The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election by Devlin Barrett

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election by Devlin Barrett Interview The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary's blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center. In September 2016, Hillary Clinton was the presumptive next president of the US. She had a blue wall of states leaning her way in the Midwest, and was ahead in North Carolina and Florida, with a better than even shot at taking normally Republican Arizona. The US was about to get its first woman president. Yet within two months everything was lost. An already tightening race saw one seismic correction: it came in October when the FBI launched an investigation into the Clinton staff's use of a private server for their emails. Clinton fell 3-4 percent in the polls instantly, and her campaign never had time to rebut the investigation or rebuild her momentum so close to election day. The FBI cost her the race. October Surprise is a pulsating narrative of an agency seized with righteous certainty that waded into the most important political moment in the life of the nation, and has no idea how to back out with dignity. So it doggedly stands its ground, compounding its error. In a momentous display of self-preservation, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and key Justice Department officials decide to protect their own reputations rather than save the democratic process. Once they make that determination, the race is lost for Clinton, who is helpless in front of their accusation even though she has not intended to commit, let alone actually committed, any crime. A dark true-life thriller with historic consequences set at the most crucial moment in the electoral calendar, October Surprise is a warning, a morality tale and a political and personal tragedy. Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for both the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting. He has covered federal law enforcement for more than 20 years, and has worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the New York Post.

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 chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my gosh you're gonna be just blown away by the amazing washington post author and journalist that we have on the show today but before we get to him we'll keep you in suspense you like that

suspense setup i did there it's a whole suspense thing you know what you should do in the meantime while you're being suspended because it's kind of like the vote right now in america we're just all kind of on our uh whatever's waiting for the vote so you just have to wait to find out who this author is and the title of his amazing book that you'll be able to order on amazon but in the meantime go to youtube.com fortress chris voss i think everyone hates me now really because i you know reference the vote thing too so everyone's in that painful experience but the beautiful thing is you're going to get the rest of the show much quicker than you're going to get the vote right now it's november

5th 2020 if you're hearing this later anyway guys uh go to the cvpn.com uses right online podcast go to uh goodreads.com for chris fosh you can see all the books i'm reading there are reviews different conversations around a book there's a a book group over there. There's even bigger book groups on Facebook.com. You go to Facebook.com forward slash The Chris Voss Show to see the page. And then if you Google the groups, there's like three or four big groups that are over there as well that we talk about all the stuff we have on the show. Today, I have a really interesting topic. I'm really excited to have this guest on. We've had the ex-FBI, I guess I have to say now, Peter Strzok on. We talked about his book. We have invited James Comey on this show to do his book. And today, we have Devlin Barrett. He's a

Washington Post journalist for his book on the FBI. And this is going to be all kind of it's like a giant topic that we're talking and unpacking still four years later. His book is called October Surprise, How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. Devlin, it writes about the FBI and the Justice Department. He is the author of the book we just mentioned. He was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election. In 2017, he was a co-finalist for both the Pulitzer for feature writing and the Pulitzer for international reporting. He has covered federal law enforcement for more than 20 years and has worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and the New York Post. Welcome to the show, Devlin. How are you doing?

Hey, thanks for having me, Chris. I'm doing great. How are you? Awesome sauce. I'm doing as best as I can. I'm just waiting for the vote, but thankfully we've got something to entertain our audience with here. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs and where people can order this book up. So the book October Surprise is available at Amazon and most bookstores. And my Twitter handle is at Devlin Barrett. It's kind of a funny name, but it's easy enough to find because it's kind of a funny name. So that's where you can find me. And the book is, you know, out there. And I'm really happy about it. There you go. And what motivated you want to write this book? I mean,

seems kind of obvious after reading your bio, you cover this, but what motivated you to really write about this topic and make it? Well, you know, to be honest i i know it's sort of a cliche for reporters to write books i personally had never wanted to write a book i didn't think a book was was sort of uh worth the time and energy when i was i mean a quick personal story when i was a young man my mother was in the hospital with leukemia and she was finishing a book and it was painful to watch her, you know, spend her remaining hours working on a book. And, you know, she died before that book was finished. And I came out of that process. And weird aside, there was a there was a guy down the hall, the patient down the hall that we weren't supposed to talk about ever. We were only supposed to ever refer to him

as Mr. Brown. And he had a security detail and we weren't supposed to say anything about Mr. Brown. And they knew I was a reporter, so they came up to me, the hospital staff came up to me and said, please don't tell anyone about Mr. Brown. Okay, fine. Mr. Brown leaves the hospital eventually while my mother is working on the book in her bed. And a few days later, my mother and I watch his funeral on the BBC because Mr. Brown was the King of Jordan. And he had the same type of cancer my mother and I watch his funeral on the BBC because Mr. Brown was the King of Jordan. And he had, he had the same type of cancer my mother had and he, he didn't survive it. And I know it's a little sad, it's a little maudlin, but I came out of that process thinking, you know, no one gets to pick their amount of days, like whether you're a King or, you know, just a nice lady working on finishing her book, no one gets to pick their amount of days.

And to be honest, I came out of the process thinking, I'm never going to spend my days on a book. That's not what matters to me. That's not important. And then 2016 happened. And 2016 to me was, I covered the FBI, I covered the Justice Department, just about the craziest thing I'd ever seen people in those jobs do. And it seemed clear to me as the dust settled from 2016, that really the FBI had played an enormous role in deciding who the president was. And that is not obviously something that the FBI is normally doing or probably normally should be doing. And I also felt like as we got, you know, that sort of the arguments over 2016 seemed to get so much more heated as we moved away from it. You know, I'd

like to joke that, you know, we're still in 2016. We're still basically enwrapped in the same kind of political grappling that we saw in 2016. And, you know, it's early November, we're counting votes still, and it's the same issue. And I really felt that as we got in 2016. And, you know, it's early November, we're counting votes still, and it's the same issue. And I really felt that as we got further away from 2016, we actually understood a little less well, why certain things happened, and particularly why the FBI did some of the things it did. And so that's why I wanted to write the book, I felt like, whether or not anyone embraces it or likes it or wants to hear it, I felt like I really wanted to explain as best I could how and why the FBI came to make these incredibly consequential decisions and what the results of that were. Interesting. So give us the arc of the book, and then we'll get in some of the depth of it. So obviously, in 2016, there's two major things that happen, some of which are understood in real time and some of which aren't.

The first and most obvious being the FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server for her work as secretary of state. Everyone knew about that. Everyone understood it. And people argued about it and disagreed about it. But it was essentially a known thing, although there were certainly some major surprises along the way. And what I tried to do was explain how there were forces inside both the FBI and the Justice Department that predated Clinton, had nothing to do with Clinton, were really about sort of the internal issues of the FBI and internal issues of the Justice Department that fed into how decisions were made on the Clinton email case. And the other case, which it took a lot of people a long time to figure out really existed, which was the investigation of the Trump campaign. And obviously, that's another hugely important

part of what's in the book and part of what happens in 2016. But that's a little different dynamic because most people in real time aren't, the public, I should say, aren't really seeing very well exactly what's going on with that investigation. But obviously, the Clinton investigation is essentially playing out at least partially in public view. And what I tried to, what I focus on in the book is the forces that were moving inside FBI and Justice Department before the Clinton investigation. Then the picking up the Clinton investigation and the Trump campaign investigation, how that reaches a crisis point essentially in October for everyone involved and how the fallout of the decisions that the FBI makes in October just have incredible consequences for everyone, not just for the people involved, for the agencies involved, but for the country, for the world, really. And, you know, the last part of the book is really sort of like,

here is the fallout of all of those decisions. Okay. And reading the, the Amazon page and the PR behind this book, it, it gives me the impression that, that the FBI is the number one reason Hillary lost. Am I having that impression, right? Or how does that? What I say in the book, and I lay out the polling data argument for this is that the Comey letter, if you think back to late October 2016, Comey sends a letter to Congress, October 28th, announcing he is reopening the Clinton email investigation. It's 11 days until the election. Hillary Clinton has a lead, depending on which poll you believe and put your faith in, Hillary Clinton has a lead of about six points. What you see in the polling after that letter is her lead

drops three points pretty quickly. And now she's in about the 3% range. And why that's important is 3% is a fine number, you know, for a lead, especially when you're talking about nationally, but that's not how we choose presidents. Look around what's happening right now, and you can see a very vivid demonstration of why the Comey letter was so important, because what really matters is the margin in battleground states. And what you see in the battleground states in 2016 is that after the Comey letter, Clinton drops, and she's now in that danger zone of margin of error. And that danger zone is misleading to a lot of folks because a lot of folks still think, well, she's still up by three points. It probably doesn't change the outcome.

But she loses Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by very, very small amounts, fractions of 1%, far less than the 3% effect that Comey had on the polls. So when I look at the polls, and more importantly, when I talk to the people who process this data for a living, they're pretty adamant that, look, Comey was the difference because things were much closer than people understood them to be. And when I think when you look at where things are now, I think one of the things I said to a colleague, you know, in the last 48 hours is just imagine if there had been some version of the Comey letter in this election cycle. Do you think we would be talking about Biden being ahead if the FBI Director Wray had said last week that he was investigating Hunter Biden? Do you think we would be talking about Biden being ahead and Trump maybe catching up? Maybe not. I don't think that would be where the numbers are. And so to me, it was very important to lay out how important a role that the FBI played in the outcome, according to the data, because I think that was one of the things that sort of got lost in the shouting that followed

the election. Yeah. So you, you really feel it was the number one thing that, that sent her over the edge. Let me play devil's advocate with that a little bit, because I I'm still curious and it may be one of those things that no one ever resolves. Right. But you know, I remember reading about the union bosses in Wisconsin and the, in the States that flipped. And they're like, hey, man, she didn't show up.

And finally, our people were just like, hey, we got this Trump guy who's willing to hump our leg, and he's promising us everything, and Obama forgot about us, and Hillary isn't even bothering to show up. The running joke on SNL was Hillary just had to show up in Wisconsin once. And then you had you had, of course, the lying of the polls. We've seen that again with the polls where I don't even know why we trust pollsters anymore. Sorry, pollsters. My bad. But there was that. I mean, when I had Peter Strzok on, actually, we actually talked about this. And I said, I said, we're, you know,

you guys really the ones who push this over the edge and, you know, both him and Comey have said, my God, I hope we did it. And, you know, they're, they're kind of haunted by, by the feeling that maybe there was something, but then I kind of look at it as like a football game where there, you know, you always look at that one play play like you're like, well, they missed the field goal at the end. But, you know, over so many different watching of football,

you realize that it's the series of plays that put them in that position where they got to pull the clincher or they're fucked. And, you know, if some guy didn't run offense in second quarter properly or there was an interception thrown, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a death of a thousand cuts. So given what I to argue that, you know, Clinton's choices didn't matter. Although I do think it's interesting, if you think about the whole she didn't go to Wisconsin thing, well, Biden went to Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes. Biden's going to win Wisconsin, looks like, by almost the exact same number. And think about how different the focus, how much more focus there was on Wisconsin. You're talking about a delta of 40,000 votes in a state, you know, with a lot more than, you know, that's less than 1% of votes, right? And so you're talking about a super narrow margin.

And my point is not that Clinton was gonna win by a landslide and then lost closely. My point is that this election, the 2016 election was close. And Comey and the FBI did not believe it was close. And Comey and the FBI believed they had essentially, you know, for lack of better phrase, enough slack in the system that they could afford to sort of, for lack of better term, look out for themselves a little bit, and how angry the Republicans in Congress were going to be when they found out that there were

this, there was this, you know, supposed evidence sitting around that could change their view of the Clinton email investigation. And I think they did what they did because they thought there was no way they could affect the outcome of the election. I don't think they meant to do, I don't think they meant to change the outcome of the election. They were trying, and I think if they had believed that they could, I think they probably would not have done it.

But the reality is they had too much they could, I think they probably would not have done it. But the reality is they had too much confidence in the polls. They had too much confidence, frankly, in their own good judgment and ability to perceive the outside world correctly. But the truth is we don't perceive we all of us don't always perceive the outside world correctly. And so to your analogy, the football game, and I think that's an important analogy because I think that is very, very much part of what happened. I think of the Comey letter as this sort of crucial last minute play, except it's not by the players on the field. The Bureau doesn't have a role in elections. And that's the part where I think people sort of like sometimes gloss over, which is that the bureau letter is almost like

someone suddenly turning off the lights in the stadium in the last 20 minutes or if you're wasn't there a Patriots game where there's a snowstorm and the snowblower comes and like just plows the area where the Patriots kicker

needs to have good footing to get as good. Like, to me, that's like, hey, man, the snowblower guy is not supposed to be a player in this. And so my point is, not only did the FBI have that impact, like that final decisive end of the game impact, but also they're not supposed to be on the field at all. That is the whole point of these policies and how they work. And I think, look, I think to Pete Strzok's credit, I think he said in your show and in his book, you know, there's essentially two people on the field who shouldn't have been there in that election, the Russians and the FBI. Yeah, I think that's right. I actually think in terms of like the decisive final moments, I hate to say it, but I think the FBI was a bigger, was a bigger impact. That's a, that's a really good argument.

This is a reason why people should read the book and check it out and see how you've laid this out. I'm not sure that the, before we get into the parts of the book, you know, I didn't think this was important, but I actually love the way you described the definition of October Surprise. And I wasn't going to bring it up, but I'm seeing that there's 300,000 people in a voting election group that's growing at 1,000 per second or some shit on Facebook. So give us your definition of October Surprise, because I actually like it? So October Surprise is basically, historically, some kind of dirty trick that's played at the very end of an election. And it's usually, you know, the sort of stereotypical version is that a campaign throws out some fact or some digs up some piece of dirt about a candidate. And it's so close to election day that the candidate who's being accused of something doesn't even really have appropriate time to defend, explain, deny the accusations

that's being lobbed against them. And where I first experienced the definition in this issue was when I was a reporter at AP, I was lucky enough to have a boss named Sandy Johnson, who was very, very smart and very, very attuned to this notion that in October, a few things happen which can make things really dicey. The reporters are very, very tired. The political consultants are getting desperate and they're looking for just to win by hook or by crook. And, you know, you're right up against the election day. So weird things can happen at the last minute that just sort of change the landscape. And so October surprise, I think, weirdly, because of what happened in 2016, it's all anyone talked about this October.

Like, is this an October surprise? Is this an October surprise? I get the interest and I obviously think surprise is one candidate's partisans basically doing a dirty deed against another. And a lot of times an October surprise doesn't have the impact that folks want or hope that it has, in part because it comes from a place that people are suspicious of. You know, the example I always use is like, well, if Roger Stone came out and accused someone of, you know, being a bank robber or something, I think most people would say, I don't think I'm going to believe Roger Stone on this point. But in 2016, what did you have? You had the director of the FBI coming out and saying, we're reopening this investigation. People are going to believe the director of the FBI. And so that's why this one had such an impact. There you go. I mean, you believe the director of the FBI. And so that's why this one

had such an impact. There you go. I mean, you, you nailed it right on the head. I mean, there's a trust factor people have with the FBI. And, and, and yeah, I mean, when they come out and say something, they, they step right into it. And it's an interesting story to me, the overall concept of it, because we're all human. We all make mistakes. Sometimes we do things. Hindsight's always 20-20. And sometimes we set in motion between what we think we're doing is right or the right thing.

And it ends up being the completely wrong thing. What's the old saying? Good intentions pay the way to hell. Absolutely. And, you know, you talk about in the book, a lot of these different characters who are trying to do the right thing. I think there was a term that you use, uh, uh, James Comey. A lot of people referred to him as I think Mr. Saint or something.

Saint, Saint Jim. Uh, yeah. A lot of, a lot of, some of, some of his, uh, underlings called him Saint Jim. And I like, and I like Jim Comey, but there is a bit of self-righteous sanctimonious that comes across on him. Not necessarily in a bad way, but you can see him as a guy who really struggles to push that moral, ethical line. And in this case, it definitely buggers everybody. And the fallout has been huge. So let's talk about the book. Three different parts you have in this book.

Let's talk about, and I don't know if you get into this in the book, but one of the foundations I think was important to lay for this is the FBI not only is dealing with, holy shit, we have the Russians, and no one's ever seen this sort of electronical attack, and then on top of that, we have a president that's possibly compromised and he's the leader of the intelligence and we have to somehow you know bridge this gap and then on top of that they have they have trey gowdy and all these republican mad dogs that for the last, I think, pretty much four years have been just throwing the Justice Department, the FBI, just doing everything they can,

all these Benghazi things. To me, what I really saw in that era was they were just browbeating the FBI. And so I'm kind of curious how much that laid a foundation into how the FBI ended up with this October surprise. I think it played a huge, huge role. And here's how. When you if you think back to July of 2016, at the beginning of July, two things happened. Hillary Clinton sits for her interview with the FBI. Right. And within days, Comey decides to essentially strike out on his own without telling his bosses what he's going

to do with the Justice Department and just give a press conference in which he says, we do not recommend charges, but I would like to spend 12 minutes talking about how bad Hillary Clinton's conduct was. That was bad. That was really bad. And no one in the FBI had seen anything like that before. You know, there are there have been cases in the past where the FBI or the Justice Department have described evidence, for example, in a letter to Congress or in some other sort of fashion. And oftentimes those cases are designed to say, if it's a civil rights investigation, essentially show your work so that people have faith in the results. And that's, I think that's a valid impulse and a valid argument. And to be fair to Jim Comey, that is his argument. His argument is that this was so important that we needed to show our work in a way that we wouldn't normally do.

However, what he did instead of sending a letter was he spent, you know, 15, 14 minutes on live TV, bad mouthing Hillary Clinton. And I remember talking to FBI agents that week who despised Hillary Clinton, who thought, what the hell was that? We don't do that to people. That's not, that's not what we do. Who, who, who decided that that was what you should do? But here's, this is a very long winded answer. I apologize. But here's where it gets really important for what happens later. The political reaction to Comey's presser was was incredibly important because Republicans went crazy mad and they just raked him over the coals on the hill. Democrats were very complimentary of Comey and said, you're an upstanding guy. We have no, we in no way question your integrity. We think you're great. We appreciate you doing this. The Democrats were very happy to take their half a loaf of, okay, no charges on Hillary Clinton. Great. It's over

because from the Democrats point of view, while they might privately grumble and they did privately grumble about the way Comey did it, their main takeaway from it as Democrats was, oh, thank God this email thing is over. Yeah. And I love that explanation from you, even though you can go as long as you want. I love how that plays out. When I seen it, I thought, this is not FBI-ish. And you lay a foundation in the book where you talk about the FBI becomes really concerned about its image being right. And that's why I asked you, I really felt like a lot of it was coming from these commissions. I mean, I lost count on how many Benghazi commissions there are. Four people died in Benghazi and not to minimize it in any sort of way.

But, you know're we're closing on what'll be 250,000 people dead and they're not gonna do you know they're just like whatever um from coronavirus um but it was interesting to me you know I the browbeating I've seen the FBI and and the the other departments take over during that period. And then even with Rosenstein, Rosenstein, you know, I think he threw, who did he throw under the bus? Was it Andy McCabe or was it Peter Strzok? He threw there, oh, he threw Peter Strzok under the bus with the messages, right? Yeah. I mean, there was, there's a, there's a lot of bad blood between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page on the one side and Rob Rosenstein on the other over sort of how the texts were sent to Congress and given to reporters. The, you know, Strzok and Page are suing over that, and that's still a live case. And part of what my book sort of goes into is one of the things that sort of gets set in motion by Comey's decisions in mid-2016 is that the Justice Department leadership and the FBI Department leadership increasingly don't trust each other.

And they come to suspect each other of shivving them, essentially essentially over and over and over. And, and those two institutions do not function well, if at all, when the leadership just doesn't trust each other and they, and they are, you know, viewed as essentially stabbing each other in the back. And I think that distrust you see carry over into 2017 when it comes to Rod and Andy McCabe, because they have to sit there and, you know, get the Mueller investigation up and running. And even as they're doing it, Rod and Andy McCabe, in that moment, I described this in the book, don't trust each other at all. They're trying to get the other one bounced off the case completely. And that is an incredibly dangerous place when you're talking about the acting head of this case at the Justice Department and the

acting head of the FBI. That's a crazy situation. And it's really another form of the fallout from 2016. This notion that the head of the FBI and head of the Justice Department don't trust. Yeah, to this day, I can't figure out whose side Rosenstein was on. I mean, he did so many different things were just like your one side you're like okay he supported the fbi and the other thing you know it started with the letter of course that he wrote um the guy it didn't get comey fired but they used it as a prop i should say um and you're just like dude you didn't see what that letter was gonna be like who didn't like i'm not in the fbi i'm no intelligence dude i could see what that letter was going to be like, who didn't like, I'm not in the FBI. I'm no intelligence, dude.

I could see what was going on asking that, write that letter. And, uh, yeah, it's interesting how the whole thing plays out. It's interesting. Comey's mindset on the whole thing. Uh, it's interesting how the politics of it. One thing that made me angry when I read Peter Strzok's book, a compromise was how long Hillary Clinton dicked around with her lawyers at finally sitting down with the FBI.

It was like almost a year. And she could have got it out of the way very early on, at least from what I could see in reading the book. But instead, you know, she gave Trump, like, all this rally play that he could do. She's under investigation. And then you look at the fairness of of well he was under investigation at the same time but it's counterintelligence so we can't talk about that

but then comey comes out and he's a dick to to hillary and it's crazy yeah and and one of the ways in which i think that when he comes out and he says all those things about hillary clinton in that announcement in july what the justice Department and the FBI take away from that is they don't need to worry about keeping the Democrats happy. The Democrats are basically glad with their half a loaf. They need to worry about how much matter the Republicans might get based on whatever they do next. So when they're sitting around in September and October, like working through some of these issues, and they have to deal with this whole question of like, do we reopen this case? They're afraid of the Republicans in a way they're just not afraid of the Democrats.

And that I think one of the things I describe in the book is that's just a huge miscalculation on the part of the Democrats. The Democrats did not understand how their actions were influencing the FBI decision process. And I think they just grossly miscalculated the consequences of that. Even people like me, we were relieved, you know, just in the pews of the audience. We were relieved. We were like, oh, yeah, okay, well, it did seem weird. He said a bunch of stuff.

But we're like, hey, you know what? At least she's off the hook for the damn thing. There's nothing there. Well, and I think this is one of those deals where if you, if you are the cop nerd or whatever you want to call me and you've dealt with investigations and covered investigations for a very long time, you know, it's, it's a, it's a little like that scene in animal house, you know, it's not really over. You think it's over, it's not over. And you know,

things can always come back. Like cases get reopened. Like that is not a super unusual thing. And I know I totally understand the human impulse and the regular person impulse. Oh, the Clinton email case is gone. Great. But, you know, there was always the chance, given given the way the FBI works, given the way digital data works, that something could come up at some point. And that's what happened. So in your, in part one, it's called fidelity. You talk about several different concepts, the Comey effect, the rise of Andy McCabe. You've written several articles about Andy McCabe and his wife back in the time, because she ran for office and stuff. Let's talk a little bit about part one. What's in part one. So part one, so I call it fidelity. The FBI motto is fidelity, bravery, and integrity.

And the book is divided into three parts. The first part, fidelity, second part, bravery, and shockingly enough, the third part's integrity. And I named it fidelity because so much of what's happening in the buildup to, you know, let's say in the period from 2015 to early 2016 is the FBI is looking at the Clinton case and is trying and dislikes the what they view as the, which are top secret compartmentalized information in an email sitting in a private server somewhere to them, especially're trying to sort of grapple with the fidelity to the rule and the fidelity to the way this process is supposed to work. And they believe she has run afoul of that. And the problem becomes Comey is a sort of unique character who has a larger than life personality, who has an incredible reputation. And Comey believes that his reputation alone can sell things that lesser officials, lesser people could not sell, such as, you know, not telling the attorney general what the outcome of the biggest case is going to be,

such as, you know, making an announcement on his own later. And, you know, Comey believes that the force of his, you know, intelligence and charisma and reputation can convince the American public that he is in the right to do these things. And the truth is, and then what a lot of the book goes into is about how, you know, there's a lot of people who have spent decades working at the Justice Department and the FBI who looked at what Comey did and said, man, these rules are here for a reason. These rules don't say everyone but the six foot eight guy has to follow these rules. These rules say we all follow these rules because the rules are what protect us from people coming after us for being unfair. And it's a really important point that I think, you know, obviously Comey disagreed with,

and to some degree still disagrees with, you know, he still basically argues that he did the right thing in these situations. I think he just misjudged the moment. I think he misjudged the country. I think he misjudged his own building to some degree and the Justice Department building to some degree. But Fidelity is trying to set up the notion of they have a high standard that they want to enforce, not just among themselves, but among places like the State Department and Hillary Clinton. And how do they do that in an effective, meaningful way? And I think what happens over time, as you see, they make decisions that I don't think stand up to long-term scrutiny.

And, and that's really, I mean, that's the scope of your book, but I saw a lot of that when I, when I would watch Comey and, and the guy seems incredibly intelligent and brilliant. And, and he's, he's been through, I, I don't know if some of it contributed to it, but he's been through some extraordinary experiences like the time they rushed over to the hospital and, you know, they had the extraordinary intervention with the Bush administration over the Patriot Act or one of those things they were up to. And, you know, they I mean, that was that was moments of achievement and stuff there. But then you but then you I agree with you if they'd follow the rules of the Justice

Department where you don't announce something 60 days, I think it is or 90 days. It's really the funny thing. And here's the problem. The rule is not actually spelled out in a meaningful way. The general rule of thumb, it's actually more of a rule of thumb than a hard, fast policy, which I think is part of the problem. And, you know, frankly, that's not Comey's fault. It's not Comey's fault. The DOJ never really like puts hard lines on this stuff. But the idea is that 60 days before an election, you should not do anything that would affect the outcome of the election. And some people view the rule as to as to say you should not do anything that might affect the outcome of the election. Now, there's a big difference, obviously, between would and might.

I think in Comey's case, he managed to pull off both of them. Not, you know, unfortunately. But now you've reached a point and you saw it in the last couple of months where people are endlessly arguing inside DOJ and the FBI as to what is an actual where is the line for this? Because because look what you saw the president doing in the last two months. He kept demanding that the FBI and the Justice Department publicly announce an investigation. Of Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, he's like that to me, obviously, I wrote a book about it, so I think about this stuff a lot. To me, he's just calling for another version of the Comey letter. He got one the last time Comey didn't even work for him.

And Comey gave him one. Why can't the FBI that does work for me, give me one. And I got to say like the FBI wouldn't do it. They, they, they stayed out of it as best they possibly could. And the thing I saw in, I, I, I, I don't know that I'm the greatest person of character, but I've had thousands of employees and I used to hire a lot of them. So I used to have to sit across the desk from people and kind of crack their heads to see if I wanted to put my money in them. But the thing I got from Comey is, you know, he was a, he's an intelligent

guy. He's trying to do the right thing. He's trying to, he's trying to follow the law. He's trying to, but, but a lot of it seemed a little selfish to me with, it was all about the FBI and protecting the FBI. And I have a lot of respect for the FBI and the bureaus and the rule of law and the importance of what they, they delve to this country. But it seemed really like his, his conversation is a lot about, well, I'm trying to protect the FBI and the FBI,

and it's like, hey, dude, you're fucking with America's election. And as you mentioned early on, they had no business being in there. Right, and I think, so there's a couple things to think about. One, Comey is obviously, like a lot of senior officials, this isn't unique to him, but Comey is obviously very a lot of senior officials. This isn't unique to him, but Comey is obviously very concerned about his own reputation. One of the things I think you see repeated, not just in the FBI, but in the Justice Department, is the senior officials get in kind of a sticky spot, let's say. And they start making decisions that are more in their own personal reputational interests than are in the interests of the Justice Department.

Like no one really wants to take a hit for the team, if you know what I mean. And I think you see that in Comey. I think you see that in Andy McCabe. I think you see that in Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General. And I think you see that in Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General. It's a really unfortunate dynamic that sort of takes root in the tops of these organizations. And look, the argument that the FBI is more important than the national election for president, I think, is not a very good one. I think that's actually a pretty bad argument. But that's essentially where the FBI comes down when they're wrestling with this issue of what to do in October. I think the smartest thing they could have done, and, you know, like I said, we had Peter Strzok on the show. We talked about how they really struggled with this with this thing um and they even pre-wrote

the letter and i remember seeing the letter being put out about the you know the last was the last two weeks about the the anthony wiener laptops uh and uh that guy was just a dick at every level, which is ironic. But it would have been better if they just hadn't said anything and just wrote it out and just said, we'll eat it if there's anything, but maybe there's nothing. And then in the book, or at least some of the discussions that I've seen you take and talk about, there's a real fumbling. And Peter Strzok talked about this in his episode with us. There's a real fumbling of those laptops.

Like, they were supposed to be taken care of early on. He said he'd sent, you know, everybody, the appropriate authorities, you know, to look into it. And the ball had gotten dropped. And, like, no one saw it. And it was just a cascade of these events that were just, that were just, you know, uh, everybody's trying to do the right thing. And, and, and it ends up being the wrong thing and, and they don't see the unintended consequences. So, um, the second part about the book and one thing I'd like to have you talk about

that I've seen you talk about is your, your rendition and your research on this kind of workplace protector, cover your ass sort of thing that the FBI develops from your research. Right. That they have in their culture. Yeah. So one of the things I try to do in the book, and obviously a lot of the book is about individuals, right? It's about Comey. It's about Andy McCabe. It's about all these individuals. But I really wanted, as best I could, to make the central character of the book, the FBI itself, as a work. Because to me, so much of what happens revolves around that central character, how the FBI makes decisions,

how they interact with each other and and how they, you know, make tough calls, let's say. And so if the FBI is the central character of the book, the FBI is a fascinating work environment, and for a couple reasons. One is that Comey liked to refer to the FBI as a faith-based organization, not faith as in church, but face as in saving face, the Japanese expression of saving face. And what he meant by that was that the FBI tends to be very obsessively hierarchical, almost military in its, you know, observance of chain of command and following the chain of command religiously. But also that the worst thing that can happen to you in the FBI is to look bad in front of your boss, to embarrass and to be embarrassed in some form. The FBI is an incredibly

shame-based, you know, motivational operation. And I don't say that as a negative thing. I think, you know, all of us, you know, any workplace, I think has some element of that. What I'm saying is that at the FBI, that element is a particularly intense. And so, and so people are constantly obsessing about the notion of I can't screw anything up. I can't put myself in a position where someone might say I screwed something up or got something wrong. And that's part of their, you know, general, you know, devotion to high standards. One of the, one of the things that I, when I first started covering the FBI many, many years ago, one of my first sources said to me, never forget the three most important words in the English language, FBI. And, you know, within the FBI, they talk endlessly amongst

each other. You know, Hoover's mantra was always never embarrass the bureau. And that was the most the most awful thing you could do as an FBI agent. And that lives on in the bureau in a very real way. you know, tense and politically tough decisions to make. A lot of those decisions are sort of built around the concept of what is the thing that will make us look least bad. And so when it comes to things like sending that letter about reopening the case, there's a famous moment in the process, and I go into in the book when one of Comey's advisors says, but boss, what if by doing this, you know, we get blamed for, you know, making the other person the president? What if we get blamed for the outcome? And Comey's answer, which he's very proud of to this day, is that I can't even consider that. I can't consider the possibility that what I'm doing

might affect the outcome, because that would be the death of the FBI. We can't consider the possibility that what I'm doing might affect the outcome because that would be the death of the FBI. We can't consider outcomes, which I mean, as an intellectual exercise, okay, fine. But if your judgment value system is such that the only thing you can consider is what makes the FBI look good or bad versus what the actual real-world effect of your decisions will be, I think that's a little off, maybe more than a little off. I'm trying to be polite about it. If you refuse to consider the real-world consequences of your actions, I don't know that you're really making a decision in the best interest of anyone

but yourself. Do you think they consider though the real world implications of everything? Because I got the impression they spend a lot of time, you know, the one thing, let me ask you this, because we talked earlier about the Trigadi and the Benghazi things and how they, you know, they really had the FBI on the ropes and a lot of the intelligence agencies along comes russia and that and then and then president trump is in on it and so they're you know they're really on the fucking ropes with like how do we deal with this what do we do this guy will end up leading the intelligence agency wins the election i mean you're just like holy shit you know the the wolf is in the hen house uh sort of thing and you don't know if he's the wolf or not but that's the part of a

counterintelligence investigation and you're just like what i mean they just seem like they're really on the ropes and you know you mentioned uh sally yates and a lot of these other people that were in the justice department do you think that that the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of this horrible politics and the unethical nature of his bombastic and just all that shit just made them even more try and do the right thing and hold to these higher, holier-than-thou attributes? Or was that something that was just already baked in? I think it absolutely did. But I also think it has a different effect that was hugely important, but sort of almost more cultural and psychological than it was thoughtful or verbalized at any point. And that's this. Remember how I talked about the FBI? There's a lot of shame-based motivations within the FBI. Well, look at who Donald Trump is and how Donald Trump behaves. Donald Trump's basic premise as a public figure is he can feel no shame.

No one shames Donald Trump about anything. He says all manner of things that, you know, let's just say a generic FBI agent would just completely blanch and be like, oh, my God, that's horrible. How could you say such a thing about this person or that person or this group of people or that group of people? Donald Trump was not a kind of the kind of politician that anyone at the FBI had ever seen before. And look, that's true for all of us.

Right. I think Donald Trump was a unique. Right. And look, that's true for all of us, right? I think institutionally and personally and psychologically, the folks at the FBI, because they're such, you know, the stereotypical button-down, strict, self-limiting G-man, were almost uniquely ill-equipped to look at Donald Trump and think, oh, yeah, that guy could be the president. Because in their minds, no one like Donald Trump could even be like a line FBI agent. Like no one who behaves like that would survive two weeks in the FBI.

Yeah. And we all, I think a lot of us fell to that. Like I didn't, like no one's. Right. Even like Hillary didn't go to Wisconsin and other places because she's like, no one's going to vote for this idiot. And she had her party set up for her to go. She thought that was a slam

dunker um so getting into the second part of the book uh bravery i don't know if we've been touching on this but you get in the laptops you get into uh several different aspects uh let's talk about that a little bit if you want to suss it out right so one of the things i try to really unpack in detail um and explain to folks carefully. Sorry, there's a helicopter overhead. That's okay. Welcome to life outside Washington, D.C. So one of the things I go into in a fair bit of detail in the book, because I think it's one of the things that sort of got lost in the shouting, is that the Anthony Weiner laptop, there's an investigation that begins in September of 2016. And to a former congressman named Anthony Weiner, who has already been driven out of public life because he has

essentially a sexting problem that he can't seem to deal with. A criminal investigation gets launched into him because there's evidence that he may be engaged in sexual communications with a teenager in another state. And so obviously that becomes an issue for the FBI to investigate. They get his laptop in late September and the agent, the case agent on that case, opens it up and is just blown away by what he sees, which is 650,000 emails.

Many of them are between Anthony Wiener's then wife, a woman named Huma Abedin, who was a longtime personal aide to Hillary Clinton. And apparently at some point, unbeknownst, frankly, to Huma Abedin herself, the contents of her email inbox basically just dumped itself into Anthony Weiner's laptop. And so there's just hundreds of thousands of emails here. Now, that agent has a very specific problem, legal problem, which is that he has a search warrant to search that laptop for evidence of sex crimes. He is not there to look up, you know, Hillary Clinton emails. So he's really not supposed to look at that stuff. And he knows he's not supposed to look at that stuff. And his prosecutors overseeing the case tell him, look, man, do not look at that stuff.

Fine. He tells his bosses and his bosses are supposed to, you know, he thinks his bosses will just deal with it. Tell the Clinton email agents who are based in Washington, you know, you got to come look at this stuff to decide if it's important. The problem is three things happen. The first thing that happens is nothing happens. You know, Pete Strzok gets the information. There's a disconnect, you know, sort of almost like a classic bureaucratic disconnect between folks in D.C. who think, oh, I guess we're waiting on New York for more information. Folks in New York are waiting on instructions from D.C. and everyone just sort of sits around doing nothing. But then two other things happen that make the problem worse. First, the case agent in New York who found this stuff,

his boss, his boss comes down to him and says, hey, man, you got to wipe your entire workstation. Just wipe that computer clean because it may have classified information on it because you had Hillary Clinton emails on it. And from his point of view now, that's that's a rash. I don't want to be too mean. From a bureaucratic point of view, there is some logic to that. But here's the real world problem. Again, it's about bureaucracy versus But here's the real world problem. Again, it's about bureaucracy versus real world. The real world problem is that that agent immediately thinks, wait, so when Congress comes and asks me what I did with this information, I'm not going to have anything that shows that I did the right thing. People are just going to like take my word for it. They're going to be like, why did you wipe it?

Why did you wipe it? And how do we know you did the right thing how do we know you didn't just wipe it and sit on it and and you know put hillary clinton lawn signs up all over queens who knows but so so that's the that's one bad thing that happens the other bad things that happens is while he's he's sort of like the pressure is building on him and there's this silence and no one can tell him why no one's asking to look at any of this stuff he goes and talks to his prosecutors on the case. And he basically pours his heart out and says, you know, I'm freaking out here.

Like, no one's looking at this stuff. I think we're going to get absolutely reamed by Congress when they find out that we have not updated them with any information. We haven't even looked at it to figure out how much new information there is here. I don't understand what's going on. And he sort of mentions this sort of general idea of maybe I need to be a whistleblower. I don't know. And the prosecutors, I think mostly out of an impulse of trying to keep him from going completely off the rails and off the reservation, tell him, hey, look, you can't do anything like that. You can't go walking into a newspaper room and tell a reporter any of this stuff. You could be charged with a crime. Now, I actually don't think there's any legal basis to charge anyone with a crime, even if he had done something like that. But one of the ways in which this gets dumber and dumber as people make poorer choices as it goes, is that what you see is as the Clinton and Trump things get worse and worse for the FBI, people keep trying to what I think of as managed through leak investigations.

And that's a really bad way to manage because what you're really doing is you're threatening people. People only receive the threat and they don't receive any sort of like assurance. Don't worry. We're in this together. We'll figure it out together. All they see is, oh, we're going to come down on you like a, like a bag of bricks. If you say a word to anyone about anything. And so what happens is everyone's getting spun up. Everyone's getting more and more worried and everyone's starting to worry more about how they personally may be affected by whenever this information makes it into the public space. And so people start making decisions to protect themselves. And so that laptop information weeks, and this is the part where I know I'm going on and on again, but this is the part where I think really is like the huge missed opportunity of all the missed opportunities. This is the one that always like sticks out to me the most.

If the FBI had just done the work when they first heard about the laptop of looking at it, going through it, seeing that the emails, while some may be new, did not change their understanding of anything that had happened. They would have known that probably by mid-October. And it would have been essentially, as Loretta Lynch called it long earlier, a big nothing burger. But because they didn't do anything, when the shit really started hitting the fan in late October, they were in a panic. And they just started doing stuff because they were afraid of leaks. And that's when things go really off the rails. And I think the impression I got, too,

is they were just so on the ropes about the whole thing. I mean, the whole thing was an extraordinary thing to deal with. I remember making a joke, though, at the time that just came to me. I remember making a joke though at the time i just came to me i remember making a joke about how i hope whoever fbi agent gets stuck with anthony weir's laptop has a thick set of gloves sticking to that keyboard um it's amazing when you think about the random factors that influence the outcome of 2016 i mean very random very random. Yeah. And, and I think people don't realize too, this is an important fact for, from, for the intelligence thing. I mean, they're, they're bound by a law that if they're investigating a crime and they come across other crimes,

they can't turn a blind eye to them. They have to have to go, okay, well, what's, what do we have here? Yeah. And, and I mean, as, as the case case agent pointed out repeatedly as he was getting more and more scared like we should just do the obvious thing here this isn't complicated we don't need to overthink any of it yeah it's it's just it's just looking at the whole football game of it just everything that was going on being on the ropes being attacked being and then you know you got trump coming at you for all sorts of whatever it is, rallies. And, and, and I believe he was trying to dispel the intelligence agency through his rallies, if I remember correctly, you know, you know,

and he already had an anti intelligence. Well, he is pretty much all around anti intelligence sort of thing. Let me ask you this. And I might, I'm going to jump ahead of maybe what i should be saving till uh part three because i don't want to forget it if if comey had not come out with the announcement of we're we don't have anything to we're done with the investigation into hillary clinton i'm not gonna say a bunch of stuff that kind of maligns their character and let the Justice Department handle it and then had never brought up the laptop thing. And they'd handle that internally, either in a perfect scenario of folly where they'd done it immediately or, you know, they just kept quiet in the last 60 days and followed that suggested protocol.

Do you think the outcome would have been different? According to your, the way you've laid out the book and the research you've done, do you think we'd, you know, that, that, that would have kept the FBI out of this whole thing? Yeah, I think it would. I mean, look, the FBI was always going to have some role in this, right? Because they did investigate Clinton and they did open an investigation of Trump. Like I'm not suggesting that neither of those things should have happened at all. What my point is, if you're going to be investigating presidential candidates in the in the height of the election. There are there that is obviously the most central role you could possibly have as as the FBI.

And do you really want that central role? Like one of the things I think is sort of fascinating about Comey's thought process is that his argument is essentially, I took these things upon myself because I needed to protect the Justice Department and protect the FBI. And essentially, I was doing Loretta Lynch a favor. But here's the part where that logic has always sort of baffled me, which is the attorney general of the United States is a political appointee. They essentially, yes, they're the nation's top law enforcement official, and we expect them to be independent. Obviously, a lot of the fights that have gone on about Bill Barr have been about that very question. Is he actually independent? But you are also a political appointee. You don't completely lose the political responsibility of that job. But what goes with that is that person is hired in some part to someday be fired.

And so when Comey says, well, I was doing it to protect Loretta Lynch. Just imagine if Loretta Lynch had given in theory. I mean, she wouldn't have done this because I think the speech itself was so beyond the bounds of DOJ policy and procedure. But imagine if Loretta Lynch had given the July speech that slammed Clinton in all the ways that Comey did. The solution to that problem would have been to just fire Loretta Lynch. She is in that job to be fired later that year anyway. Whereas the FBI director is supposed to be in that job for 10 years. And so it's always sort of baffled me that, that Comey thought that he would be protecting himself by sort of putting him out there in no man's land where everyone and anyone who wanted to could shoot at him and, and basically not just shoot at him, but shoot the FBI as well.

And I think they sort of get they sort of start down a road and then they can't stop. Like once a lot of people think in the FBI, I think of that July press conference, the original sin that causes all the other bad things to happen. And I think there's some truth to that. And the reason I asked that question, and I think what you're alluding to as well, is I've kind of had an aha moment where when he does that meeting, he really puts the spotlight on the FBI. I mean, he really, like, you know, they could let the AG take the heat and some other people. And, you know, they're used to going on the hill and getting the crap beat out of them. And he really could have kept them off the thing. But once he does that and puts a spotlight on the FBI, the Republicans just beam in on it and go, you know, whatever.

And then I think some of the Republicans are aware that there's a counter-investigation, the Gang of Eight, right? Well, that certainly happens in August and September of 2016. are aware that there's a counter investigation the the gang of eight right the republicans that certainly happens in august and september of 2016 is when they they learn that there's some there's there's work being done in that space yeah and and one of the other things that i've you know i've i i've said i'm one of these strategy guys i'm a combination guy and so i'm always like what if that path and this path and this and one of the things was was uh and you factored this in your percentages by what what hillary lost i've often wondered if if if the american public had also known that trump was under investigation how much that would have factored in? Do you think that would have thrown it back to Hillary? I think that's a super interesting question.

I think there's a couple of data points to just think about. I will say this. I'm going to be, I'm going to give you the weasel answer. I'm not sure. I don't think anyone's ever going to be sure, but it's, it's a great debate. I'm not, I'm not sure, but, but here's the two data points I think are worth considering when you, when you think about that question. One is, remember that that arguably the best evidence against Trump in all the you know, you can read the entire Mueller report, which is very long and dense. But the best single piece of evidence against Trump is the thing he did on live television where he said, Russia, if you're listening, I'm sure the people in this room would love to see those 30,000 emails. And, you know, I will say like one of the things in which I think sometimes the D.C. universe sort of misjudges the rest of the country is it wasn't really a secret that Trump was willing to take help, even hacking help from the Russians. Because he said it to everyone. So and I look, I take I, that that is not to, you know, be dismissive or scornful of, you know, people like Peter Strzok,

who do this for a living and are very concerned about what the Russians do and how they, you know, try to manipulate people. But to be honest, as a political calculation, as a public voting calculation, I would argue that this was on the table, like in essence, if you choose to look at it, it's on the table. I think what's sort of jarring to people, I think to this day, it's still jarring to a lot of people who work in the intelligence field, is that they genuinely can't believe that a presidential candidate who would say something like that in public could possibly be elected. And I think

one of the things that came up in the work on the book constantly in talking to people was just a sense of disbelief, like a sense of disbelief that the political universe, the politics of this country are so much different than people who do intelligence work, than many people who do intelligence work for a living actually thought. And one of the old jokes about the CIA, I think, is, you know, go all around the world, study the, study all these political systems and all these other places and know nothing at all about your own country's politics. And I think there's a little element of truth to that into what happens in 16. But I think, look, I think the concerns about Russia were raised. I think if the FBI had announced that they were investigating the Trump campaign, I think certainly that would

have moved the needle somewhat. But one of the things to remember, one of the things I point out in the book is that there's a famous New York Times headline that comes in late October, where the headline literally says, Trump comma FBI finds I think the rest of it is something like you know no ties to Russia something they call it after they they edited it a little bit after that is that is a fairly controversial story and people you know pointy-headed media nerds like to argue about that one to this day but I would just say like it was actually in a headline in in late October it it wasn't like it was a super well-kept secret i guess is what i'm saying but the other point of that story to be fair the other point of that particular story was that

fbi looked into this and didn't find anything of that um so then again if if comey had delivered it with the power of his reputation and and stuff might add. Absolutely. And that's the thing that I think about how they really had a blind spotter's costoma that no one thought he would win. And that's where, I mean, it's like the tortoise and the hare sort of story, I guess. So getting into the third part of it, you get into the real, the end of it, the Comey effect, the hangover, the storm, text machine, investing in investigators. How does that how does that all wrap up then in your book? So the where I leave the book is sort of at the I sort of end my time period in the book right about when Mueller is starting up,

because to me, at that point, you sort of see all the dynamics are in place we are going in and i i think of the muller investigation as sort of a continuation of the unant of the search for the answers to the questions that were posed by 2016 right is he a manchurian candidate was there some conspiracy brass tacks what the just happened? Like that is really the goal of the Mueller investigation. What the hell just happened? And so I ended there because I think at that point, again, I'm a little bit of a nerd in the sense that what I really care most about is explaining how this character of the FBI is left in a different position than because of what happened in 2016. And the position they're left in is they are beset by critics,

particularly conservative critics in Congress. That is sort of, you know, hardened and sort of the battle lines are drawn there and they are going to be under attack by conservatives they know for the foreseeable future. And Democrats are trying to get essentially via Mueller, a sort of legal criminal investigation, like attack towards Trump to sort of try to fix what they see as the core problem of 2016, which is Russian interference. And in the meantime, you have, as I mentioned before, that horrible meeting between Rod Rosenstein and Andy McCabe, where they're both trying to basically accuse the other one of being ethically conflicted off of this whole issue. And the two buildings are basically at odds with each

other. The leadership of the two buildings, certainly. And that's a dangerous place for the FBI to be. That's a dangerous place for the Justice Department. And if I were going to write, you know, if you magically gave me a final chapter, I would throw one in about October 2020. And it would be about how the president is publicly pushing for some new version of a Comey letter. And the FBI, I think, under its current

leadership, realizing the dangers of that and exactly why the president wants that and basically digging in their heels and saying, we're not going to do that. And, you know, I wrote a story a couple of weeks ago that said, you know, Chris Wray, the FBI, the current FBI director, says jobs in a lot of isn't in a lot of danger precisely because he wouldn't do an October surprise. And he was telegraphing that, too. Like, I'm going to probably fire Christopher Wray or something after the thing. I read that he was talking about that privately, I guess. Yeah, he's been talking with his senior advisors about it for a long time now.

And, you know, they've talked about doing it when the election is over. Now, look, the election isn't over. And, you know, one of the things, one of the things I think that 2016 and 2020 is a good reminder of is like no reporter can predict the future. That's not what we do, but it's really important to think about the ways in which the decisions of 2016 are still with us today, have major consequences for everything that's happened since and maybe hopefully you know not make some of the same misjudgments so does it end if biden wins or do we still have we still we know clean up duh but i i don't know that anything really ends uh that's a good but i you know i think there is a path for the FBI and the Justice Department not to be at the center of every political discussion in the future.

I think there's a path for it not to happen. I mean, one of the things that you can talk to all these different people in the FBI and the Justice Department, one of the things they'll tell you is part of the problem is both parties have now learned that one way to really hurt an opposing candidate is to like get an investigation going. And, and, you know, it's not like that's a newsflash to them, but I think 2016 showed just how much of an impact that could have. Yeah. I mean, one thing I thought about with the, them not announcing the, the, and, and I understood, especially Peter Stork's book, you know, they explains why

they don't talk about counterintelligence because clearly duh i mean you know it's kind of like why don't you call the drug dealers uh to let them know you're going to raid the house so they can flush everything down the toilet because by the time you get there they'll be gone you know it's it's the same sort of principle but but you know you look at how it would have weighed and, and how there was some unintended maybe shift of bias there. The other thing is, is in the October surprise you're mentioning for 2020 is actually tried to retread the laptop thing again. Yeah. Isn't that incredible? Like, Hey, what worked in 2016, all that shenanigan shit.

Let's just try and retread it yeah it's almost i don't know if you remember that tv show 24 but it feels like oh no there's another terrorist with another bomb in another city this feels remarkably like last season but okay well we'll watch again maybe um you know look i on a serious level i do think that one of the lessons i hope that people sort of have started to process is both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation have one unique, like through one commonality to them, which is that you're injecting a great deal of sort of the world of classified information and intelligence into domestic politics. I think in both cases, you can make a pretty good argument that that's a risky thing to do, that that is a toxic, that becomes a very toxic combination very quickly, because people start accusing people of being traitors. People started accusing people of being like Manchurian candidates and spies, and everything gets very, very sketchy, I would argue, very quickly. And I think it would be great if one

of the lessons of 2016 and 2020 is, you know what, maybe we don't want counterintelligence, or espionage work to play a front and center role in our domestic elections, our domestic politics. Because I'll be honest, like one of the things you see is like people are so quick to choose, accuse each other, the worst possible things based on very slim evidence. And so I think that is a dangerous road to go down because you can end up in a place where you just naturally suspect the other side's a criminal. And I just think that the countries where that happens a lot are not countries that have great systems. where they're entrapping them, basically, and instead of going, okay, the real world, we need to maybe do this, the rules are the rules, but then, of course, Comey skips some of the rules

or the suggested rules, the rules of thumb, and then all that is to protect the FBI, the integrity, and everything else, and it just weaponized what Trump needed to destroy as far as i'm concerned the intelligence agencies i think they're still good people running them uh but you know they're they're severely compromised especially with ratcliffe i mean that guy's a joke um i'm probably black helicopters show up uh now um the uh if i get dragged to the gulag, just tell my mom where I am, Delvin. They're just so compromised.

In fact, I didn't trust Christopher Wray for a while until I saw some of his actions. I'm still not sold on the guy. He seems like a nice, integral guy. I don't want black helicopters. I don't want to end up in a Poland secret prison, please. It's interesting how everything they were trying to prevent from happening,

just the destruction was just so horrific. The destruction of these poor people's careers, their lives in many cases. I mean, Andy McCabe's life, retirement, Peter Strzok, incredible hits, what he's had to deal with. James Comey, you know, constantly, you know, and of course, the fallout with the notes and whether or not they should have the, I mean, it just created a shit show. Rosenstein, you know, should we pull a 25th Amendment? You know, it just goes fucking downhill. And it's all because, you know, you're just trying to do the right thing. And it's interesting how how badly that backfired. sort of the increasingly nasty fights that happen in 17 and 18 and 19.

Because, look, I think it's fine. I think it's, look, I obviously think the FBI made some pretty significant errors in 2016. That doesn't mean that people should be hounded out of public life or, you know, have just become, you know, perpetual political targets because they made bad decisions. Like, I think there's a big difference between, OK, you messed up here, you misjudged your moment and you must be pilloried forever in the public square. Like, that's not how the country works, I don't think, or shouldn't work. And I think that's one of the ways in which 2016 has had another bad influence on our politics. There you go. Well, guys, it's been

wonderful to talk to you and suss out these subjects. And I think we'll, you know, 100 years from now, we'll still be having these debates, assuming we survive or we'll leave it to them. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. I hope we will, my friend. Give us your plugs one more time so that people can take you on the interwebs. Sure. So my Twitter handle is Devlin at Devlin Barrett. And my book you can get on Amazon. It's called October Surprise, How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election.

There you go. Check it out, guys. It's, it's going to be interesting. You can listen to the Peter Strzok interview and hopefully we'll get James Comey on. And I I'm interested to see if Rosenstein Rosenstein, I just, I don't care enough to get his name proper because I want to punch him in the face half the time, but I'd love to get him on the show. I'd be interested to see what kind of book he writes and be kind of interesting i keep hearing he's not going to do one i'm wondering i'm wondering

he might not do one for the obvious reasons yeah i mean look he's he's he's a fascinating character he really i think i i think pinning him down on a lot of specifics is, I will say, as a reporter, has been a challenge. But, you know, he's obviously a central player. And just one small example, right? You mentioned it, the memo he writes criticizing Comey's handling of the Clinton investigation. I don't know a single person in the FBI and Justice Department who doesn't basically agree with the thrust of that memo. But I also don't know a single person in the FBI and justice department who doesn't basically agree with the thrust of that memo. But I also don't know a single person in the FBI and justice department who understands how Rod would, you know, sort of allow it to be used that way because it's obviously being used for the

complete opposite reason. Yeah. And so he is, like I said, fascinating character, fascinating character. I mean, there was so many different things he did throughout the period that were yin and yang. And you're like, which freaking side are you on, man? You know? And so it could be interesting. That's the challenge of the Justice Department. They're not actually supposed to be on a side, but we have 2016, like, basically put them in the water as, you know, pick a side.

It's interesting. You know, we think of the fbi and these guys as infallible and you know they they put in so much training and work to become who they are and and and do the right thing and stuff but we're all human beings man i mean yes sometimes we try and do the right thing and we muck it up so check it out guys october surprise how the fbi tried to save itself and crash an election i think you're going to enjoy the read uh thanks to devlin for being on the show thank you very much sir i had a great time thank you thank you very much and uh it's my honest uh order the book up you can go to amazon.com

you can also see i think we have a shop on there called amazon.com for a shop for just chris foss you can also go to facebook.com for the chris foss show and also go to facebook.com. And also go to goodreads.com. You can see all the books we're reading over there and reviews and stuff. And, of course, youtube.com. Watch the video versions. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Stay safe.

Be good to each other. Hopefully we'll know the country soon. And we'll see you guys next time.