Monday, April 22, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt one)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

The embedded assumption of all these superlatives piled up in the future tense seemed to be: The Bureau was a mess. If he believed that to be true—and it was not—then I bore a good part of the responsibility. Why, then, was he flattering me? He spent most of this meeting spewing stock phrases he often uses—You’re great, you’re terrific—all of which rang hollow. I knew that he had been aware of me since 2016, when he referred to me in terms that were not flattering at all. My wife, Jill, had run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Virginia state senate back in 2015, and she had received money, as other candidates did, from the state Democratic Party and from a political action committee run by the Democratic governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. Because the following year I was involved in the FBI’s email investigation, the president during the campaign decided to allege that I had been bribed to look the other way. He tweeted a headline from The Wall Street Journal that insinuated as much—CLINTON ALLY AIDED CAMPAIGN OF FBI OFFICIAL’S WIFE—and on the campaign stump expanded the insinuation into a conspiracy theory, in which Clinton directed McAuliffe to make campaign donations to Jill as a quid pro quo. So I was disregarding all of his You’re great, You’re terrific verbiage, letting it flow past, like the blather it was.

Then he said, Your only problem is that one mistake you made. That thing with your wife. That one mistake.



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