the last book I ever read (Bowlaway: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken, excerpt two)

from Bowlaway: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken:

Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn’t matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.

the last book I ever read (Bowlaway: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken, excerpt one)

from Bowlaway: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken:

“Ah good!” she said. “Give here.”

He did. She held them like a queen in an ancient painting, orb and scepter. She was alive. She was a bowler.

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 fourteen)

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

By the afternoon of May 17, Rosenstein had confirmed his agreement to hold a briefing for the Gang of Eight about the Russia investigation. He had also made the decision to appoint a special counsel and taken steps to do so. The FBI team had already set up the briefing, for five o’clock that day, so it was a good thing he was on board. At the Capitol, on the House side, they walked me down to the SCIF, in a basement floor. Some of the Russia team was waiting for me there. The senators and congressmen started straggling in, each with one or two aides—mostly staff directors—and then Rod showed up with a couple of his people. Now that the Gang of Eight was a crowd of two dozen in the room, I thought, the chance of this not getting back to the president was basically zero. Then Devin Nunes walked in, and the chance was less than zero.

Nunes, a congressman from California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had publicly stepped away from that committee’s Russia investigation. In April, just before the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating Nunes for speaking with the media about classified information relating to the Trump campaign and Russia, Nunes effectively recused himself—although he did not use the word “recuse.” Nunes was suspected of having surreptitiously been given intelligence by presidential aides during a nighttime rendezvous at the White House, information that he then publicized. Look who’s here, I said to Rod. Rosenstein understood. He went to talk to Nunes, pulled him aside. Came back, told me, Nunes is staying, he says he’s not recused from this, he refuses to leave.

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 thirteen)

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

Among all his odd claims, one stood out as being especially dubious. He said, as he had said during our phone conversation earlier that day, We’ve had so many FBI people calling us, sending us messages to say they’re so glad the director is gone.

Who would do that? Who in the Bureau would send a message to the White House about something of this nature? It was not beyond the realm of the possible—there had been so many leaks in the months building up to this point. But for anyone in the Bureau to make or maintain contact with people in the White House would be unambiguously inappropriate—an absolute violation of the White House contacts policy. But the president kept saying it was happening.

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 twelve)

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

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first day on the job as acting director, I arrived at the office early, went through the morning meetings, did my briefs, and by 10 a.m. I was sitting down with senior staff involved in the Russia investigation, many of whom had also been involved in Midyear Exam.

As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. This was highly unusual. Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. Federal policy, written by the Department of Justice, strictly restricts such contact. There should be no direct contact between the president and the FBI director, according to the White House contacts policy, except for national-security purposes. The FBI does have frequent, routine, and direct contact with the White House by way of the National Security Council and other facets of the national-security structure, but when it comes to topics that do not concern national security, the FBI is supposed to go through Justice, which then makes contact with the White House counsel’s office. And vice versa: If the president or any other senior White House official needs to get a message to the Justice Department or the FBI, that message is supposed to go through the White House counsel to the deputy attorney general before it gets to us. The reason for all this is simple. Investigations and prosecutions are delicate and complicated, and can affect the lives of many people; they need to be pursued according to fixed rules, without a hint of suspicion that someone with power wants to put a thumb on the scale. That means those on the front lines must have insulation from politics—or even the perception that political considerations many be at play. So the president calling the acting director of the FBI is, and was that day, remarkable.

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 eleven)

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

I am not aware of another president who has weighed in against ongoing criminal prosecutions in the overt, hostile, and unrelenting way that President Trump has. This is a breach of propriety and of historical norms. Presidents don’t weigh in on those things. They don’t try to tip the scales of justice for or against a particular defendant. In our system, intervention from the outside is not only considered inappropriate—it is inappropriate. It undermines the operation of a fair system of justice. It sows seeds of mistrust. President Obama was rightly castigated for a single offhand remark, when he said of the Clinton investigation that he thought there was nothing there. The political world exploded: Was he trying to telegraph something to investigators? Was he sending a coded message to the attorney general? It was not a smart thing to say, as Obama surely realized. And yet it was not even in the same universe as what President Trump does on a daily basis—casting doubt on the legitimacy of the prosecution of Paul Manafort, as he has done since June 2018, and calling the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt,” as he does all the time.

For an FBI agent, watching the president seek to interfere with the ordinary process of justice is especially galling—an affront to our constitutional system. The work of every agent at every waking moment is governed by intricate procedures whose aim is to ensure that every step taken is by the book. The process has to be fair and rigorous from start to finish—for the sake of subjects and for the sake of justice. It is a high-minded regime. The Bureau suffers lapses, of course, as any institution does, but the standards are taken very seriously.

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 ten)

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

On March 17, the FBI press office got a call from a reporter at Circa News, which is owned by the right-wing media powerhouse Sinclair Broadcast Group. The reporter said that sources had told her that I had announced in staff meetings that I hated the president. Said I was out to get Michael Flynn. Said that when Flynn got fired, I slapped high fives with everyone in the room. The reporter made my staff meeting sound like the towel-snapping scene in Top Gun.

There was no truth to any of this and we flatly denied it. In any normal, reasonable world, that would be the end of it. But we’re not in that world. We lost that world at some point. Instead, our denial touched off a new standard cycle of story development. The FBI press office would receive inquiries about fictional scenarios from right-wing news outlets we would shoot them down; the news outlets were unable to go forward. Then the story would appear on some fringe, alt-right website, without a byline. Once it was picked up by the blogosphere and on social media, an outlet such as Sinclair would have cover to repeat it, which would enable Fox News to get on board, and then Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham would talk about it for weeks. This is a practiced, intentional strategy of news circulation. The stories may be fictional and the information false, but the consequences of this strategy are real.