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Terrorism in 2006 and a ros i ro the highest ranks to the Deputy Director until you were fired by attorney general Jeff Sessions for what they say is a lack of candor in interviews. Much has been talked about in the books. I thought i would take a shot at many asking new questions. Before we get into the meat of the book i guess i have a question about writing. I wonder how long did it take you to write this book and what was the process like because you are obviously a firsttime author and wrote a lot of memos that this is something a little different. So, walk me through how you tackled this particular project. Guest how to balance and understanding and talk about my entire experience which is really concerned by what i felt were corrosive impacts the false narratives about the fbi are having with people on the fbi and the ability to do their work and felt like if people understood really more about the organization, who we are, people are drawn to the fbi and how we make the decisions we do. If they are based on specific legal authorities and priorities and policies get into us by the department of justice, not based on politics and preferences, but that was kind of the infidels that brought me to the project. Securing the resort of Saint Martins press published a book and i started working with the team, a coauthor i worked very closely with on the project, so literally we spent the entire summer every day together either in my house or the house he was staying with and lived nearby. Researching, talking, writing, editing and adding different pieces and Building Blocks back and forth. Host were you able to go back and review any of the notes and materials that you left behind or were you having to reconstruct this from other newspaper articles and subjects you were writing about . Guest i had no access to the time at the fbi. My man knows and all that stuff remained in the custody of the fbi said it was from memory. But as you know a lot of it your own work and papers ther theren incredibly robust factual record available and open source and publiclin thepublicly availableo we spent a lot of time reading that as well. It was a real process. Host because of the sensitivities of some of that, did you make a decision while writing the book that you were not going to include it and why . Guest i made decisions to avoid talking about things, certainly anything classified. I try to refer to those things only got i can open source material. Beyond just classified, we are concerned about what we would call sensitive information. So, something from a criminal case, for example, it may not be classified to name the identity of him in the format or source, but its highly sensitive and we dont want to talk about the person in the way that we identify demand could put them in danger or jeopardize their relatives and families. So, i definitely made a concerted effort to avoid putting material like that in the book and then of course, i went through an extensive process with the fbi they called pre publication review that went over everything in the book and a kind of Robust Exchange about what i could include and what they wanted to pick out. Host did they push back on the material in the postwar New York Times . Guest away the process works is they take an initial review of the manuscript and highlight everything that they think is sensitive or classified and they send it back and say we should consider redirecting these things and if you had the opportunity to go back and say this paragraph that you have redacted on page 25, heres where you can see this has been publicly acknowledged by some Government Official or some element and published open source material. And once they see that proof they will retract the request so that went on literally for a month. Host lets jump right in to the buck. About midway through the book, you write that as a matter of policy the fbi does Everything Possible not to influence elections. In 2016 it seems we did. It seems for an fbi agent you seem to be having a moment of reflection. Not sure that i encounter that too much. [laughter] this almost sounds like kind of regret and acknowledgment that the fbi really screwed this up at the end and we hear this now. Whats your thought about that . Is regret too strong for you . Guest you are definitely on to something. I did spend a lot of time thinking about this issue and the reason behind it and how we thought about it at the time and with the benefit of hindsight, i try to be honest in my own reassessment of did we get it right or did we not . The biggest issues are the announcement in july about our conclusion of the case and a very public way that departed from the president , and then of course the decision in october to notify congress about the reopening of the case because the emails on the laptop. I very much agreed with the decision to announce the case as we did in july. In rich roast that i think we probably got that wrong. I think we underestimated how it would be to convince people of just how good is an investigation we have done and how the conclusion was the independent and correct and fair result. I still believe all those things that we underestimated how deeply people would cling to the political perspectives rather than listening to us with an object if and i think that we were all overconfident and the abilitover confident in theabilt we had done a good job and i blame myself for that miscalculation. I go through a few paragraphs in the book. From the scars of the multiple reviews and to the investigations that were charged publicly should i have concluded this wasnt possible for us to really convince anyone this was the right result. Should we have just been quiet, reported the findings to the department and with the department kind of step in front and take that hit. So, that is kind of how i look about in retrospect. Host in the book you mention an agent named adam lee and he was recently retired. You think about somebody like this with experience as a public corruption investigator and those people understand people who do public corruption for a living whether agents or prosecutors understand and do nothing to upset. And i guess it had me thinking you think that h think the bured benefit more by having people, more people like this, more people exposed to public corruption and giving politically sensitive investigations on the seven core . We know post9 11 they are postterrorism at the end of the people you talk about your experiences and the terrorism operations section, those people have risen to the top of the bureau. Do you think much into perspective that they need to sort of look at the way to produce more experienced . In terms of people handing over these cases because now we have seen these cases are about kryptonite to the bureau. Theyve known that but it seems that the bureau forgot that for period of time. Guest you raise a great point. Is it to have that First Experience all the broadspectrum in the bureau represented across all times, absolutely. That is what we would prefer to have, but like every institution, when those critical moments come, you are selecting the next National Security or the next executive director for the criminal side of the house. Theres always a fairly limited pool of people that have had the requisite experience, tim, perspective and abilities to serve in that role so like every other organization you try to make the best decisions at the time with the people that you have before you. Should more emphasis be put on, should the same sort of emphasis they put on the expertise in navigating politically sensitive matters . Its certainly something that probably the director and the other leadership on the floor or thinking about and maybe in a different way that we did a few years ago. Guest speaking of ray, what is your opinion of blacks i know that he wanted you to step down and couldnt believe that were quite accurate, walk me through a little bit . Was it facetoface, was it on the phone . I have some disagreements over how i left the bureau. I probably should leave. For now because of the ongoing matters that continued in the investigations and spun from the report, my own civil suit i will be bringing in a couple of weeks. But it did have the opportunity to work for several months before i left. I find him to be a very smart hardworking guy. I think that hes committed to the fbi and making the fbi strong and effective as they possibly can. He has a different approach to leadership i think and i do, certainly better than jim comey did and so i hope that he is successful and he wants the organization to be in good hands and theres no reason to believe they are not. Host they said mueller didnt talk enough and comey talked too much. The director is going to find out somewhere in the middle in these perilous times. Guest i think that security needs to find that balance. Im not sure that hes found it yet. Hes only been on the job for about a year so well see how that goes. The chapter titled enterprise theory you mentioned informants and it seems like a reference to chris steele the former officer that work worked with the fbi ad perhaps another informant whose identity was leaked with chris steele. You seem to take a shot at the Deputy Attorney general in the chapter. You said this is important. It seems like you were angry it leaked into certain information was provided to the congress. Talk a little bit more fully about what that means and what exactly you were getting at in that legitimate oversight function. Guest the fbi needs oversight from the department and places that are not the fbi. I dont think anybody would dispute that but in the wake of the conclusion of the email case, we received an overwhelming number of requests from the hill. It was the most invasive and comprehensive request for not just our conclusions. This is the beginning of that process, so the next thing you know summer of 16, fall, beginning it really continue to develop through 2017 we were struggling to comply with these expensive requests and a very granular information a type of things that are not normally provided or shared outside of the organization or the fbi for very good reasons to protect peoples identities, all sorts of things like that. The department of justice took a very expensive view, unprecedented view of what we should be turning over to congress and certainly the Deputy Attorney general, Rod Rosenstein was central to those decisions. Guest why were these originally given becaus but thas the condition to get him confirmed. So, that comes down. Why do you think that he relented Going Forward and providing the congress this granular information they were all under an enormous amount of pressure from the hill and it was intended for the political results. So, we found ourselves handing over information that we dont normally share and it was something that caused many of us great concern that it increased in the period of time that was identified. The side you end up in a fight about things like are we going to protect the actual identity of an informant or a source in an ongoing matter. Adam schiff who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has weighed in on this issue. For two years from just this principle there were hundreds of thousands of pages and i warned them they would need to live by this president. Do you think now they have a legitimate argument to withhold from congress . Guest i think representative shift is exactly right, this is exactly the scenario that we worried about at the end of 2016 and some of us in the fbi were arguing strenuously over this fact if we do this now we will never be able to walk it back. And i think that the department is going to have a tough time justify doing anything different in this case. Host we talk about some of the things you didnt include in the book in the reference to using the 25th amendment to get that removed from the president from office anpresident from offt that he made in the two meetin meetings. You signed this and put your name on this. And theres been a dispute about how much of the dossier, the information that was generated and contributed to this investigation. So, how much of the deal actually contributed to the application, and in your opinion do you think that got it over because there are other people at the National Security and the fbi that handled these including those that believed they didnt need the dossier to get over the hump, and do you think that you adequately informed the court about the origins of the dossier, and the chief Intelligence Officer when he took it to the court. Guest i do believe we adequately notified of the court of the information we were using and what they thought about that information. I think that in fact in my experience with the packages, ive never seen a footnote like the one that we included in that package it goes into detail about a previous relationship and what we thought of the information we were getting from him and how we understood his involvement or interest in this stuff that was in the fisa package. I think we represented adequately and that is a matter in the investigation. Guest it stops with the department of justice that is the ultimate person and in your conversations, did the Justice Department office, you knew reached in accommodation with him in terms of transparency. Guest im not going to go into the details of the conversations but at the end of the day we put forth a package that to my understanding, people in my building were satisfied with to the extent there were any concerns how we represented and what we knew about the informant and his potential and how he came involved and what his background might say about his involvement. I think everyone was satisfied that we represented that accurately and adequately. The court was satisfied and assigned it three or four times. When you sign the application clearly you were involved in a lot of conversations taking place. I mean, there are Text Messages i believe between lisa paige and peter struck that talk about pushing this thing through. Why did you thin do you think ts urgency to push this through october 21, whats the urgency . Guest theres always an urgency about getting surveillance in place and conducting and having probable cause that was our feeling at the time and they obviously validated that assessment. Electronic surveillance isnt like a weed will get to it when we get to it, you do it because you think you need it then and so this is an approach we felt was necessary and important. Host do you find it extraordinary that you are talking about surveillance in public . Guest it is unbelievable to me and we are talking about it of course as im sure the viewers understand the package itself you can go online and read it in the redacted version for your self. That alone is so unprecedented. Ive been involved in, connected to and find many packages over the last 12 or so years and we just do not talk about these things outside of the organization. Its a sign of the times where we are trying to navigate. Host lets move on here. In the days after comey was fired, this triggered a firestorm. You opened up on the investigation a counterintelligence case. You did this within the fbi and wanted to walk the case down but now we know you had the approval to doityourself. Guest the requirement when you open up an investigation like this we call it a sensitive investigation matter, you notify the department of justice at a very high level within 15 days. And i of course did that. We discussed this as i was thinking about it. I informed him that we had taken that step into the cases were now open. So the doj have almost instantaneous notice, its not like we sat around for 15 days. Host that is what you did not want to do is sit around and talk about it. Guest i felt like we needed to move quickly and again, my concern is i probably wouldnt be around for very long and i felt very strongly the investigation needed to be on a solid footing as it could be because i didnt know who would be sitting in my chair the next day. Guest this is a pretty chaotic period you write about in the book. There was a lot of confusion and i think one of the things we thought about as reporters as if the president is investigating, i mean come if mueller is investigating into the president were possibly obstructing justice and one of the reasons you opened on him, how does he not recuse himself and does he ever suggest that you guest the vast a great question and that is a question only he can answer. The refusal decision is one that they have to make and hopefully it is done on the basis of consultation and following the ethics officials. Thereve been a number of issues of those to navigate and i did so in a very clear and transparent way. So, i dont know why he made the decision he did. Host did he ever suggest that you recuse yourself . Guest he raised the issue with me and it was based on the photograph that i took during my wifes campaign while we were at a swimming meet with my kids that they all happened to be wearing shirts for my wifes campaign we have matching shirts for one of those goofy family pictures. At some point in your private life so it was a non issue that kept coming up. Guest now you have the benefit of hindsight. And they believe the i believe u handled the initial refusal and couldnt find anything wrong with it in the way you handled it. It was going to happen and the republicans were going to weaponize dot would you have recused yourself Going Forward. Now they all agreed there was no reason to recused from the case which i wasnt involved in until three months after my wifes campaign had failed and was in the past. So, no, i dont think i navigated that issue incorrectly and i think my position on that has been validated by those that have reviewed it. Host are you angry for making the refusal at the end . Guest i disagree very strongly in the request and i made it known to him. He felt it was important, so i followed the directors direction. But i will say it was important for me to get this out. This entire idea that i was somehow compromised in my approach because of the support that my wife had received from someone else a year earlier is a false narrative. It is a lie that has been perpetrated for political purposes. So, should i have made this decision differently in my professional life and anticipated people are likely to lie about this later. Host i. Tol told reporters recently we do not predict the future. But its clear enough to coat of time with your wife running for political office, the objects of that haunted you. Guest it was created in the Political Warfare going on at the time. You cant possibly sit here today as they should i make a decision about something happening today on the off chance someone might lie about it a year and a half from now for politics. Host lets switch gears for a second and moved to one of my favorite subjects, gitmo and article three courts. You talk about a detainee page 121 into the former attorney general Jeff Sessions refused to bring back to new york he had been detained by a foreign partner. He put a lot of blame on sessions and in the organization theres a lot of criticism directed at you and some anger he was picked up and everybody knew where Jeff Sessions stood on this issue. The attorney general of the United States didnt believe he should prosecute terrorists in the article three courts. How come it wasnt sooner, he could have been an important cooperator. New york wante once again, a grt terrorism case. Why not bring him back sooner and get this done before sessions with his team which had been talking to get out of the chance to handle this . Guest a couple things. First for the record im not going to confirm who the detainee was. What i will say is you know from your extensive reporting on these topics generally these are unbelievably complicated issues bringing people back here to face charges whether they are americans or u. S. Citizens. There is a thousand places along the path where these efforts can get hung up and delayed and i completely. There are diplomatic issues and our own internal policy debates about who thinks we should be bringing terrorists back to the United States is if im correct its one that suffered from a number of those issues. Host were you district it a little bit of using . Guest no there was a lot of robust conversation and i understand how people they got the agents on the field and this is the thing they are working on and they want this to happen sooner rather than later. They are routinely frustrated and compounded by what they perceived from the field to be typical bureaucracy, nonsense politics getting in the way of the results that they want. Its often a much more complicated answer and just flat. People made a lot of efforts to get that done and we were not successful before the new administration came in but you shouldnt have to think that with the turnover of the Administration Process effectively for so many years is automatically going to be thrown out the window. Theres no doubt the attorney general brought a very strong opinion about these matters within the job based on a preconceived understanding about the work that we do. Host i think that they were still at the fbi. You brought back a terrorist from spain, he had irish roots does this ring a bell . How eager was sessions to bring somebody to gitmo . Guest i dont know that it ever got to a plan. Its what they talk about on the campaign, never understanding the challenges that they would have once they were finally trying to get it done. The legislative obstacle to bring anybody there, the problems here. Lets move on back to the investigation which people seem to be fascinated with known as crossfire hurricane which i can neither confirm or deny. Guest among the officials. I have a topic about this. Like i said, lets back up a second. You were in this extraordinary period. The directors fired in may of 2017 and people come its chaotic people were under an enormous amount of stress. Look, i know you had lived through some pretty highprofile event. Benghazi, the boston bombing, perpetrators so it was a horrific event. Do you think in this moment of time when you were rushing to open up. Do you think that its panicked and cooler heads might have prevailed . Did you really think that the department of justice was going to stop this investigation . You can take away the prosecutors, but the fight was always with the fbi he will not expunge information. Do you think that you panicked . Guest in this moment granted the people around you had never seen before, i dont think the country had ever seen before. It is a great question. I dont think i panicked or that the panicked. It isnt really how i react to things partially because of those experiences that you just referred to. Numerous terrorist events. Unfortunately we have a lot of experience navigating challenging facts and emu show and pressure filled circumstances. This one was totally different, i get that. But at that time, you fall back on what you know and my first instinct was lets go to the investigators, lets pull the Team Together and ask them or ararewe in the right place righw with respect to this investigation, there were some that we were thinking about closing at this time. Are there other investigations out there that we think we need to get started and should we start those before, and who knows what might happen. We might be reassigned. If this is an actual effort, the firing of the connector is the first step to throw a wet blanket on an investigative effort that we all believed was valid and necessary, then we should try to put it o on the state List Foundation possible. I am not going to tell you that we knew where it would go. We just knew it needed to be done. Thats the question in a moment. Is there an investigation that needs to happen. The answer is yes. But you are a smart guy. You understood the consequences to that. I knew there would be an incredible impact on me personally into the country at large. We are in these jobs because they took an oath to defend the nation and the mission and to uphold the constitution. The fact created the basis to believe the crime might have been committed. It was to not make the decision instructing investigation at thaand start the investigation t that time would have been abandoning our duty. There are people out there. Maybe they havent read the investigation operations guide. Online you can get it at fbi. Gov. Its the pathway to understanding how the fbi conduct the investigation and a necessary predicate to open with. Your predicate to open this investigation is reasonably articulated. The critics have said he gets on tv and tells lester holt that was russia and you have this mosaic of information. They are scoffing at that because it is not evident. Whats the difference in your mind when they say theres no evidence to open this investigation coming to it you had a set of facts and reporting your own guidelines. Can you explain that a little bit . Guest that was kind of surprising. I think that the representative has some prosecutorial experience so they hear from a former prosecutor seems to be an assumption that criticism unless we had to serve the warrant to get it where we got it through a classified meetings or something it doesnt count as evidence. That is simply false. Sometimes you have to look at the facts that are abundantly clear in front of you and make a decision based on those facts and not a crime to what he is eluting to. You didnt have evidence of a crime per se. Guest it is a standard lower than probable cause that this is an investigative effort we are not convicting anyone in the decision or throwing anybody in jail because they opened up the case on them. We are simply stating that with the facts we have we have an obligation to go forward and investigate. That is what the fbi should be doing. Host theres been a lot of talk lately shouldnt it be different because it is the president of the United States, or shouldnt we step back and think about it differently . They need a clear and consistent standard to apply to everyone. Those sorts of qualitative decisions should be made by the department of justice and investigate the facts that reached the declared threshold for an investigation and we should refrain from doing something they do not have the facts, period. Host may 16, 2017, there were basically two pivotal meetings. There was one in the morning with i believe it was you, the National Security adviser and his chief of staff and then later there was a second meeting with you, your lawyer, the same group as mr. Goldberg. In these meetings you write about pushing for the special counsel and who else was pushing for the special counsel among a group of people privy to what was going on . Guest its hard for me to go back and parse out i wasnt the only voice in the room that felt very strongly that the special counsel needed appointed quickly. The other kind of strong opinion in a direction that i remember is jim crowell who was serving as the chief of staff. Host why did he think it needed to be done . Guest in retrospect. We had a briefing in front of congress coming up to update them on the status of the case and the steps that we have taken. He was supportive of the briefing and the decision to do it and i thought that it was the right thing to do but i made it clear to him the people that were calling for the appointment of special counsel. He hadnt done it yet or wasnt going to did i told him i thought he was going to get a lot of pressure about that, and i remember him being kind of saying some of the same things. Host we talked earlier about the fact to placate congress they handed over an enormous amount of material to the legislators regarding the investigations and of course theres referring to hillary clinton. It seems like this was done at least when rod came into the job to give congress what it needed but also to protect Robert Mueller because if he was fired then he would be exposed as the sole person that could fire. Looking back on this, do you think was all of this worth it . You gave away the farm to protect mueller. What if i said so what the fbi would continue to investigate and agents would continue to investigate. With all of this worth it to protect mueller in the end . We dont have a final report but it seems like they gave away the farm to protect this guy. You have found the question that i havent been asked yet. Thats definitely one i have not thought about it. I think that these are matters that should be investigated. I think it was may 15 we started talking about the assessment that plays out over the course of the next seven or eight days. These are matters that needed to be investigated. They couldnt be investigated by the fbi a loan. We learned that in the clinton email case have we had a counsel in the case, things might have been very different in july and october. So, that is the problem that i was trying to avoid. Host is anybody making an argument against appointing a special counsel . Guest there were definitely people in the room that were not convinced we needed to do i that on a timelie that i was pushing for. I dont know, it is hard for me to say. The. To leave and be branded unfairly i believe is just sickening so depleted that they that bothers me but ultimately, i am confident in standing by the decisions ive made and the things that i did. I think it is fair for people to disagree with the decisions if somebody wants to come in later and say you should have thought about it differently or you made the wrong call thats fine people are certainly entitled. What i hope designate out of the work that we all did, it wasnt just me, it was an entire team of people. Its within my on our role and authorities and commissions what are we supposed to do here and how do we protect the American People and uphold the constitution. I think we have made some very tough decisions under tough circumstances. Many of us have suffered greatly, personally as a result of those decisions. I would do it all again tomorrow. I really would. I think ive said this in a couple of places as a Deputy Director to the fbi, acting director, in any of the jobs if you are not prepared to get fired for making a decision that you think is right, you should not be in that job. I wish it had not happened, but i would make the same decision again. He gets approached or if you use a checkered shirt and hes a hard one to judge. But he is not the kind of guy that takes this he stays focused on what hes doing, he lets the noise play out and he doesnt get involved in it. Host motel that was turned into a political attack. Did he just sort of t two and al of that out of . Guest she monitors those things, but his preference is for us to stay as far out as we could and we could continue doing our work in a clean and purposeful way as possible. The hill came to play such an active role in what we were doing and we needed to be more interactive with particularly our overseers on the Intel Community we needed to be a little more proactive in sharing information about the National Crisis or mass shooting or something that just happened, how we were handling an attempted terrorist attack and by being more transparent and open and what we are doing we could build support. Host i think weve benefited somebody that transparency and by exposing us to a leadership within the bureau i think that the bureau stuck its head in the sand at the moment and maybe rightly so. Do you think that he will provide a lengthy report to the American People were obviously to the department of justice or is i it past the term its not s style . What do you envision . Guest i would wait to see like everybody else does. But i think that he will provide a robust detailed report to the attorney general. The idea that he would give the minimal amount required and the charges against these people and not against these people, Something Like that is silly after two years worth of work. The department has some tough decisions to make and i think that as we have discussed it to some extent they backed themselves into a corner in terms of what they will share with the hill. I think they should share with the American People as expensively as they can come, acknowledging that theres all kinds of things that will mitigate against the details in the classified or sensitive privileged material, things like that that are not appropriate to share. I analogize it to the way that we handled the Intelligence Community assessment about our report assessing the 2016 campaign that a document in its original form is one of the most highly classified compartmentalized things i ever read. We were still able to come up with in unclassified version we share with the public that if we gave them our conclusions and the basis for that conclusion. Host someone will take the job and hedge fund, im not sure if that is going to happen now. What is next . Guest focusing on the book and getting the story out, its to continue speaking about the fbi. I think that there is an education that needs to take place and people dont understand as much as we talk about the fbi it is kind of the icon of american might and we dont really know. To push back against many of these completely false narratives in the corruption and all the rest of that nonsense. Any sense of when there will be a conclusion it seems like its been going on for a long time. We had a number of exchanges. My attorneys have with the Prosecutors Office area so, we wait to see what happens. Host or the u. S. Attorneys and ethical . Guest iethical . Guest co. Itd really anger the president. Guest theres al guest theres all kinds of ways to speculate about that. If they are guided by the law and the facts which i would give them the benefit of the doubt but that is how they will make the decision and that is how they make the decision then i dont have anything to worry about. However, if the decision is in good by politics or by the president and pressure from who knows where, then nobody knows what will happen. Host thank you so much. Guest appreciate it. I am so excited to welcome you to this event with the latest collection of essays

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