The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump by Peter Strzok

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump by Peter Strzok “This is the book I have been waiting for.”—Rachel Maddow INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | The FBI veteran behind the Russia investigation draws on decades of experience hunting foreign agents in the United States to lay bare the threat posed by President Trump. “Peter Strzok is the FBI agent who started it all.”—David Martin, CBS Sunday Morning When he opened the FBI investigation into Russia’s election interference, Peter Strzok had already spent more than two decades defending the United States against foreign threats. His career in counterintelligence ended shortly thereafter, when the Trump administration used his private expression of political opinions to force him out of the Bureau in August 2018. But by that time, Strzok had seen more than enough to convince him that the commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin. In Compromised, Strzok draws on lessons from a long career—from his role in the Russian illegals case that inspired The Americans to his service as lead FBI agent on the Mueller investigation—to construct a devastating account of foreign influence at the highest levels of our government. And he grapples with a question that should concern every U.S. citizen: When a president appears to favor personal and Russian interests over those of our nation, has he become a national security threat? Author Peter Strzok is the former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence and a 22-year veteran of the Bureau. He served as one of the original case agents for the Russian couple who inspired the TV series The Americans, and he has investigated a range of other high-profile cases, from WikiLeaks to the 9/11 hijackings to Hillary Clinton's private email server. He was selected to head the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and worked with Robert Mueller as a leader of the FBI's efforts in creating the Special Counsel's Office. Also a veteran of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, he is the recipient of the FBI's highest investigative honor, the Director's Award for Excellence. He lives in Virginia with his family.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you on another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. And, oh, my gosh, you're just going to be mind-blown at the guests we have on today. But before we get to that, be sure to watch the video interview of this on YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification so you get all the notifications that are on there. Be sure to follow me on Goodreads.com, and you can see our book club on there as well. I'm under Chris Voss. You can also see us on the newest syndication that we have. We've been welcomed onto Amazon Music. So you can see the show there, and of course,

you can see it in a million different syndications and everything else. So today, we have probably one of the most popular guests that we have ever booked uh and that being we've been doing a lot of pre-promotion and uh the outpouring has been incredibly positive and incredibly interested uh there's so many people that are when does this get published because when does this get published chris and and so i'm excited to have him on he is a patriot and uh he is the author of the newest book that came out September 8th, Compromised, Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump. You may have heard of him. His name is Peter Strzok. Peter Strzok is the former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence

and 22-year veteran of the Bureau. He served as one of the original case agents for the Russian couple who inspired the TV series The Americans, and he was investigating a range of other high-profile cases that he's done. From WikiLeaks to the 9-11 hijackings to Hillary Clinton's private email server, he was selected to head the FBI's investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and worked with Robert Mueller as leader of the FBI's efforts in creating the special counsel's office. Peter, welcome to the show. Chris, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Tell us where people can find you on the interwebs and order up the book. Yeah, absolutely. So it's on most online booksellers, obviously Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you've got a local store, certainly a huge fan of independently owned local bookstores, so you can find it there as well. But hopefully it's a good read. I think you'll enjoy it and encourage everybody to go get a copy. I would encourage everybody to go get a copy too. I just finished it last night. It is an extraordinary story. Not only is it your story, but it's the story of America.

It's the story of the FBI. The details of it, if you're like someone who likes the minutiae of details, how the FBI works, investigations, police work, all that sort of thing, spies, et cetera, et cetera, it's a wonderful book to get into because you get into all the details and everything, and there's adventure and all that stuff. It's also heartbreaking in a way. My heart's still broken from last night, Peter, but we'll get into that. So let's talk about what motivates you to want to write this book. So a couple of things. One, you know, I was looking back on a career I left, was fired from the FBI. And so trying to figure out what, what came next and what I was thinking about that time and certainly seeing the things that were going on with special counsel Mueller and the things coming out of the

administration, I wanted to tell a story. I mean, you know, my career in counterintelligence, you kind of spin that out of the spotlight, trying to avoid being known whatsoever. But I kind of got involuntarily thrust into that light and figured, well, you know, I want to tell the story. And I want people to have something that not only can they go to to kind of get, like,

the facts of what happened, but more than that, for somebody who's never worked counterintelligence, who maybe you know sees a spy movie to actually bring them inside and explain what it's like to be a counterintelligence agent what it's like to be an investigator what it's like to go on a covert search or to go in and arrest somebody and really bring that experience to the reader as sort of a backdrop to then explaining everything that happened in 2016 forward. And that's what's a lot of fun about the book, because you go into detail and the complexity of everything that goes on. But this is also an American story. You begin your life

with your parents in Iran. If you want to start as to how the book starts out. Yeah, absolutely. So my father was a career army officer. And then when he retired, he went into international development work. So we moved all around the world growing up. And certainly, you know, one of the unique perspectives that I got from that, I mean, I was in lived through the Iranian revolution in 1978, 79, lived through another revolution, a couple of revolutions in West Africa in the early 80s, and then again, in Haiti in the mid 80s. And so throughout these, and they're all authoritarians, and you could see the kind of ways they would pervert power. And growing up, it was always something that you look back to America and always thought, God, you know, how amazingly lucky we are, how powerful in the American experience and how remarkable our democracy. And so having that perspective, you know, on the one hand, it's great. But then, you know, I kind of talk about like seeing as 2016 and the current president and administration starts to encroach on that ideal in a way that seeing things now that I saw overseas in these authoritarian regimes, and finding that really concerning, because I never imagined those things abroad, seeing them

here. And it really goes to show, you know, we take our democracy for granted a lot, and we can't. I mean, I think it's obviously apparent now we have to be out there every single day, owning the democracy, owning our rights and our liberties and making sure we're doing everything we can to maintain it. Because it's not a birthright. We have to work for it. We got it from our forefathers, and we have to do our part to keep it going forward. Benjamin Franklin, it's a republic as long as you can keep it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And we're, we're learning that. Yes. I hope we don't,

I hope we don't end up in one of the situations where when you, you, you don't, you don't miss it until you don't have it anymore. But the, but the interesting part about your story and Colonel Vindman, Fiona Hill, a lot of the people that were engaged in some of these things, what broke my heart was seeing these folks that came from other countries, that have seen authoritarian and fascist regimes, that know what this is like. And they saw America as this shining city on the hill, this beacon of light. And they look to America as this place of integrity, truth, honesty, kind of, you know, we have our, we've fallen a few times. But to see them have to end up testifying and abused and by people who, and I've been guilty of this, who get very spoiled. You know, I'm an American, nothing can stop America and stuff.

It's just heartbreaking to see that. When you came to America, I think you went into the military. Give us a little bit about your history of growing up and your time in the military and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I came after high school and looking at college, got an ROTC scholarship to pay my way through school. So went through college, knew that when I got out of there, I'd go into the Army, and I did.

Went on active duty at the 101st Airborne Division as an artillery officer. Loved it. Spent four years and at the same time realized two things. Like, one, I really love public service. And two, you know, the Army's great, but I think I want to do something that's got a little bit more of a, you know, intellectual bent or a different, you know, sort of kind of career path. And as it happened at the time, the Oklahoma City bombing had happened about a year earlier. You know, Timothy McVeigh and some others blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And the FBI had gotten

a bunch of money from Congress to hire counterterrorism analysts. And so I'm literally looking at the paper one day, saw an ad for, you know, come work terrorism for the FBI. I'm not one of these guys that, you know, knew from the time I was six that I wanted to be an FBI agent. I was, you know, sitting there and paper open saying, God, that looks amazing. And so, you know, I applied, I was fortunate to get in and best decision I ever made. I mean, you know, I got in, realized that I wanted to be an agent, applied for that. I got in, you know, about a year and a half later

and then went up to Boston in 1998 and spent, you know, more than 20 years doing it and best job in the world. And, you know, and I hope that comes through in the book. I mean, you know, trying to sit there and the experience of going in every day, on the one hand, there's this altruistic, wonderful feeling of working to make America safer. But at the same time, it's really interesting work. I mean, it was like sitting in the most amazingly complex puzzle

every single day trying to figure things out. And it was great. And I think and I hope that love comes through as you read it. Yeah, it definitely would. What's the biggest misconception people have about you? I mean, people have seen you on TV. They've seen, you know, everything that's gone on and all the garbage, you know, that's gone on from tweets and evil people. What's the misconceptions that people have about you? I think that I am very much like the average FBI person,

and that is somebody who is drawn to their work, who absolutely, I mean, it sounds goofy and a little Boy Scout-ish, but believes in the Constitution, believes in the oath of office. And I'm an average person in the sense that like every other person I worked with over the course of those 20 years, you go into work just, you know, dedicated to pursuing that work and doing it well. And so, you know, all the stuff that's out there about the deep state or, you know, people with a partisan agenda, that's all, it's all nonsense. And that's, you know, some of it gets broken down into, well, there must be a us versus them partisan thing, but it's not that way at all. I mean, it isn't

that way about me. And that's what frustrates me the most about being portrayed that way. But, you know, when I talk about contrast that to what I am, what I am is very consistent with what the FBI is. And that's hopefully what other another thing people take some comfort in. There are a lot of really good men and women at the FBI who are doing their job day in and day out to protect America. And all this sideshow of this partisan back and forth. Don't let that take away from the truth that there are a lot of people doing a really, really good job for America at the FBI. And there's something extraordinary about Boy Scout values. I grew up as a Boy Scout. So, and I think a lot of people that work in our government that work in the intelligence agency, you know, like you say in the book, they leave their politics at the door. They have a belief system in doing what's right for this country, what's right for America. And I really appreciate that. And I think more Americans need to take and do that. So you rose to the rank of the organization. Throughout the story, you talk about, you know, some of the different activities you did against a Russian couple,

which is kind of extraordinary, if you want to expand a little bit about on that. Yeah, absolutely. So I was the first office agent. That's what you call your first when you're brand new out of Quantico. I was assigned up to Boston and got very fortunate to a pair of Russian intelligence officers called illegals. And they're called illegals because they're not here assigned to the embassy. They're not even, you know, in their true identities and they're not Russian. So in the case of these two, they were they had assumed the identities of some Canadian infants who had died close to birth. And that identity, as they were going up through training in the Soviet Union, because it really started that long before the Soviet Union fell. They kind of went through their training.

They were selected, you know, near the top of their class and then paired with this false identity and that they then went, you know, they graduate and they then sitting there and their goal is just to burrow into American society to somehow go and get permanent residency and get their citizenship and the whole time they're just watching and they're finding people who are moving and shaking and moving up the chain in government or industry and they're sending all that information back to Moscow to go on a file and maybe Moscow uses it in a month. Maybe they use it in five years. Maybe they use it in 10 years, but to sit there and watch them and all the things they were doing, like they would literally sit there and pull out a shortwave radio and, you know, put it up and they have a little Morse code broadcast and they'd write down all the numbers and then take this one

time pad and then subtract the numbers and then pull out the message there that had the secret communications from Moscow. So that stuff they were doing, the kind of thing you imagine or see in the movies of the Americans, they were doing it. And so to be able to watch that and watch them was, you know, as a new agent, it was extraordinary. I mean, it was a chance of a lifetime to work on a case like that. And that was a lot of fun for me. You know, I grew up in the age where Russia was bad.

I don't know what happened the last five years or something. I don't either because they still are. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. But, I mean, I grew up in the age where, I don't know about you, but I was cowering under my little wooden steel desk as a child, you know, thinking that would save us from the nuclear bombs. You know, we would do the nuclear bomb thing for when the Russians or Cuba dropped thema dropped them on us i grew up with the russians being bad and so the last four years but the the fun

exciting part about your story in this in these parts of the book where you tell the story about bin laden uh or not bin laden but 9-11 and then um uh these two russian folks uh you know it plays out like a movie like just seeing the extraordinary detail that has to go into it, the manpower, the money, it just blows my mind just how much work you guys have to put into this. Yeah, it's true. And again, I'm glad to do that because I'm like everybody else. I'll sit there and I'll watch an hour-long show on TV

or go to a two-hour-long movie and everything gets compressed. Oh, we got the car, we put-long movie, and everything gets compressed. Oh, we got the car, we put in the bug, and then it's done. But it's never that 30 seconds on the television screen takes weeks and a bunch of people to actually pull off. And what I was trying to do, I mean, a lot of books have been written by, obviously, director Comey wrote one and some others, but it's at a much higher level where they're having discussions at the White House or at a policy level. I wanted to take the reader inside and like, you know, there's a scene, one of the opening scenes, we're breaking into a bank in the middle of the night to get to the safety

deposit box. And I was trying to say, you know, you, we can talk about, you know, briefing somebody at the white house, they're going to brief the speaker of the house, but it's really, what's really cool, you know, as you're sitting there in an alley behind a bank waiting for the cleaning crew to go in. So you can get in there and break in and you know see what the illegals have so i was trying to again bring the reader in so that if you ever wondered like what it's like and what it's like for real you know there's some tv shows that are pretty good but you know this is really

as you said and i'm glad it came across it's really complicated and it takes you know there is no one person who does it it's's a huge team. And that's always, you know, TVs likes to make or movies, you know, a hero or a person, but it's truly, it's a team. I mean, every single thing, there's nothing I did in my career worthwhile that I did alone. There was always a huge number of people involved in it. So I'm glad that came through. It really did. And it's fun. Like I just read it like a movie.

Like I was just like, and then, you know, there's anything can happen. You guys lay the best laid plans. And it's so like, everyone's like, okay, what, what have we missed? Are we thinking of everything? You guys laid the best laid plans. And like, even like, I think in the story, you guys are going to arrest them. And, you know, some, some local trooper gets in the way and blocks a whole armada of FBI cars. This is crazy, some of the things that go on. Yeah, and there's never, you know, like anything in life, there's never anything that goes as you plan it, and particularly the more complicated the plan, inevitably something's going to go sideways. So it's just learning to kind of like exist within that uncertainty. Look, I know something's going to go sideways,

so let's figure out a way to get from here to there and, you know, adapt to whatever comes along. And it shows the hard work the FBI does too. One of the stories you tell in the book is about 9-11. And it also talks about how you're not searching for the limelight. You're a guy who's trying to stay under the radar. You know, there's different reasons why you guys want to protect your guys' identity secrecy. At one point, you guys find the the hijackers cars at the airport. Tell us a little bit about that if you would. Yeah, absolutely. So we were, you know, after 9-11, you know, two of the flights left from Boston. And so there was a tremendous amount of work that took place there trying to figure out, you know, who the hijackers were. But once we started identifying them, like, you know,

they spent in some cases, you know, certainly the night before, but days before, in some cases leading up to that. So what did they do? Were they in touch with anybody else? What things did they leave behind? But all this stuff. So we have agents, you know, I'm just a probationary agent, not quite, and just come off of probation at that time. But doing all those things, like going to the car rental agencies and hotels and ATMs and getting CCT, like everything you can imagine trying to piece it down. And I was working at a group out at Logan Airport. And, you know, one of the things we had done was, okay, get to all the car rental companies and see if we could figure out who and if anybody had rented a car because they had to be getting around somehow. And it turned out they had. And so we were able to go and actually find that car

at the airport. And course i didn't you know readers or your listeners may remember 9-11 if they're old enough like there were no flights like flights were shut down so all the parking decks like everybody when they drive and leave their car at the airport well they hadn't nobody's come back to get it because you can't fly in the days after 9-11 nobody's flying so all the cars are still there so we find theirs it's like okay you know here are all the cars around it and trying to track down those people and interview them. But then, you know, inevitably the TV, somebody leaked it to the TV station and they show up.

And I just, because I was, what I was doing on the counterintelligence side, just having to like, you know, literally run around the corner and hide behind a pillar until, you know, they got their shot and moved on because it was the nature of the work is that way. I mean, my goal was to retire that, you know, they got their shot and moved on because it was the nature of the work is that way. I mean, my goal was to retire that, you know, in Moscow and Beijing, there's this big org chart of the organization chart of the FBI. And there's like my block and there's just a gray, gray pixel. And there's some guys getting yelled at because they don't have a photograph of Pete.

I mean, that was the, that was the intent at the end of my career, but it, it didn't end up that way. So that, that, uh, that speaks to though, the intent of what you wanted to do, where you want to stay anonymous, do your job, rock and roll, kick ass, use your Boy Scout values and, uh, do a great job as you, as you get to the point in the story where you talk about, um, you know, we, we start the Papadopoulos stuff starts coming up and things of that nature. At what point, where are you in the structure of the FBI at that point? So at that point, I become the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division. So that's the number two for all the counterintelligence work

that the FBI does. So that's every Russian case, every China case, every espionage case, every counterproliferation case that, you know, running that as one of the operational deputies. And so I was at headquarters and I might have been, I'm trying to remember when I got promoted. So immediately before that, I was the second chief of what's called the counter espionage section. So every espionage case in the US supervising that. And I was actually, when that information about from the friendly foreign government first came in, I was in that job as the chief of the counter espionage section. And of course, then, you know, opened up the case now known, was known then as Crossfire Hurricane

to try and figure out, you know, who may have received this offer of assistance from the Russians on the Trump campaign. And then, you know, we started that in late, very end of July. And then I was promoted early that fall into the deputy assistant director role. Nice. And you're fairly close to Comey at that point, right? Not as close as, I mean, close because of the, for two reasons. One, you know, the case on Secretary Clinton, which is called Mid-Year Exam, was something that he was very closely involved with.

You know, obviously he made the speech on January 5th announcing that we'd ended it, and then again reopening it in the fall. Both me and my partner, who was a senior analyst who led the Clinton email investigation, you know, got very, briefed him a lot. And so we became, you know, not close, but certainly we're doing a lot of interaction with them. And then when the Russian interference cases started, there was a kind of a continuation of that relationship. So, you know, while I wasn't like his, you know, one of his immediate deputies, certainly, you know, there was enough interaction to, you know, kind of gain appreciation of, you know, him as a leader and kind of as he thought about the job as FBI director. And with the Clinton emails, you get involved in that whole thing. And it's an extraordinary story in the book, if you want to expand a little on it. Yeah, so we, I was fat, dumb, and happy sitting over at the Washington field office, which

is kind of the local investigative office in the Washington, D.C. region. Like FBI headquarters doesn't do investigations. They supervise them. They do a bunch of, you know, organizational management and guidance. But the day-to-day people out there investigating cases in Washington, D.C. sit at something called the Washington Field Office. And I was an assistant special agent in charge there. Happy as can be. Great job. Great people enjoying the work. And got a call to, you know, hey, can you come over to headquarters and bring one of your supervisors? And I had heard rumblings that there was something going on with regard to former Secretary Clinton and thought it might be that.

But then, you know, walked in and they laid out the whole case, you know, how it came to be. And that, you know, their initial thought that they might be able to open it and run it from headquarters and resolve it. It was going the other way. You know, it was apparent that we're going to need to do a lot of work and it was kind of, you know, tag, you're it. And so, you know, with my partner, his name is Derek in the book. That's not his real name, but, you know, he and I said, all right, well, we've got this, let's build out the team and figure out what we've got to do. And so then for the next 10-ish months, got a team together, found some space, burrowed in the deep in the middle of FBI headquarters and went all over the world tracking down Secretary Clinton's damn emails and figuring out what

happened with them. You know, this is one of the reasons people really need to grab this book there's a lot of reasons but this is one of the one of the reasons you want to read this book i was you know i i when i was in 1986 i was uh my audience knows this but i i adored donald trump you know i was i was 20 years old or something and i thought he was the greatest businessman in the world and i followed him for several years and by 1989 he'd fallen into his bankruptcies and and it became quite apparent at that point that he had some issues. Let's put it that way. And I'd followed him throughout all of his life, just kind of keeping notes on him. I'd watch the bankruptcies keep rotating through the casino trust fund or investment vehicle they'd made. And then finally they kicked the family out.

But it just became apparent over time. And then owning a lot of companies, I became very familiar with narcissist behavior. I had a couple friends who were just like Donald Trump. And so to me, I knew what was going on. So I was screaming hair on fire all of 2015, 2016. I've been screaming hair on fire ever since um but uh the the hillary clinton story is like really you get into it and there's stuff that i don't know if anybody's ever covered it but it is really good the whole hillary clinton section and just seeing what beyond the

scenes i mean her delaying of you guys her her kind of mucking about and pushing off the interviews into the last point. And then, you know, there's the original laptops, there's a second laptops we'll get to. But that really was quite a story that you put in the book. And it really shows that, like, if she would have just, like, I was reading and I'm like, man, if you just would have sat down with the FBI early on, then you could have got that whole thing out of the way. Instead, it gave Trump fodder for all that time period. Yeah, it did. You know, and that was one of the frustrating things for us. I mean, I think we had plenty to do, but certainly some of the things that and again, was it her? Was it her attorneys that were choosing to interact? I don't know. You know, and she was busy on the campaign trail, but I don't want to excuse it either, because the fact is, at the end of the day, you know, some of the delays, certainly we had to to do a complete investigation.

We had to get every possible email from every potential source that we could. That's just good investigation. And there was no way that we're not going to do a complete investigation because, A, it's not the FBI, right? We do work well. But then B, you know, this was under all kinds of scrutiny from Republicans in Congress to Donald Trump to everybody else. So, of course, it's going to get picked apart. So naturally, we're going to have to be complete. And so why that didn't, you know, we get to the point where, you know, we identify two laptops that had been used to sort her emails. The stuff she said was work-related, the stuff she said was personal. There's a big chunk, like we never recovered some of the personal ones. I think we got all the work-related stuff, but these two laptops were clearly stuff investigatively that we had to do.

And then we entered this extended fight back and forth with her attorneys to try and get it. And it was similar to some of the fights we had had early on that you're right. I think if we just sat down, if you just say, Hey, look, it's an investigation, I've got nothing to hide. They're going to look at it. It's going to come out fine and I'm happy to do whatever I can to help. Let's get it done quickly. Everybody, we would have said, great, that's fine. Let's go as fast as we can and get it off everybody's plate.

And what is hidden, you know, because if you listen to some of the partisan discussion afterwards, it's like, Oh, they were covering for Clinton. No, you know, we were fighting. And if you go read the inspector general did a report, you know, it's like, hey, you know, the FBI team and me in particular, we're really aggressively going after it. So it doesn't, that truth doesn't line up with the perception of some, you know, democratic operative that some want to paint about me. But the reality is, yeah, there were a lot of frustrating times. And, you know, I do talk about that some and give examples of how, again, would it have been different had that unfolded more quickly or differently? Who knows? But, you know, there's probably a hundred things that could have caused the elections to have

unfolded differently had they all happened. And what I loved about it is that whole time I'm following politics. So I know the one half of the story. I'm I loved about it is that whole time I'm following politics. So I know the one half of the story. I'm seeing what Donald Trump is doing. I voted for Hillary. You know, I grew up with Hillary in the 90s. I wasn't all that excited to have to vote for Hillary. I would have liked to have had another candidate, but you know, I wasn't going to vote for that guy. And so I watched the whole thing unfold. And so the beautiful part about your book that I highly recommend people get it, uh, as one of the things is you tell the whole story that I'm missing in, in, in following Clinton and seeing, you know, the fallout of Trump attacking her and using the emails

and, you know, it becomes that locker up chant. And, and, and as, as I'm reading your book, I'm listening to that other narrative in my head that I experienced and going, holy crap, man, she should have done this. At least I think so, you know, or attorneys or whatever. But you're seeing that play out in your book. And I'm listening to the other narrative in my head and I'm going, my God, maybe she did this or maybe she, you know, the whole, that's the whole fun of the book, right? Just figuring all that out. And then the Trump narrative and some of the warning signs start coming up for you guys in the FBI.

And so those start becoming a parallel thing, correct? Yeah, that's right. And, you know, one of the other, you know, frustrating is probably the wrong word, but while we're looking at Clinton, while we're fighting all these battles, while we're hearing, you know, Trump say some things, I mean, we're hearing that, but that's not anything that's, you know, generating an investigation. But what we didn't know, I mean, Russia's going crazy at this time, right? They've sent people into the U.S. They're going around.

They're kind of surveying the landscape. They're finding socially divisive issues that they're going to turn around and go back and start planning in social media and Facebook and other places to try and pour gasoline on these conflict points. And then also, they're sitting there working like mad to break into all the servers associated with the DNC and the DCCC, RNC too, but they were particularly focused on the Democrats. They're starting to look at all of the various state voting infrastructure and databases. And so all this is going on and we're seeing little things pop up. You know, there's a different, the group that works counterintelligence and the FBI is different from the group that works cyber matters. Now they talk to each other and we embed people. The FBI embeds folks to try and bring those groups together, but we're seeing all these little things come up, but we have no idea in the spring and early summer of 16, what the Russians are doing. And of course,

they're doing an extraordinary amount. And we slowly start to see it. I mean, we open, we get this lead at the end of July that opens the case, but we don't get a real good handle on what's going on in social media until frankly, after the election. I mean, we saw Twitter, people re-amplifying, but a lot of what the Russians were doing, you know, literally, and I talk about in the book, we're doing the very first interviews for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, literally walking out of them overseas. At the same moment, Paul Manafort is walking in Manhattan to link up with a guy named Konstantin Klimnik to give him detailed polling data about everything, you know, the Trump campaign had. And we had no idea about that at the time. So what I always think and wonder is, all right, if we hadn't been so focused on resolving the Clinton server and email matter, had we got managed to get, got that done in March and April, you know,

do we see, are we looking more carefully at Russia? Are we seeing this earlier than we did? Might that have made a difference? You know, who knows? But it's certainly, you're right. I mean, that's certainly something I think I and others, you know, do reflect back on. Yeah, most authors, when they do a book, you know, you're going to have the plot and the subplot and different things to keep people active. You guys got one going on your own. And then, you know, you talk in the book about how the FBI is not ready.

No one's ready for this. I mean, no one had seen this sort of thing. I came up in social media as a, as a rock star early on, uh, when Twitter was first launched and things of that nature, top 50 social media guy, Forbes, all that kind of crap, huge audience. And so back then we used to, we used to promote, you know, Hey, Kumbaya, it's the new world and new age and everyone's going to be good. But somewhere around the end of this decade, we saw that whole thing turn where it became,

where instead it became a tool for, you know, the Arab Spring or things of that nature and democracy, evil organizations and governments went, hey, we can use this thing for evil. And so the FBI is stuck with this whole surprise, this whole attack that's going on to America, democracy, and everything else. Yeah, that's right. And look, I mean, I failed. We failed. I mean, not only me, but the FBI, and not only the FBI, but the entirety of the U.S. government.

It wasn't, you know, we saw on the terrorism side, like Anwar al-Awlaki was using YouTube videos that were, you know, radicalizing people inside, you know, the U.S. and other countries without any, they weren't in contact with somebody associated with al-Qaeda. They were watching these videos and self-radicalizing. And so we saw what the internet could do, how that could be used to move opinion.

And certainly, you know, people looking overseas saw what the Russians were doing on social media inside Russia and in places, you know, nearby the Baltics or, you know, the Ukraine or other folks, you know, they're near abroad, but none of us, not me, not anybody else sat there and said, well, hey, wait a minute. You know, if they're doing it there, if it's really working well on the terrorism side, what might the Russians do with it in the US? And so we were really caught flat footed. I mean, by the time mid 16 came along, I mean, I remember going to a briefing, somebody in the private sector had been looking at Twitter re-amplification networks,

right? There was something and it tended to be related to Russian sort of propaganda outlets that tweet something and then it would rapidly get re-amplified and retweeted through a set network that was kind of established and was used several times. And I remember watching that going, holy cow, you know, what does this mean? How bad can it be? How much do we not understand? Why are we just hearing about this now? And again, that's just Twitter. We weren't thinking about Facebook. We weren't thinking about, you know, stuff that came out later where they were actually paying for people to go organize protests in America and, you know, holding up a sign saying, happy birthday. I forget the guy's name, but it was their Russian boss, you know, but doing that within domestic actors in the U.S. who had no

idea they were dealing with Russians. And that sort of really active involvement in U.S. domestic activity on that scale is something none of us saw coming, and we should have, you know, and again, that's a failure on my part and the organization, but, you know, I think we're catching up, but it's an unhappy place to be catching up on something like that. I would say we failed as Americans because I think maybe what everyone underestimated was the American populace. I don't know. I guess I wouldn't say all of us, but the American populace has become so dumbed down

and so lost in their own echo chambers with social media and the manipulation of it without algorithms of Facebook and Twitter. This is something we talk about fairly regularly. They would fall for this. They would fall for the propaganda that they wouldn't double-check the facts. Yeah, and that's really tough, and you're exactly right. I mean, people, you know, I like Chris. I like what Chris has to say.

I'm going to tune in and hear Chris because not only do I think he's great, but he's also reinforcing what I think and what I want to hear. And so that's going on. It's not, you know, you don't have your choice of Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite. I mean, you've got any particular flavor you want now to go for what you believe. And so the problem becomes like people will tune in and listen to something because they believe it. But then if you go and try and say, oh, hey, what you're hearing actually is coming from Russia. Well, that's almost like, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know, raining on their, you know, their personal beliefs, right? Well, no, this is what I believe.

How dare you say this is Russian propaganda, because I believe it. And I think this is right. And so people's kind of, you know, they feel insulted, they feel threatened by that. And so this kind of the self selection of news sources, and then an inability, because if you challenge that belief system, it's like, I don't, I don't, I'm not challenging what you believe. I'm asking you to challenge some of the players that are giving you information. Believe whatever you want, but just take a little bit to understand, you know, this might be some guy sitting in St. Petersburg somewhere who just wants America, you know, at each other's neck. Separate that out. And if you can do that, well, fine.

Then go believe whatever you want and think whatever you want. But at least see that hidden hand because, you know, within America, you know, whatever we want, that's great. But don't let these foreign, like foreign governments sit there pushing this one way or the other and pushing us against each other. And Trump is clearly propagandizing and popularizing Russia and Putin during the campaign. He's like, yeah, we should all be friends and hang out together and have drinks and stuff. And you're like, what? Wait, what?

I used to hide under the desk from these people. When did we cross this line? So you guys start getting the data on Papadopoulos. And you guys start seeing these different things. And you're like, what the heck's going on? And then you named the, you named the, you named the investigation after Rolling Stones. Are you Rolling Stones fan? Yeah, I am. And I was trying to remember because everybody's asked and like for the longest time, like case codenames like that for counterintelligence cases are classified. So I, you know, I was writing the book and that

hadn't come out. It might've been in the media, so I'm just notigence cases are classified. So I, you know, I was writing the book and that hadn't come out. It might've been in the media, so I'm just not naming it at all. And then, you know, it comes out in the IG report and some other stuff, but yeah, you know, I was listening. So of course people have asked, I think, I think at the time I might've been listening to hot rocks, which, you know, an assembly of kind of a lot of their singles. But in any event, you know,

I had jumping Jack flash running through my mind and there was always that. I love that, that the idea of those, those two words, those two words you know being you know i was born in a crossfire hurricane but just crossfire hurricane the idea and the imagery of that was like oh my god this is you know pretty amazing case name you know i had no idea how i don't know this is i don't know this is class of sorry go ahead oh no no go ahead i don't know if this is classified i don't know if you can tell me but has the fbi ever looked into why the Rolling Stones are still alive? Like, I mean, this seems like something that should be looked into. I don't know that they have, but I can tell you my guess is that, look,

I saw them just after the 4th of July last year. They came to RFK, or not RFK Stadium. Yeah, but I mean, the FedEx Field, the successor to RFK Stadium. And God Almighty, it was a great show. I mean, they got up there and, you know, like any classic act, you know, the music mean, the FedEx Field, the successor to RFK Stadium. And God Almighty, it was a great show. I mean, they got up there and, you know, like any classic act, you know, the music sounds like the music. It's not synth, it's not lip sync, but, you know, however old they are, 70s, 80s, and rocking out like they're,

you know, 40 years, 50 years younger. I will let you and your listeners draw your own conclusions about how that is. I hope half is vigorous when I'm that age. Everyone's like right now, so Peter Strzok is one of those guys who likes the Rolling Stones over the Beatles, so I see what kind of guy we're dealing with right here.

Yeah, I will confess to that. I mean, nothing against the Beatles, but given the two, I'm definitely... I think the Rolling Stones, even the Beatles are a good influence on them. So you start the thing. And like right away, Papadopoulos, this was kind of interesting. I think I'd heard this in the news reports.

But Papadopoulos interviews with you guys, and he goes home and erases his Facebook account he's had for 10 years. Like if that isn't a guilty sign, I don't know what is in my book. Yeah, there was a lot of stuff he did. Look, I mean, he pled guilty to lying to us. He went to jail for lying to us. And again, it wasn't just lying. It was lying about his contact with the Russians.

And there was a lot of kind of sketchy stuff he did, including, you know, deleting the Facebook stuff. And, you know, he's on his, you know, coffee boy rehabilitation tour trying to say how he was, you know, the mastermind behind, you know, it got in the way of a lot of whatever it is he's claiming. But the fact of the matter is that he did have contact with people associated with the Russian government, more than one, that he actively hid. And so the question is, you know, when you see that, why are you hiding that? And it's true of all these folks. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong if Donald Trump or any other candidate says, I want to have a closer relationship with Russia or China or, you know, whatever country. He ran on that and that was clear. And we were very careful to make sure that we weren't ever doing anything investigatively that would get in the way of that, because that's not the FBI's role.

That is perfectly legitimate activity. The problem is all the hidden stuff that was going on with Russia, the hidden stuff with Trump, the hidden stuff with Flynn, who became his national security advisor, the hidden stuff with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the hidden stuff with, you know, both George Papadopoulos and, you know, allegedly with Carter Page, who were both named foreign policy advisors, the hidden stuff with Paul Manafort, his campaign manager, and Rick Gates, his deputy campaign manager, have hidden relationships with Russia or people in Russia and make you wonder, this is one, unprecedented, two, enormously concerning, and three, most of them end up getting charged and pleading guilty to violations of federal law, all about those hidden relationships with Russia. So yeah, it was overwhelming at times to to look at that sort of scope of what we were seeing as we started diving in and it was quite extraordinary to me to see some of the

american public there's always been that 30 that's kind of out there they always supported nixon no matter what he did um but but to see these these folks go against the f, go against the rule of law, start calling what the FBI is doing as maligned or a political sort of thing. It was crazy. I mean, Hoover would be rolling around his grave right now, wouldn't he? Yeah, and I don't understand how that happened. I mean, I grew up like my father grew up on a dairy farm in the middle of Wisconsin. My mother grew up on a tobacco farm right on the North Carolina, South Carolina line. And I remember growing up and we would go and they were both, you know, we were Republicans, the family was Republicans, we would sit there on the Fourth of July and thank,

you know, go to church, thank God we're not godless communists, and we'd eat apple pie and wave the flag and everything was good. And that was, you know, it was clear and everybody agreed. And I don't know where and now we got, you know, like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, the same, you know, it was clear and everybody agreed. And I don't know where, and now we got, you know, like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, the same, you know, my father's, you know, the entire family there who's going to Moscow on the 4th of July and then coming back and taking all this Russian propaganda that he's using and, you know, putting into stuff to try and, you know, denigrate Joe Biden. I don't understand how things have flipped. And I don't understand at the end of the day, because, you know, one thing that's absolutely still true, like, you know, when I went into the army, all the soldiers that I served with, you know, they're from these, you know, they're either from

the, you know, urban areas where they're trying to find a way out, or they're from the middle of America where they're trying to get off the farm, or they're trying to see the world or whatever it is, that is that traditional 35% that you talk about. And so when you know that, and at the same time you see Trump like not, the Russians putting bounties on the heads of Russian soldiers and on American soldiers in Afghanistan. When you see Russians like ramming American servicemen

in Syria and injuring a bunch of people. I mean, these are the sons and daughters, the husbands and wives, the friends of that 35%. And our president is doing nothing, nothing. I mean, it's the upside down. It's less, it's worse than nothing. I don't understand how that gap can exist. It just doesn't make sense to me because, you know, that guy that got injured in Syria, that gal who got injured in Syria, that person who was, you know, getting shot at in

Afghanistan, that is the person from wisconsin or indiana or pennsylvania or north carolina it's not some elitist from chappaqua you know so i just don't i i i can't square the the corners of that i i don't understand it it is quite the insanity of all that what the one thing i loved about book, and this really needs to become a movie, hint, hint, anybody listening, option it, is I was watching you guys, you're going through the Clinton track, and you've got the new Trump track, and you guys, I felt for you guys, before I read the book, I mean, I was feeling for you guys back in the day, because you guys have this guy who

could be president, who oversees the intelligence agency who would see the investigation if he's elected and you guys are dealing with these extraordinary conflicting things that the fbi has never had to ask themselves in in its whole in its whole experience of life of like what do we we do with this? Yeah, it was hard. I mean, certainly it was difficult before the election because, you know, part of what you do is you, you know, you never have enough resources to do what you want to do. So you look as an investigator and you say, okay, what's the range? You know, what's the worst thing it can be? And what's kind of the best thing it can be? You don't ever just pick one thing and go to it. You're looking at the scope.

Well, the worst thing was that he was a Manchurian candidate, right? That, you know, he was wittingly working with Russia, taking tasks, doing what they told him and responding to that. Now, I always, all of us always felt that was unlikely. But just the fact that you had to say that, just the fact that that might be possible is astounding. I mean, it's staggering to have to sit there and, you know, we're all kind of shaking our heads saying, none of us can believe we even have to say that, but yet we can't exclude that possibility. And then on the other side, which I think is frankly the truth, is that you don't have any central mastermind. You get a bunch of people who are largely incompetent. They're all grifters. They want to get rich or they want to gain power or they want

to translate power into money. And they're all running around with their own agenda rather than protecting and serving America. They're trying to, you know, serve themselves. And I think that's the reality of what happened. But so we're looking at all that and the minutes and the hours and the days till the election just keep getting closer and closer and closer and understanding, you know, we're not coming to a resolution point. If anything, the horizon is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we're finding all these things. And then the election comes, you know, and everybody's expecting the chances are that Clinton's going to win, and then she doesn't. And it's like, all right, well, two months, a month and a half, this guy's going to

be the President of the United States. So then it's like, okay, well, we a half, this guy's going to be the president of the United States. So then it's like, okay, well, we can't, this is not too significant. We can't just sit there and watch for four years and not know. So we've got to kind of pivot and figure out what can we do to responsibly try and wrap this up. But the pressure, I mean, it was unbelievable that summer. And then, you know, it's like the movie you're watching and you think you defeat the boss at the end and instead oh he's just a little minion and the real big boss is you know and you got another 45 minutes left in the movie you're like oh god it just it was the same thing it's like all right well now he's been elected and we still don't know truly how much

you know trump himself is or isn't involved in this and all these people under him and around him we do know now we know that they're you know hiding and have these concealed relationships with Russia and that pressure that intensity just increased and increased and increased as time went on and then um one of the other things I liked in the book and one of the reasons people should read it because like I said it completes a lot of what we know and then what you know, and it comes together and you're like, wow, there's the whole picture. You know, you talk about when the two laptops appear at the end game. You guys have wrapped the investigation.

You think it's in the can, and then all of a sudden that comes up. And by duty and rules of the FBI and honor bound, you guys have to deal with this. And both you and Comey, you talk about in the book about dealing with, you know, what do we do? Do we follow protocol? Do we follow the Justice Department's thing of not doing anything with it, saying anything within 90 days of election? I think it is or 60 um and you guys are trying to decide like how is this all going to play out do we interfere with election do we do our job um and how it all balances out to me i had you know we were arguing

like hell over this whole time especially i remember the day that shit dropped about okay we're gonna we're gonna reopen the investigation for two laptops. I was like, Hillary's dead. I had friends that were saying, uh, I wish I hadn't sent him my vote. Cause I would have, I would have flipped from Clinton to Trump. Uh, I had friends that were saying, I'm going to flip the Trump. So, and, and like you say in the book, you mentioned that a football game or any sort of game is lost by a whole lot of factors that go into it. I mean, I've been a Raiders fan to know there's a lot, there's a lot of ways you can lose, but I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that, but that was quite the experience to read about in the book.

Yeah. So those were really hard conversations at the end of October and a lot of soul searching by everybody there. And you know, there's been, you know, Comey's talked about it. A lot of folks have talked about the back and forth, you know, initially when he said, well, I think we need to notify Congress, you know, I was against it. I didn't think that was the right call because we didn't know what was on there. We didn't know if it'd make a difference. And, you know, I didn't articulate that very well. And then, you know, one of the senior attorneys, you know, sitting next to me chimed in and said, Hey, look, you know, are you worried that, you know, if we do this, we might swing the election to Trump. And

then Comey gives us now, you know, recounted a thousand times stories of, you know, if we start taking political considerations into account in our decision-making, there lies the death of the FBI. But that was, and then I was persuaded because his point was, look, I've already said we closed the case. I've already told Congress we've closed the case. If I don't then mention that now, if, you know, to not speak is bad and actually is much worse than speaking and all the horrible things that will come from that. So, you know, a couple of points. One, to the extent there was an original sin, if you will, that happened back with the July 5th timeframe where he made that speech announcing the end of the investigation. Because that puts us on this path that we can't get off of. And then that really forces a smaller set of decisions. And

then the other thing is, like, I do think, you know, and it's heartbreaking to feel this, that I do think that made a difference in the election. And, you know, to your point about the football game, like, I do think, unfortunately, that might have played a role in getting Trump elected. I do think Russian influence also got him elected, you know, but so did a thousand other things, you know, campaign more and, you know, Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin and not, but yes, but all of that is kind of baked into the American political process. I can tell you, Russia doesn't belong in that process. And I can tell you, sadly, frankly, the FBI doesn't belong in that process. So I like the analogy of the football game, you know, or any one play.

But, you know, of all those plays, there are a couple that didn't have any place in the game. And that's, you know, with impossible, you know, the benefit of hindsight, that's, you know, one of those things I reflect on and think could have made a difference. Yeah. I mean, there were tons of people who didn't vote. The vote was repressed.

The social media factor of it. There was a lot of different things that went into it hillary clinton could have gone to wisconsin just once for christ's sake um was that uh anyway uh you tell the story about how uh you guys are dealing with all that, then Comey gets fired. And then you're dealing with that whole fallout and everything goes in. And then you go into and that leads you into more if you want to expand on that a little bit. Yeah, no. So to the earlier point about how things just continue to seem to continue to accelerate and accelerate and accelerate. Of course, now we're post inauguration. He, Trump is in power. He's having these meetings with Comey where he's asking him to, you know, Flynn has, it's come out, you know, didn't tell

the truth about his interactions with the Russian ambassador. Trump fires him because he didn't tell the truth to Pence and others in the White House. And at the same time, he's telling Comey, hey, you know, do me a favor, see if you can let this go. And so this pressure just continues. And then up to the point where suddenly, you know, none of us expected just out of the blue, you know, that, that evening, whatever day of the week it was coming, it's fired and he's out in LA and we're all stunned because now it feels like, you know, nobody, none of us know what's coming next. I mean, is it the kind of thing where somebody is going to come across from the department of justice or from the white house and say, close all your cases, give us all your evidence, give us all your files.

I mean, we don't have any idea what is coming. All we know is that the head of the organization, the organization just said it's head cut off. And all these things we were worried about, you know, and there's this building concern about, do we need to open a case on the president himself? You know, we had plenty of legal justification and authority to do it months earlier, and we just had held off for a lot of reasons. But then this is, we're faced with this

and just, you have to assume the worst or prepare for the worst just to be prudent and just not knowing, you know, what's coming. And so we're sitting there scrambling, like, you know, the memos coming in written, like, you know, the night he's fired, I'm sitting there at a, you know, at a multifunction scanner on our classified network, just getting those scanned into our file system so we can bury them and make sure they're part of the record and nobody can come and take it away until we try and figure out what is coming next. And of course, what comes next is, you know, Trump sitting in the Oval Office with a Russian ambassador and the Russian foreign minister laughing it up, you know, put his arm around him saying, you know, he fired Comey. It was a real nut job. And so it's like the worst, all these,

however bad you thought the nightmare was, you see this and it just keeps getting worse. And so, you know, that was those 11, 12 days between the time Comey was fired and Mueller was appointed as the special counsel were, you know, probably probably the the 10 11 12 days of most stressful i've experienced in my life it it was extraordinary for those of us who uh i don't know are patriots i suppose because because it just went like this into overdrive because you're like wait we just fired comey and you know i know enough about nixon saturday massacres and stuff to go, okay. And then you see the Russians in there.

And, like, my head just went around on social media. I was like, what the hell? I think John Brennan said, I hope they swept the office after they left. And then we didn't get the pictures or any of the news from it. We got it from the Russians. Yeah, that's right, because he threw out a menu. No American media was allowed in. Yep.

I was just like, what the hell? I'm moving to Cuba. I don't know if that's an upgrade, but there you go. So you detail in the book, and this is where the book just goes, like Star Wars when you go to hyperdrive. And it just starts punching. And you guys are just going through this. You're like, our values and what do we do and how do we do this right?

And it's a situation the FBI has never been in. And then McCabe, you go through the story of, of course, what was interesting to me in the book, because I've always been interested, and this is another reason people should grab the book is is um the the appointee or or the gentleman who wrote the letter and his name is escaping me right now for some reason who wrote the letter that got comey fired from the rod rosenstein rod rosenstein's always been an interesting character to me to try and crack that nut like i've spent the last four years trying to figure that nut out. And I, I don't understand him. I mean, some, I'm not calling him a nut. Yeah. He knew, right. I mean, he was,

it came out later in the Mueller report that he had gone up to the white house and Trump had asked him, Trump had written a letter firing coming, which his attorney said, the white house attorney is like, no way in hell. You cannot send this. And so he asked Rosenstein to write it and told Rosenstein to put Russia in there. And Rosenstein said, no, I don't want to, I don't feel comfortable doing it. And then came back and wrote instead this letter criticizing Comey about his handling of the Clinton email investigation. And then of course, the White House uses that as the fig leaf, you know, ah, we fired Comey because this letter from the deputy

attorney general and Rosenstein claims to have been in surprise. Like, I had no idea they were going to, they're pitting it all on me. I'm not the one who did it. It was like, well, you're, you know, you're the, the acting attorney general for a lot of this because Sessions had recused. How can you be so unaware that you having had all this interaction and all this discussion at the white house with Trump himself, how can you not understand full well exactly what they were setting you up to do and that you willingly went in there. And so this professed surprise, I find, if it is true, then it is disappointing because I would hope that somebody who's the acting attorney general and was the deputy attorney general would have enough political acumen to understand the ins and outs of the political environment in

Washington, certainly under Trump, which we had been under for, you know, five months, four months at that point. So I don't, I always thought that whoever writes the biography of him is going to be a biography worth reading. But now I've put the biography of Bill Barr on top of that in terms of like, can't figure it out, interesting reading. So in any event, there's some, there've been some interesting folks at the Department of Justice over the last few years. Yeah, the original letter, we invited Andrew Weissman to come on for his memoir, and he made a comment about the original letter that Trump had written. He called it tinfoil helmet material. Yeah, it is.

Having read it, I think it was appropriate that his White House counsel kept him from sending it. After reading all of his tweets, I think we can get a picture of what it goes into. Several pages of that, right? Yeah. Just, yeah. What a tome of interesting. I hope someday we survive all this and we're able to look back and then go, well, that was interesting. Otherwise, if this is what our future is, we're definitely screwed. And then you go through the whole thing where it was interesting, the story too,

and this is a story that no one hears about. Another reason why people should grab the book is it tells a story, and my perception of it is, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my perception is the FBI starts to throw you under the bus. Donald Trump starts winning. He starts putting them on the ropes. They start instead of, you know, I think Hoover would have done something different. Um, but Hoover probably had tapes and stuff. Uh, well, he usually did actually. Uh, but, but it really seems like they start falling apart. Uh, you know, he's attacking Andy McCabe. He's attacking you. He uh you know he's attacking annie mccabe he's attacking you

he's attacking he's attacking everybody i mean he just goes full out and uh he's talking more um but it really starts to i really started getting the impression reading the book especially near nearing the end that the fbi really starts uh breaking down from his attack. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. I mean, you know, I'm suing the FBI right now and DOJ. You know, my firing was politically motivated and was done for improper reasons directly as a result of the pressure from the president. So I believe that.

And I think, but the thing is that it goes to the, I don't think anybody in the institution of the FBI or anybody else in the government was ready. Like you have kind of the standard bureaucratic behavior that protects the organization that everybody knows and everybody has done for decades and decades and decades. Suddenly, when you're faced with a president who's like personally attacking people and going after in very repeated, direct ways, employees. I mean, I was at the time, you know, I'm an FBI employee, so I can't talk to the media. I'm not allowed to say anything. And, you know, there's all this outrageous, these lies that are being thrown out there. I can't speak. And, you know, the Bureau

is, you know, traditionally is, oh, we're not going to speak at all. And, you know, you see it not only FBI, but department after department after department, you know, attacking people, you know, you mentioned the State Department, Department of Defense, and all these organizations, people are taken aback, both personally, but also professionally. And some of it's like, well, A, I don't, me personally, I don't want to be in that line of fire. And then B, the organization that I'm running, I don't want in the line of fire. So the tendency is just to pull back and like, you know, sorry, we got to cut you, we're throwing you loose, you know, or casting you overboard, whatever analogy you want. But that has an insidious effect because it doesn't stop. And then, so you've got all these

people who are been, you know, cut loose and demonized. And then the much, I mean, which is horrible and awful. But then the other thing that does is anybody in the remaining in the organization, they don't, nobody's going to stick their neck out. And that's the goal. Nobody is going to work cases against Trump. Nobody is going to speak out against something he's doing. I mean, that's the intent. And it's pretty effective because I haven't seen a single US government agency where there's been effective pushback and somebody's kept their job. And it's bad now, but that's why I'm terrified about another four years of it. Cause I think that's when the wheels come off in a way that are hard,

if not impossible to fix in any reasonable way. And me understanding narcissists. I don't, I, I don't know why I was so lucky. Maybe it's cause they just own a lot of businesses and do these people. But I understood that what he was doing was to cull the FBI and to put everybody into submission mode to make it so that everyone would just fall in line and follow him. But one of the heartbreaking things about the book is, you know, you go speak in front of Congress and you really take those boys on. You do a great job uh the attacks are just blistering um it's heartbreaking to read throughout the the thing because like you say you can't speak out you're

just you're just stuck and just getting pummeled you know i mean like i say i can't imagine i've written a lot of ugly things to donald trump and and uh and if you pull my messages i'm going to be in the gulag in the next four years with you. If he gets reelected. We'll have a lot of company. Yeah, there'll be a lot of us in the gulag. We'll do a good social scene for the shuffleboard. We'll sing songs or something.

But, you know, you go through that whole experience, but it's just heartbreaking to see you go through it and everything else. You have your great moment in front of the Congress. You get to speak your thing. You're still holding and defending your FBI agency. You're the people you work for, the reputation that you have. Even now, you're still holding secrets that you'll probably take to your grave because those are classified, even though you're suing the FBI. I mean, like I say, I'm kind of a different sort of guy, which is probably why I'm not an FBI agent.

I'd have a hard time, like, not lashing back out. But the heartbreaking story for me came in the end when they just start just slowly moving you out of the agency. At one point you go through and you ask for review and there's different things. And usually there's a long procedure that goes into it, you know, fighting, you know, getting pushed out of the FBI. But clearly they're just trying to push you out. And then you start, after the hearings, you start going through this thing where your family's attacked, where the press is showing up at your home and, and death threats are coming to your family. You guys had to evacuate your house for a week. And it's just, it was just heartbreaking for me to read. I'm like,

what the hell is this going on in America? Yeah. And it's, I mean, clearly it was hard, you know, and writing about it was hard and hearing about it and talking about it is hard, but it's, you know, one it's the heartbreaking thing is it wasn't just, you know, and writing about it was hard and hearing about it and talking about it is hard, but it's, you know, one, it's the heartbreaking thing is it wasn't just, you know, I'm an example of what's happened to so many people and, you know, trying to sit there and say, Hey, you know, to personalize that and to try and put a human face on it that people can see, but also say, okay, but that is the same thing that Colonel Veneman said and Ambassador Yovanovitch and Dr. Hill and, you know, the anonymous whistleblower who people will track down and think they know who it is, but just person after person after person, anybody who is crossing, you know, Dr. Fauci, I heard is getting, you know, all kinds of crazy threats, but anybody

who has any variance of opinion is targeted in such a personal way that pervades into their private life and their family's private life. And I wanted to show that, at least in some way, that the cost and impact of that, that hopefully people, because that goes on with a lot of tacit agreement, whether it's from partisan media, whether it's partisans in Congress, but at some point, hopefully people will sit there and reassess and say, wait a minute, this is nothing we've ever done before or accepted before. And we've let this line go too far, so let's try and bring it back.

And, you know, my hope is certainly next administration we do, but at some point we've got to have a little bit of reckoning about, you know, the boundaries that have been crossed that shouldn't have been crossed and try and get those back to a reasonable spot. You know, I had the co-editor of Washington Post on the book, Trump on Trial, and his wife, Mary Jordan. And one of the things I asked him, I played the scene from Colonel Vindman saying,

because your right matters. And I asked him, does rights still matter in America? And like you say, and you tell the story in your book, and like I said, it's heartbreaking to read. I didn't even know you could death threat an FBI agent. Like I thought people came to your home if that happens didn't even know you could death threat an FBI agent. Like I thought people came to your home if that happens. And maybe it does if they know where you are.

But that just always seemed like a bad idea to me. I don't know. Take it from me. But you go through that whole experience. And in the book, there's a point where you talk about one of your FBI agent friends. And he says, sometimes, you you know the good doesn't win sometimes the guys with all the money and the bad guys uh get away yeah and that was early on like this guy and uh senior agent in boston again i was 28 29 years old and he was a vietnam vet so he was i think past, like you're eligible to retire at 50, mandatory at 57. So he was easily in his mid fifties. You know, we're driving down Commonwealth

Avenue, I think in Boston, these beautiful Bronson homes, just like old money, right? You know, old money from before the American revolution sort of money and looking around and, you know, and he saw me, I'm sure looking around with my eyes wide open and just trying to point out to me that, you know, if you were going after all these people, but we tend to get the simple crime or the criminals you can't afford, you know, a defense team of 50 attorneys. And so if you do get somebody who's amazingly wealthy, who wants to break the law, it's going to be really, really hard. But then his point was, of course, that's not the worst thing. The worst thing is that there are people that, you know, if you want to pursue things that aren't, you know, traditionally in our American value set that you can still, you can influence the law, you can make things legal and, you know, still abuse. But this idea of, you know, we are all participants in perfecting justice.

And that never ends. And that goes to the broader idea of like, you know, we are, we have to be invested in democracy. This isn't some birthright. You know, it isn't birthright that we have elections every four years and there's a peaceful transfer of power. We have to be engaged in all of this. And we've had, you know, our grandfathers fighting the Nazis, and the Japanese knew that. But we've had this remarkable span of, you know,

notwithstanding the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the Cold War, but we've had this remarkable period of peace where people have kind of forgotten how active you really have to be to keep up the American experiment. And, you know, like we kind of started out talking, I think we're about to, we're realizing that again now, and it's going to get more and more apparent in the months ahead. The crazy thing is, is, is we're going to find out what America really is and what America really wants to be. But on the other insane side, we're, they may not get that choice because, I mean, just as of yesterday, Donald Trump is, he's giving fascist symbols that there may not be a transfer of power.

He tried to throw a balance. One thing I did skip in our questions is you were the person who interviewed Michael Flynn. And you talk in the book about how you prepare for it. And actually the whole conversation with Michael Flynn, at least what you can tell us. And so that was quite an extraordinary thing to see in the book. But what do you feel now after being that guy who interviewed Michael Flynn, seeing what Bill Barr has done with that in reversing the charges or trying to? Yeah, I mean, clearly, look, it's a miscarriage of justice, I think,

more than think, I know. This is a man who played guilty not once, but twice to two different judges. He did it verbally. He did it in writing. He gave extensive statements to the special counsel, where if you read the Mueller report, he is giving all kinds of explanations why he didn't tell the truth. I don't know what's going through his mind. I don't understand specifically to Flynn. It was, and it's a, it was a plea bargain, right? Part of the word of bargain, because, Hey, we're making a bargain with you that you're going to plead guilty to this and these other things that he was investigated, which are now known, like his unregistered lobbying work for the government of Turkey and some other stuff that,

you know, what may be there from criminal exposure, the agreement, the bargain was that he would just plead guilty to this false statement. So I'm not sure what is going on in his mind. But I can tell you that, you know, what I see the attorney general doing when I see the lead prosecutor for that case quit because his conscience won't allow him to stay on that case because he's so disappointed and disturbed by what he's saying. I mean, those are huge alarm bells. And I'm beyond disappointed. You know, there's certainly a level of disgust that this is a miscarriage of justice and it shouldn't be happening. And we'll see what the court does.

I mean, I think, you know, they'll have some hearings and interesting to see what information comes out of that. That was quite compelling in your book to be reading that knowing, you know, what's going on now. And you're just like, holy crap, this guy, this is the guy who who asked the questions and and part of this whole thing is is you know you were i think a year and a half uh

before your retirement uh with the fbi mccabe just the cruelty of the point of trying to take away as much of his pension as they possibly could vinman fiona hill the attacks uh seeing them frog, you know, seeing Colonel Vindman taken out of the White House with his brother and the fallout that's gone on with that. One of the hardest things for me is this is supposed to be America. This is supposed to be right. There's supposed to be a good ending to this story. And that was one of the things I put to the Trump on trial authors from the WAPO was, when does right get to matter again? or not we're going to fall into a fascist regime where I think some, someone's going to seize and, and, and seize power and, and take over it.

We may be looking, looking at the new Trump family monarchy that we saw in the GOP convention, or we may have Biden. And somehow I just want that story to end good. Like there has to be that you like, I'm like, where's the you, man? Yeah. I look, I think if we wait long enough, we'll get there. I mean, I talk about like one of the hard lessons of being an FBI agent is you find out that, you know, you know, somebody has done something wrong and you know, you're never going to be able to prove it. And just that knowledge that bad people get away with doing bad things sometimes and how hard a lesson that is to kind

of absorb and live with. But I think, you know, it's definitely, you know, in my mind, a dark time and a lot of challenge ahead. But I think, you know, if you look far enough out, I have every, you know, I believe that 65 and I think it's more than 65%. I mean, I think some of that 35% really, you know, there's a good 15, 20 there that, you know, whatever it is, has haze, has gauze over their eyes. And that when the truth comes out, the truth, you know, be like sunlight from above, but things suddenly become clear. And I do have faith. And, you know, at the end of the day, we still do. Again, I go back to that analogy.

You know, I go back home to my parents, you know, homes in the middle of Wisconsin, in the middle of the Carolinas. At the end of the day, we still believe in the same sort of things for America. And a lot of things on top of that that are contentious, but at the core, those things unite us. The things that unite us are stronger than the things that are dividing us apart, as bad and contentious as it is now, as in many demonstrations as we have now. But because, you know, we got it. There's not, frankly, any other option that we got to fight through it and get to write.

All right. I'm going to put that on a soundbite loop. And every time I get discouraged, I'm just going to keep what I do with America. Yeah. God pray I'm right. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's say a little prayer right now. You know, like I said, every time I log into WAPO, the Washington post and see that democracy dies in darkness like I said, every time I log into WAPO, the Washington Post, and see that democracy dies in darkness, I go, okay, we got one more day. We're still here. We're still rocking

it. But yeah, I think it's going to be a dark time. I think it's gonna be a dark time over the next few months. So one thing Joe Biden wanted me to ask you, he called me earlier, if he wins, and he appoints James Comey as Attorney general, would you take the deputy position? Well, let's get let's get Biden. Let's get Biden elected first. I mean, never say never. But, you know, I want to I want to get to November 4th and then figure out what there is. There's the good the good news and the bad news. The bad news is there's a ton that's broken. The good news is that means there's a lot of work to do to, to make things right again. So there's plenty of opportunity out there. So would you come back to the FBI if the door was reopened for you?

You know, if there was a whole, I mean, I think at this point, you know, I'm now old enough to retire. So I think that whole calculus is, is changed. I mean, you know, never say never. I, you know, clearly that I'm suing to be reinstated, but at this point, you know, reinstatement and then retirement, mean, you know, never say never. I, you know, clearly that I'm suing to be reinstated, but at this point, you know, reinstatement and then retirement, I, you know, I haven't thought about that, but it was, it was the job of a lifetime. I mean, I'm so to this day, despite all the horrible stuff that happened, I mean, the day in, day out, the men and women that were just amazing and the job was amazing. And I, you know, couldn't be more thankful for having had that

opportunity. Well, now you're an accomplished author. People love you. know, couldn't be more thankful for having had that opportunity. Well, now you're an accomplished author. People love you. What's the future for Peter Strong? We'll see. I mean, I'm teaching at Georgetown, which is great. Something I always wanted to do. And now, you know, with the book out of the way, that was a, you know, a very focused effort to get that done and edited and worked out and published. And so now it's kind of looking back out and, you know, public service has always been a strong draw, whether that's inside of the government or outside of the government. Again, there's a ton to do for better or worse.

And so I'm looking forward to, you know, figuring out meaningful work and diving into that. There you go. And I'm going to look forward to book two, which is the good ending. The you part where, and everything came out good. And the winners went into the sunset and the heroes. Sir, you're a and and everything came out good and and the and the winners went into the sunset and the heroes sir you're a hero and a patriot uh and uh i i just uh uh i love the book it i read it in 24 hours like it was just gripping it was like a movie i encourage my whole audience to go out and grab this book read it and like i say if you've been following the one track of all

the news that we've been exposed to uh peter's book fills in the blank and you get the full circle and you're just like, holy moly, that went on. Check out his book, Compromise, Counterintelligence, and the Threat of Donald J. Trump. Thanks for being on the show with us today, Peter. Chris, it was great to be here. Thank you very much. And it was wonderful to have you. And to my audience, be sure to see the video version of this on youtube.com for just Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Order his book on Amazon.

You can see all the great authors that have been on the Chris Voss show at amazon.com for a shop for just Chris Voss. And also for us on goodreads.com, you can see our book club group. We just started over there. And also the CBPN online podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Be safe. Wear your mask.

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