The day I briefed the Gang of Eight about the Russia investigation—Wednesday, May 17—I also had another appointment. Just before that meeting on the Hill, I had gone back to the White House for my job interview for the position of FBI director.
Inside the West Wing I made my way to the small reception area outside the Oval Office. The door was open. To the left of the door was a desk where Hope Hicks, who was then the White House communications director, was sitting. Covering the whole of the front of the desk was a poster-sized display—a map of the 2016 electoral college results. In the space where all outside visitors would wait to see the president, the main decorative element was this proof of the president’s victory.
As I stood there in front of her, I could see into the Oval Office. The president was at his desk, having a loud conversation with a crowd of staffers including Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer. It almost sounded like a shouting match. A television was turned on, and the news headlines were about Comey and the FBI. The scene recalled the one I’d encountered in Pence’s office. People in the room emitted bleats of exasperation: Who leaked this? How did that story get out?
It didn’t seem right to be standing there, overhearing this. I looked at Hope Hicks and asked, Do you want me to go somewhere else? She answered, Oh, he’s very busy. She seemed to think that I was impatient about getting in to see the president. To clarify, I said, I understand that he’s busy, and I’m happy to wait until he’s ready. But would you like for me to wait someplace else? I gestured to the open door with my eyes, so she would understand. She said, No, no, no, you’re fine right there.
The phone rang, and she answered it. I heard her talking. She stuck her head into the Oval Office and spoke to the president: Sir, It’s Senator Grassley on the phone for you. Charles Grassley, a senator from Iowa and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had become one of the president’s primary attack dogs against the FBI and the Justice Department. For months he had been writing critical letters to the Department of Justice, fanning the flames of false rumors about me. In one letter he called for my exclusion from any aspect of the investigation into Russian engagement with the Trump campaign, citing my “partisan Democratic ties”—a line that I could only laugh at, having been a registered Republican for the whole of my adult life. Now Grassley was calling the president just before my interview. A few moments earlier, I might have had a one-in-ten-million chance at this job. The odds now slimmed. The whole fact of being here felt ridiculous.
A line of people filed out of the Oval Office. Sean Spicer looked me up and down as he passed by, silent and yet somehow sarcastic. Gave no greeting. If there had been a cartoon thought bubble above his head, it would have said, What are you doing here?
I went in. The furniture was arranged the same way it always seemed to be: little schoolboy chairs in a semicircle in front of the desk. The president behind the desk. The sit-down wave of his hand. Reince Priebus. Don McGahn. Rod Rosenstein was supposed to be there but wasn’t. Attorney General Sessions was there, impassive. The president said, I was talking to Senator Grassley, and boy, he’s no fan of yours. Trying to make a joke, I said, Yes, I was aware of that. After Grassley’s fourteenth letter criticizing me, I drew the conclusion that he and I were not going to be friends.
For some reason, the president immediately began to talk about his electoral college results in the state of North Carolina. Percentages. Numbers. His commentary on this went on for a while. Not sure how to respond, I did not respond. Just held eye contact, nodded to signal comprehension, waited for the topic to exhaust itself. Eventually he began to repeat his claim that most people in the FBI had voted for him, because people in the FBI loved him. I noticed that the percentage of love was creeping up—now it was 90 percent. I took the topic as an opening.
I said, Mr. President, when we talked last time, you asked me a question, and I did not give you a straight answer. So if it’s okay, I’d like to go back to that and tell you what I’ve been thinking. A little puzzled, his expression said, Sure, why not?
I said, Last time we met, you asked me who I voted for, and I didn’t really answer the question. So I wanted to explain to you that I did not vote in the 2016 election. I have considered myself a Republican my whole life, and I have always voted for the Republican candidate for president, except in 2016. Owing to the nature of investigations that I was involved in during the campaign season, I thought it would be inappropriate for me to cast a vote. Although it’s the first time I’ve ever missed voting in a presidential election, at the time I felt it was the right thing for me to stay out of this one.
No one in the room said a word. The president squinted. I couldn’t tell if he was angry. The look certainly didn’t convey approval or comprehension. For a second, he held my gaze. Then he moved on.
He said, So we’re looking for a new director now, and here you are. You’re interviewing. Isn’t this great? Isn’t this terrific for you? You’re interviewing for the director’s job. How do you feel about that?
I said, I’m an FBI agent, and I would like to think that any FBI agent would be honored by the opportunity to interview for the position of director. I never imagined doing this, but I’m very happy to be considered. I love the organization, and becoming director would be the ultimate way to serve. We’ve only had one former agent as director, Louis Freeh.
Yeah, he said. Well, it’s great, and I don’t know if you’re going to get it, but if you do, that’s great, and if you don’t, you’ll just go back to being a happy FBI guy, right?
I said, Yes, of course, I’m a career professional.
Repetitions of redundancy: He told me I was doing a terrific job, he talked again about people he was interviewing—Joseph Lieberman, other FBI agents. To wrap up, he said, This has been great. This is great for you, all this attention has been great. And who knows? You might get it.
There was a lot of that—a lot of dangling. Look, it could happen.… As if he were going to select the new director by spinning a wheel. This was my job interview in its totality. He had barely asked a question.
When the first tweet came—July 25, 2017—I was already hanging by a thread. I’d been acting director for six weeks. I was trying to figure out this job day by day, trying to do the right thing, keep everybody’s spirits up, stay focused, keep the organization focused, do everything I possibly could to be consistent in my messaging and stay on target and keep people working.
And then this missile fired—“Problem is that the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!”
I think I heard it on the news. I didn’t have Twitter on my phone. Following Twitter was not a part of my life. The tweet hit me on a lot of different levels, not the least of which was it’s just embarrassing to be called out by the president of the United States. To be referred to by clear implication as corrupt. To have my wife be referred to by clear implication as corrupt. It was shocking. Donald Trump had done it before, during the campaign, and now was at it again, as president.
I went into work, committed to staying upbeat and pushing forward, whether one-on-one with people at headquarters or in speeches to field offices, at a moment when the firing of the director had rocked the whole organization. Now I had this feeling that everyone I talked to probably had that tweet in the back of their minds.
Soon there would be more tweets. The next morning, as I was getting ready to leave the house, Jim Baker reached me by phone. He said, I was just calling to see if you’re okay. I was confused. Said I was fine, and why was he asking? He said, Oh, I just saw the president’s tweets this morning.
I looked them up—“Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation…” / “… big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!” Again, I was baffled about how to react. The president’s statement contained no facts. It was not an argument—it was innuendo. What should I do? How could I acknowledge this in a way that wouldn’t give it more significance or lend it some further credence? In the office that day we had an executive-leadership team meeting. I started the meeting by saying, I haven’t seen the news today—haven’t had a chance to check the paper. Anything happening? There was some awkward laughter, and then we moved on.
Two days later, on July 28, the inspector general’s office contacted me. The assistant IG said I had to come and talk to him that day, that it was urgent that I speak with them immediately. The IG was investigating Midyear, and I assumed there would be questions about my involvement in the case. I made it clear that without my lawyer present, I did not want to speak about an investigation in which I was a subject. The assistant IG said the meeting would not be an interview. He and his colleagues had something they needed to bring to my attention. In their office, I was shown the now infamous text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. IG staff and attorneys began to ask me questions about the meaning of those messages, which I had never before seen—I had not even been aware that they existed, much less that Strzok and Page had been romantically involved. They hammered me with questions about the texts that Strzok and Page exchanged, questions I could not have answered unless I’d been a mind reader—What did I think this one meant? What did I think the two of them were thinking when they wrote some of these things? Then the IG staff started asking about specific references in Page’s texts, and whether she was referring to other cases. I objected. I told them they were wandering into the territory that, as they knew, we were not going to discuss at this meeting. They pressed, asking if I knew whether Page had been authorized to talk to reporters. Two of them began speaking together, asking overlapping questions, pointing to numerous references in different texts. I was disconnecting from the questioning, trying to shut this conversation down. I said I was not aware of any authorization, but in fact I wasn’t following their questions. My mind was elsewhere: The information I’d just been given about those text messages represented an emergency, and I needed to deal with the consequences immediately.
I had a general sense, that day, of things coming unglued. President Trump gave a speech in New York, in which he called gang members “animals” and encouraged law-enforcement officers to use force freely when handling suspects. Chuck Rosenberg, Director Comey’s former chief of staff, who now served as acting head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, called me. He was taken aback by the president’s statement, and we discussed how to respond. Rosenberg issued a public statement strongly affirming core law-enforcement values of integrity, respect, compassion, and the rule of law. I spent the afternoon and evening with my senior staff trying to assess and control the damage that might be done by the texts between Strzok and Page, and trying to figure out where to reassign Strzok, who had been working for Mueller’s special-counsel investigation, but who for obvious reasons we had to remove from that team. I was angry about the poor judgment that Strzok and Page had shown, and I was saddened to consider the disparagement they would now be subjected to. Strzok was a gifted investigator. Page was a gifted lawyer. I respected and trusted them both.
After that weekend, Christopher Wray became the new FBI director and I returned to the job of deputy director. The same day, I contacted the IG’s office to add some clarity to the things I said in the chaotic interview of the prior week. I provided additional information about Page and her role in responding to the Wall Street Journal inquiries, and I suggested that they speak to Michael Kortan, who was also involved. I wasn’t trying to hide anything—there was nothing to hide. As deputy director, I could authorize colleagues to speak to the press and push back on inaccurate stories that were harmful to the FBI. I corrected the record—I wanted the IG to have an accurate understanding of the facts. These sorts of corrections are common in any type of interview, especially when it covers topics the witness was not told about in advance. Witnesses recall things after the interview is over, when the heat of the moment has passed, and they have had time to reflect on the questions they have been asked. I made similar corrections in discussions with the FBI’s inspection division later in the month when I realized they had apparently heard and written down something other than I knew to be the case. I thought that settled the matter. But some time after, the inspector general began investigating the statements I made in the July 28 interview. Having corrected the record without delay, I trusted that the process would confirm that I had done my best to answer the questions accurately—and when I realized I needed to clarify and correct what I had said, I did so voluntarily, without being prompted.
Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet.
A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country.
I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions.
Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.
At home, it was more difficult to move on. The situation was especially hard on Jill. At times, she has felt responsible for everything that has happened to me and even to the FBI—as if it all somehow grew from the kernel of her choice to run for the Virginia state senate. Of course, that’s not true. Had Jill not run for office, Donald Trump would have found something else bad to say. 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. He went after the FBI, and continues to do so, because its work has led to more than thirty indictments—with more likely to come—of individuals associated with Russian interference in the 2016 election. Those investigations raise questions about the legitimacy of his presence in the White House—questions that prompt fear.
Fear is why the president still has a map of his electoral college victory hanging outside the door to the Oval Office. Fear is why the president makes every person who goes into his office pass by a display meant to assert his right to sit behind the Resolute desk. Fear is why he asks people to pledge personal loyalty.
After December 19, 2017, it was impossible for the president or any of his supporters to believe that I might pledge personal loyalty to him—if there had been any doubt before. That was the day when my testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence made it clear that I would corroborate Jim Comey’s version of the events surrounding his firing and the president’s attempts to stop the investigation of Michael Flynn. Before I gave this testimony, the inspector general’s report on Midyear had been expected to be made public the following spring, and the investigation of my statements was expected to come out later. After I gave this testimony, the inspector general informed one of my staff members that the report on me would be coming out first—and earlier than expected.
The president’s tweets resumed within a few days of my testimony. It was like being the target of a schoolyard bully who slaps you around, lets up for a while until you think maybe it’s over, then shows up again, saying, No, no—it’s not over. You didn’t think I’d forget Christmas, did you? The whole family was at home getting ready for the holidays when I was sent a screenshot of his latest tweet: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”
It was a very effective way to terrorize my family. All through Christmas and New Year’s, the thought would buzz inside my head: He’s focused on this. Can I just get to my birthday—the date of my retirement, long planned—before I get fired?
In January 2018, after conferring with the IG, Chris Wray called me in to a one-on-one meeting on a Sunday night and demanded that I leave the position of deputy director—but also asked that I announce I was stepping aside voluntarily. I refused to make what I considered to be a false statement and instead went out on leave, intending for this to last until my retirement.
“A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe,” which was concluded in February 2018 though not released by the inspector general until April, determined that I “lacked candor on four separate occasions.” This report was used as a pretext for dismissal. The attorney general ordered my firing on March 16—twenty-six hours before my planned retirement. I received word, as Comey had, by watching the TV news. The president 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!”
I do not want to get down in the mud with the president. I do feel 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. The president of the United States especially should not. Analyzing or breaking down the specifics of what he’s said on Twitter is a fool’s errand. And I understand that it is meaningless to be called a liar by the most prolific liar I have ever encountered.
But I will say this. 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. He demonstrates no understanding or appreciation of our form of government. He takes no action to protect it. Has any president done more to undermine democracy than this one? His “I hereby demand” tweet in May 2018, ordering Department of Justice investigations of the investigators who are investigating him—I can barely believe that I just wrote that phrase—is a clear example. His demand for documents identifying confidential informants does harm to the men and women of the FBI on a fundamental level. It undermines their ability to build the trust that allows law-enforcement investigations to take place, in ways that, I want to believe, he does not comprehend. To think that he could recognize what constitutes a good thing for the men and women of the FBI does not deserve comment.
As for my own firing and the ostensible reasons behind it, the demands and risks of an ongoing legal process put tight constraints on what I can say, although I would like to say much more. I am filing a suit that challenges my firing and the IG’s process and findings, and the unprecedented way DOJ handled my termination. I will let that action speak for itself.
On May 20, 2018, on Twitter, the president called for “real Americans” to “start getting tough” on what he calls “this Scam”—the reference was to the special counsel and the Russia probe, and the basis of the accusation was nothing more substantial than fiction and malice. This was a frightening statement, which has larger implications. I want to spell out those implications here.
Since the 2016 election, it has become commonplace to note how polarized the country has become. Disagreements that fracture public life have grown to the point where people on either side of the political divide can no longer even agree on what the facts are. People accept as fact only the information they get from their own selected news outlets. When you reach the point where your own group sees itself as representing the true believers, the only good people or the only “real Americans,” then everyone else by definition must be seen as wrong, bad, fake. The president of the United States is actively pushing the citizens of this country in that direction. He exhorts his supporters to think of themselves as true Americans, and to consider anyone who disagrees with them as being treasonous, like criminals—people who should be in jail, as he has explicitly urged. The president tells one group of citizens: You are the good ones. No one else is equal to you. All the others are not as significant, not as important. They should not have the same rights. They should be treated as less-than. They are alien. They should be stricken. That is the language used by totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions to generate shock troops of core believers and sow the seeds of extremism. It would be impossible to overstate my concern at the president’s rhetoric and behavior. I hope that others, including people close to him, are as alarmed by it as I am. But even if they are, I have seen in him no evidence of any capacity for introspection, self-criticism, or good-faith resolve. He will never back off that sort of rhetoric.
I would like to imagine a future in which we have righted the ship. The more horrendous things become, the more—I hope—it will increase the odds that America can swing back in the other direction. I hope that Americans will return to faith in one of our country’s best traditions: answering the call of duty. Answering the call of duty is a tradition of both personal and professional excellence. And entire institutions, also, can embody and answer the call of duty. The FBI was built to do just that. It’s the quality that made me want to be an FBI agent instead of a lawyer.
It’s the same thing that compelled the FBI to change after 9/11. It wasn’t just that we were being told we had to change. We knew we had to prevent the next attack. We had to answer that call. It’s the same reason that Director Mueller took on the responsibility of the HIG from President Obama, despite his reluctance to get involved in an interagency feud. It’s the reason Jim Comey took a bullet for the Justice Department in the Clinton email investigation—especially after the attorney general’s conversation on that tarmac with former president Clinton. He knew it was a no-win situation, but he did it because he thought it was the best thing for the country. Finally, answering the call of duty was why I took the actions I did in the days after Jim Comey’s firing—why I protected the Russia case by pressing for a special counsel to be appointed. I suspected that someday it would cost me my job. But I also knew that it was the right thing to do.
The purpose of the FBI is not to support one side. The purpose of the FBI is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. I know that the motto sounds corny, but I will say it a thousand times. That is really what we are trying to do. I’m not naïve—I know that nobody works in a vacuum. The FBI depends on Congress for funding and for oversight. Oversight is a good thing: We ought to be overseen by someone who is not us. The FBI also depends on the White House for support and direction and policy guidance. But at the end of the day, we have got to do our work independently and apolitically. That has become very hard, and it is time for more Americans to know that this difficulty of the Bureau’s—this effort by Congress and, now, the White House to politicize everything—could cost our country dearly.
In order for the FBI to continue to fulfill its mission, it needs to attract the best and brightest. We don’t need just former police officers, military officers, and attorneys. We also need computer scientists, we need biologists, we need statisticians. We need engineers. We need people who represent America’s full spectrum of backgrounds and intellectual gifts. As the political atmosphere of our time continues to poison the intelligence community with politically motivated attacks, my fear is that people who are trying to decide whether to take a high-paying career in the private sector or to embrace a tough, maybe dangerous, and demanding career in the public sector are going to turn their backs on public service. We have got to start cherishing public service in a way that’s going to continue to attract the people we need.
I look back on more than two decades of service to the Bureau with a sense of how much has changed and also of how durable the fundamentals have proved to be. My first major case as a newly sworn-in special agent concerned organized crime from Russia. And the ultimate Russian criminal organization—the Russian government itself—created the last significant issue I faced as acting director: interference in U.S. elections, the mechanism of our democracy, which resulted in the appointment of a special counsel to investigate this assault on this country’s core values. People often think of values as fragile—and they certainly can be—but values grow in might when embodied in relationships, the basis of all social institutions: families, schools, churches, civic organizations. The U.S. government embodies values, too. The glaring exception to that rule, for now, is the presidency of Donald Trump, whose only value is self-seeking. But our government is vast, and it operates on many levels. The military, for instance, is a reservoir of civic values. So is local government. My vocation has been to work proudly in another bastion of legitimate values, the FBI. The FBI’s core values—rigorous obedience to the Constitution, fairness, respect for those we protect, compassion, uncompromising personal integrity and institutional integrity, exemplary leadership, accountability, and embracing diversity—take their form and power not only from guidelines and procedures but through an animating culture, something that exists in the soul.
Hundreds of thousands of people in government devote their lives to the work of the United States of America. Millions upon millions of ordinary citizens serve their communities and make up the backbone of institutions of every kind. All of these people, in ways large and small, stand up for what they believe in—it’s an abiding characteristic of our nation. If ever we lost that capacity, we’d be lost. But that capacity is something that real Americans will never lose.