me state the proposition openly: The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president. He and his partisan supporters have become corrosive to the organization. In public remarks and on social media, he has continued to beat the drum about the “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!” On Twitter alone, Trump has identified the FBI with the “Deep State,” the pejorative term he uses to refer to professional public servants who conduct the nation’s business without regard to politics; he has called Jim Comey “a terrible and corrupt leader”; he has called the investigation of Russian interference in the elections and possible ties with his campaign “perhaps the most tainted and corrupt case EVER!”; and he has referred to two of the investigators on the Russia case, themselves, as “a fraud against our Nation,” “hating frauds,” and “incompetent and corrupt.” His insults have emboldened legions of goons to push further. Even mainstream news outlets have been unable to refrain from trafficking in destructive clickbait, juxtaposing the terms “FBI” and “corruption” in headlines over stories ostensibly covering “both sides” of the brawl that now passes for argument. TRUMP SUPPORTERS SAY MCCABE FIRING EXPOSES FBI CORRUPTION—that’s not Breitbart, it’s USA Today.
I knew this administration would be different from the last one. What I did not expect was the suspicion that so many members of this administration would train on those involved in intelligence gathering. The president has compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany. He has asserted the essential equivalence of the U.S. government and the regime in Russia, proclaiming that “we have a lot of killers.… You think our country is so innocent?” He has stated in a press conference before the world, walking it back only under duress, and even then without conviction, that he values the word of the Russian president more highly than the collective opinion of his own intelligence services. When the president of the United States attacks the intelligence community and demeans the people who have been charged with keeping the country safe—and when he embraces conspiracy theories that politicize the FBI’s most critical work—it has a direct impact on our ability to collect, analyze, and present intelligence that is essential to the security of the United States.
The FBI must perform a balancing act. To keep the American people safe, the FBI must be independent of the White House. At the same time, it must maintain a close functional relationship with the White House. Since the start of the Trump administration, that relationship has been in profound jeopardy. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. His unpredictable, often draconian behavior is dangerous—a threat to both the Bureau and the nation.