The Washington Post reports that 25% of Americans believe that the FBI was clearly or possibly behind the riots at the Capitol three years ago, on January 6. Of Trump voters, 44% believe that. Of Fox News viewers, 39%. Of MSNBC viewers, even 16% believe that. (The Post concludes that this might not be surprising, since a 2021 poll showed that 15% of Americans agreed with “a QAnon conspiracy theory that Satan-worshiping pedophiles control government, media and financial worlds.”) There obviously is no basis for this belief at all. But it seems to fit a general and surprising tendency of Republican voters to belittle various federal law enforcement agencies, and to pledge to shrink them, revamp them, or eliminate them.

But, when you think about it, the FBI has often been in the center of controversy. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for its first 48 years. He was always controversial, and was widely (and correctly) accused, mainly by left leaning individuals and groups, of keeping secret files on political leaders and effectively blackmailing them, investigating people whom he didn’t like, utilizing illegal surveillance techniques, wiretapping phones, organizing burglaries, and so forth. And then there was James Comey, who ran the agency during the 2016 election campaign, who has been accused by both the right and the left of influencing, or trying to influence the Trump-Clinton presidential election.

Yet beneath the shenanigans of these leaders, the FBI has always been doing important work in investigating criminal activity. It currently has 35,000 employees both here in Washington and in its field offices throughout the country. Do we need 35,000 in the FBI? I don’t know – maybe we could do just as well with 25,000. Or maybe we need 45,000. But the point is that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes at the FBI, and that it shouldn’t be ignored. 

For my first book of 2024, I chose to read The Threat by Andrew McCabe, who was James Comey’s deputy director, and who led the FBI as acting director after Donald Trump fired Comey and before he selected Christopher Wray as the next director, a job he continues to hold today. McCabe is no longer with the FBI, but you see him fairly often commenting on CNN, where he is a security analyst or some such thing. He also teaches at George Mason University. (By the way, for my second book, I chose to read actress Britt Ekland’s 1970 memoir, True Britt, but that’s another story.)

McCabe was educated at Duke and then at the Washington University Law School (my mother’s alma mater), practiced law for several years in New Jersey, and then decided to become an FBI agent. He joined the FBI in 1996. and left the agency in 2018.

McCabe’s book, published in 2019, is very readable, and very, very interesting, and I recommend it. McCabe, who was a registered Republican his entire life, is no fan of Donald Trump (to put it mildly). And a fair amount of the book covers McCabe’s interaction with Trump. He describes his first meeting with Trump:

“He started off by telling me, We fired the director and we want you to be the acting director now. We had to fire him — and people are very happy about it. I think people are very happy that we finally got rid of him. I think there’s a lot of people in the FBI who are glad he’s gone. We had to do it because of all that — you know, the Clinton thing last summer and all his statements and everything, he really mishandled that. He had to go, because of those decisions he made, and for a lot of other reasons.”

Trump then asked him if he agreed with Comey’s decision that Clinton should not be charged with a crime, and McCabe told him that he did. This seemed to displease the president, who then claimed that the FBI was in turmoil because its agents really disliked Comey. McCabe said that, in fact, most people in the agency did like Comey and respected him, although the election situation was very complicated. McCabe then reports that Trump told him: ”about searching for a new director, talking to great people, it was going to be great, there were going to get somebody great, the FBI was going to be great again, and now here I was, isn’t that great?…… He loved law enforcement and the FBI. He thought police people loved him.”

The book, though, is about more than how the Trump administration changed the FBI and rattled its agents. It’s a history of McCabe’s time in the FBI – investigating organized crime, Russian crime rings, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the bombing of the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, prospective but not successful suicide bombers on airplanes, the Boston Marathon, Guantanamo, Benghazi, what Trump calls the “Russian Hoax”, and more. He talks about how FBI agents are selected, how they are trained at a special location in Quantico, how they are assigned to particular jobs or locations. He talks about the interaction between the FBI and the Department of Justice, the FBI and the White House, the FBI and the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Defense. He talks about the different styles of Bob Mueller as Director (Mueller preceded Comey) and James Comey as Director, and discusses other government officials that he worked with, including Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions.

I came out of this book with a much better understanding of the FBI, and with an even more intense dislike of Donald Trump. I think your reaction would be the same.

(As to Britt Ekland, who is one year older than me, and always has been, her upbringing in Sweden is not particularly interesting, her meeting and in short order marrying the 18 year – I think – older Peter Sellers is very interesting, mainly because Sellers was interesting if a bit off his rocker and because they wound up on very friendly terms with Princess Margaret and Tony Snowden and, through them, the rest of the British royal family. Her subsequent career was busy but she had no great insights, and her other dalliances with all sorts of famous folks, including Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal and Rod Stewart were titillating but dull at the same time. She seems like the “girl who can’t say no”, who falls in love at the drop of a hat, who believes that her love will last forever, and who finds – in every occasion – that it doesn’t. And it’s always the fault of the guy, never her fault, although each relationship winds up the wrong way. I chose to read the book because I wanted something light. It’s not exactly light and, unless you are a Rod Stewart fan, the only worthwhile part of the book relates to Sellers.)

More than enough for today.