[applause] mr. Mccabe thank you. Thank you so much for that warm welcome. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and distinguished guests, students, and all members of the new school community. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you here tonight. It is truly an honor. And quite frankly has large and as terrifying as hello you are now, but to do it on the hundredth anniversary of the new school. Congratulations on your anniversary and for making that a part of it. Tonight, i would like to talk to you about loyalty, and about how my experiences in the fbi showed me the majesty and power of loyalty at its best. And the danger and manipulation of loyalty in pursuit of selfinterest. The motto of the fbi is fidelity, bravery, integrity, so it begins with fidelity. Fidelity, what is that . The quality or state of being faithful. And what is faithful . According to miriam webster, faithful is steadfast affection in affection or allegiance and loyal. So i think it is appropriate that at the fbi you begin swearing an oath of loyalty to the concepts and principles that we dedicate ourselves to during the course of our career. My beginning took place on a hot sunday night in july of 1996. I had been suffering as a miserable attorney. Are there miserable attorneys in the audience . This is new york city, so i know there are some miserable attorneys in this audience. [laughter] mr. Mccabe i feel you. I was working. I locked on to the idea of becoming an agent while i was in law school. The fbi was under a hiring freeze. I graduated from law school and went to work at a small firm in camden, new jersey. Wonderful town. [laughter] mr. Mccabe i immediately put my application in and waited and waited. I remember most visceraly the day that Timothy Mcveigh drove a truck to the front of the alfred p. Murrah Federal Building in oklahoma city, detonating the truck, killing 168 americans, injuring others. I spent the entire day sitting in my office staring at the wall listening to the radio, no work. I could not break away from the coverage of that event. There was something about what was happening on the ground. I could not explain it to myself at that time, but i knew i wanted to be there. I just felt the need to be a part of that, to be in the rubble, the side of the smoking hole, helping those touched so dreadfully by terrorism, and most importantly, being a part of that team that was going to have the responsibility to find those people responsible and bring them to justice. So i remember that time as being particularly tough, waiting for the fbi to give me the call, but i did get it eventually in july 1996. On that sunday night, i packed up my stuff and drove to quantico, virginia. Quantico is a very regimented place. You are told exactly where to be at every minute of the day and must be early and dont be late, the whole nine yards. As soon we got there, we were told you have half an hour to eat, put on a suit and tie, and report to the classroom, where we were sworn in as special agents in training at the fbi. Your very first night in the fbi, you dont sleep until you gather together with your class of 40 or so and you hold up your right hand and take the oath. The following oath. You begin by saying, i, Andrew Mccabe you wouldnt say Andrew Mccabe, you would say you own names. [laughter] mr. Mccabe just dont get hung up on that. Do solemnly swear that i will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that i will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That is the phrase that gets me the most. Everybody thinks about the first clause, i will defend the constitution against all enemies , foreign and domestic, which is striking, important, and powerful, but it is the second clause that really defines what you do as an fbi agent, i will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, to that same constitution that binds us all to the principles of freedom, fairness, and justice. That is the source. That is what you become loyal to when you make that oath. Notably, there is no president in that oath, there is no Political Party in that oath, there is no race, there is no gender, there is no sexual orientation. It is simply the pledge of loyalty to the document that binds us together as americans,. It is the same oath that every Public Servant in the United States government takes, and with each of us, it carries the same meaning. Basically, that we will do our job, whatever it is, in accordance with the principles of that constitution for the betterment of all americans. I started to learn how this happens when i had the opportunity, my first office of assignment, right here in the big apple, new york city field office, not too far down broadway from where we are sitting tonight, and i was first assigned there as an agent on the Russian Organized Crime Task force. I know, ironic, right . [laughter] mr. Mccabe coincidence or not . Im not sure. Not sure, but there, i had the opportunity to work alongside the same people who share the took the same oath as me and shared the same values and dedicated themselves to those values on a visceral and daytoday level. I also had the opportunity to work for leaders who showed me , by example, what it meant to be loyal to those concepts, to those ideals, and those values, and i had the ability to interact with and help victims of crime, who intrinsically new loyalty to those help them nod , matter what. Probably the best example i can give you of this is my first big case on my squad, still very new in the new york office, new enough that i was showing up early, which no one in the new york office does. I was not seasoned enough to realize that our days drag on into the evenings and it was better to come in later. Nevertheless, i was the only was there when the phone rang one morning. [siren] mr. Mccabe on the phone, i hear this gravelly voice of a man with a heavy russian accent. I had to introduce myself, hello, mccabe, fbi, then i giggled because i couldnt believe i was actually saying it. [laughter] mr. Mccabe the man on the other end said, i think im being racketeered. I think that is extraordinary. Verber thought of it as a in that way. I talked to him and he laid out a story for me. Felix was a Furniture Store owner. He owned a store in brooklyn. He was russian, here on a green card, here for many years, and was part of a community of other Furniture Store owners, all russian, hardworking people, not making a lot of money, but making their way in this country, paying their taxes in , and living their lives the same way all of us do. Earlier in his career, he had a partner, dimitri. He left the store, went back to russia, spent a year in moscow, then returned to brooklyn with a new approach on life. Dimitri decided he would become a gangster so he built a small crew of thugs and he set about doing what gangsters do, which is taking advantage of people in their own communities and extorting them for things like protection money, collection, kidnappings, things like that. So dimitri had come to felix and said, im going to get all the Furniture Store owners together and they are all going to start paying me for protection. I need you to help me with this. I need you to pull them together. Felix was outraged, outraged. He was nervous because he had a family it was outraged by what demeter is demanding from him and his in he said i dont need him because i have you and i knew in that moment, the fact that he came from a place where he could never have that level with alland trust forceful officers that he interacted with, but here it was different. Member of thes a to that i would remain loyal those principles that my and thation stands for was why he was inclined that when we asked him to go to a meeting wearing a concealed recording device, he didnt want to do it, but he trusted us and get it anyway. We were able to make what turned. Ut to be an unbelievable case i also had that time to work for whot leaders, leaders taught me about creating environments of trust. [no audio] the last few hours, he would cases,alking to us about our performance, with mean to us complain about our prosecutors, but also talking about our wives and kids in the renovations we our firstg to do on houses. Whoas just there in the guy connected with us on a very personal level, and exemplified a level of excellent and honesty and integrity that we all aspired to mimic in our own lives and the way we worked our own cases. Later when i moved to headquarters, i had the opportunity to work closely for many years with director mueller. So the best way i can describe director mueller to you is he is exactly that got you heard about them fits the description to a t. People have got this guy figured out. He is the consummate investigator, prosecutor, cross examiner. Director mueller never met a case he didnt love, and he wanted to get right into the weeds of every one of them, and would use that knowledge to grill us at the table in the morning. He would ask us questions, constantly challenging our knowledge of the facts and whether we had followed up on the things he asked us to do the day before, and although that was mildly terrifying and stressful at the time, i realize later as a leader in the fbi that what he was doing was teaching us and communicating the level of excellent, the level of understanding that he demanded of each of us. We are in a business [indiscernible] terrorism. It is not like you get most of them, you have to get them all, and understanding those demands director mueller communicated us can exactly how much emphasis he placed on our expertise but he is also incredibly fairminded, and although he can push you to the limits, he was the same guy who called me the day after i got hit by a car riding my bicycle, to find out how i was doing. I was heavily on painkillers, so it was a strange conversation i cannot exactly recount at this moment, but another caring, moral leader with integrity who served as a great example to the people he led. So you can imagine my shock when on the evening of may 9, 2017, after having been informed half an hour earlier by the attorney general that he had to fire the fbi director, i received a call, my staff received a call, the president would like to see you in the oval office. So i had never been to the oval office. I had been to a thousand meetings in the white house, the situation room, members of the National Security council, some of which were attended by president obama, but i had never met with president in the oval office. Simply as a career government servant going to the oval office is an aweinspiring event, no matter who is sitting in the office at the time. When i walked in, President Trump was seated behind the resolute desk, the incredible, solid desk. He popped up quickly, came around the desk, put his hand outstretched, his fingers outstretched, he immediately shook my hand and begin talking. I know, you are surprised. [laughter] mr. Mccabe President Trump is an overwhelming communicator. He is a big man. He speaks loudly and constantly. He launched into a tirade of really statements, not so much questions, just statements, which i later learned was his way of informing me of the facts he wished me to adopt. He said, so glad you are here. This is going to be great. [indiscernible] everybody is happy. Did you hear them everybody is happy about this . [indiscernible] are they happy about this at the fbi building . Isnt this great. Isnt this terrific . Yeah, fortunate he ended with the question. He said, i heard you were part of the resistance, and [indiscernible] i am not sure i understand what you mean. He said, i heard you were part of the group that didnt like jim comey. You didnt approve what he did in these cases. You didnt agree with him. He said, you objected to the way he worked to these cases, is that right . I said, no, sir, that is not right. I worked very closely with jim comey and we worked on this cases together. I was a part of most of those decisions, most of them. I know that some people have disagreements with the way that we handled some of our decisions, but i was part of that team, so i dont think you are correct about that. So in the moment, my impulse was to answer the question honestly, because that is what we do. It was only later that i realize that this was my loyalty test. Jim comey had notoriously had his in his private dinner with the president shortly after his inauguration, when the president came out and said, i need you to be loyal. There was no interpretation needed there. It was pretty direct. I realized this was my version of that same loyalty test. The president clearly laid out i dont want to call them facts alternative facts . That he wished i would adopt, then gave me that opportunity come put that lifeline in the water, saying you are either with us or against us. It did not even occur to me at the time to respond to that in any other way other than to correct [indiscernible] several other interactions with him, the next morning on the telephone, and then later that day in the afternoon, then a followup meeting i had with him a few weeks later. I saw things about President Trumps leadership style that i had never seen in the fbi. I saw the way his staff and advisors would sit at attention in a small row of chairs gathered in front of the resolute desk. I saw the way he tried he and his advisors tried to manipulate me into inviting him to speak at the hoover building that week. I saw the way he reflexively again and again came back [indiscernible] Political Campaign in a state of virginia the state of virginia in 2015, consistently referring it to it as that mistake that i made. Leaders dont this was not a leader creating an environment of trust. These were obvious efforts to coerce me in a position to take that loyalty i had over the course of my career and shift it, the loyalty, to a person, rather than an ideal or the constitution. We all know how this story plays out, unfortunately. Over the days that followed those meetings, i had the opportunity or the obligation to make a series of decisions that ultimately, i believe, led to my own firing from the fbi, in some way. Those decisions have been characterized as acts of treason, and we have been referred, a group of us that worked on those issues, referred to as plotting a coup to overturn the presidency. I think those words are lies. I think they are intentionally weaponized to gather peoples attention to a certain set of talking points. But im going to leave it up to you. We can tell you exactly what we saw, exactly what we knew at that time, and what we thought of the decisions we were making, and you can be the judge as to whether those decisions were an act of professional integrity and loyalty to the responsibilities we had at the time, or some sort of treasonous coup. So im going to ask you to put on your investigators hat and think about the facts that we had in our hands over the period leading up to the firing of jim comey and immediately after. The standard for opening an fbi case, as given to us by the attorney general and the attorney generals guidelines, is when we have information to indicate that a threat to National Security might exist or that a federal crime might have taken place. That is the standard to open a full field investigation. So, go back in time, through your investigators lens. 2014 and through 2015, we knew that the russian government was behind an aggressive series of Cyber Attacks that were focused on institutions, government institutions in d. C. At the highest level. We werent sure why they were doing it, but we knew they were behind the activity. 2016, we see the aggression and the targeting of that activity becomes even more specific. We then uncover signs that the Democratic National committee may be a target of cyber activity. So we go through a period of fits and starts where we dont communicate very well with the dnc, telling them they should check their systems and see if they see evidence of this probing and intelligence collection. As we get deeper into 2016, we see that activity is focused specifically on emails at the dnc and other places associated with Hillary Clinton her campaign. Unbeknownst to us, in may of 2016, an individual with the Trump Campaign, george papadopoulos, has a meeting with a friendly foreign diplomat in which he tells that diplomat that the russians have informed them that they have a lot of negative information about candidate clinton and they offered to help the campaign using that information. But we dont know this in may. Now we see the information we know the russians have taken is actually weaponized. It is released on the eve of the convention in an effort to harm candidate clinton. Seeing that activity, the friendly foreign diplomat realizes the significance of the information he has received from mr. Papadopoulos, and he passes that to us. At the end of july in 2016, we had known for a while that russians were targeting our political systems through cyber means, we know theyve taken this information from the democratic infrastructure, and now we know from someone in the campaign that they were at least aware of the fact that the russians had this information and were willing to make it available. The obvious question then is, is it possible, do we now have information that our most significant adversary on the world stage might be working in concert with a domestic Political Campaign to undermine the stability and sanctity of our democratic elections . We make that decision to open the russia case on that reason. And then we think, who are we actually going to investigate . Who do we know who is associated with the campaign who has known significant ties to russian intelligence . We come up with names that will not surprise you. Mr. Papadopoulos, because he made the statement. Paul manafort, who was well known before that time to have had highlevel political contacts in ukraine with candidates supported by russia. Michael flynn, who engaged in highlevel and public interactions with Vladimir Putin and other russians. And an individual named carter page. Carter page was a guy who was known to us for many years, who had come up in an earlier counterintelligence case, who had been interviewed and alerted by our agents to the concerns we had about people he was interacting with, and then shared that information with them after the briefing. Carter was a person who had significan