Andrew mccabe discussed his career, his firing from the fbi and the origins of the russia investigation. He was interviewed by investigative Journalist Carl Bernstein at a conference hosted by the new school, new york city. Mr. Mccabe was fired by the Justice Department less than two days before his planned retirement. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for that warm welcome. And good evening. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, students, and all members of the new school community. Thanks so much for inviting me to speak to you here tonight. It is truly an honor to address a group as engaged and, quite frankly, as large. Thats a bit terrifying for me, as you are right now. And also to be able to do it on the 100th anniversary of the new school. Congratulations on your anniversary. Thank you for making me a part of it. Tonight id like to talk to you a bit about loyalty and about how my experiences in the fbi showed me the majesty and the 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 and integrity. It begins with fidelity. Fidelity, what is that . The quality or state of being faithful. And what is faithful . According to merriam webster, faithful is steadfast in affection or allegiance and loyal. I think its appropriate that at the fbi you begin swearing an oath of loyalty to the concepts and the 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 toeshs in this audience. I feel you. I was working. I really locked onto the idea of becoming an agent while i was in law school. The fbi was under a hiring freeze. I graduated from law school. I went to work at a small firm in camden, new jersey. Great town. I immediately put my application in as soon as they started accepting them. I waited and waited. I remember most viscerally on april 15, 1995, sitting in my office the day Timothy Mcveigh drove a ryder truck up to the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and he detonated that truck, killing 168 americans and injuring about 500 others. I spent the entire day sitting in my office, staring at the wall, listening to the radio. I did no work. I could not break away from the coverage of that event. There was something about what was happening on the ground. I couldnt explain it to myself 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 innocent people who had been touched so dreadfully by terrorism. Most importantly, being a part of that team that was going to have the responsibility to find those people responsible and bringing 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 of 1996. And so on that sunday night, packed up my stuff, drove down to quantico, virginia. Quantico is a very regimented place. You are told exactly where to be at every minute of the day and you must be early and dont be late and the whole nine yards. As soon as we got there, we were told, you have half an hour to eat and then put on a suit and tie and report to the classroom. Where we were sworn in as special agents in training 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 following oath. You begin by saying, i, Andrew Mccabe you wouldnt say Andrew Mccabe. You would say your own names. 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 will i bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That is the phrase that gets me the most. Everybody thinks about the first clause. The i will defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which is striking and powerful. But its 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. Thats 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 sexually orientation. It is 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. 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. I was first assigned there as an agents on the Russian Organized Crime Task force. I know. Ironic, right . Coincidence or not . Not sure. Not sure. But there i had the opportunity to work alongside other people who had taken the same oath as me. People who shared the same values and dedicated themselves to values in 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 knew that our loyalty to those concepts meant that we would help them. No matter who they were or where they were from or what their immigration status was or anything else. Its probably the best example i can give you of this is my first big case on my squad. I was still very new in the new york office. New enough that i was showing up at work early, which no one in the new york office does. I was not seasoned enough to realize that our days dragged on onto the evenings and it was better to come in later. Nevertheless, i was the only one there when the phone rang one morning and on the phone i heard this gravelly voice of a man with a heavy russian accent who says to me well, first, i had to introduce myself. I said, hello, mccabe, fbi. And then i giggled, because i couldnt believe i was actually saying it. And the man on the other end said, i think i am being racketeered. I was like, thats extraordinary. I never thought of that word as a verb sort of in that way. Okay, lets go with it. 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. He was here on a green card. Been here for many years. And he was part of a community of other Furniture Store owners. All russian. Hard working people. Not making a lot of money but making their way in this country paying taxes, living their lives in the same way that all of us do. Earlier in his career he had a partner, a guy named deon memit. He left the store, went back to russia and came back with a new look at life. He decided to be a gangster. He set about him a small group of thugs and he wanted to be a gangster. Dmitry had come to felix and said, im going to get all the Furniture Store owners together and theyre all going to start paying me for protection and i need you to help me with this. I need you to pull them all together. Felix was outraged. Outraged. He was nervous because he had a family and children. Dmitry knew them well and where he lived, but he was outraged and humiliated by what dmitry was demanding from him and his friends. I remember him saying to me on the phone, i dont need him because i have you. And i knew in that moment, like the fact that he came from a place where he could never have that level of faith and trust in the Law Enforcement officers that he interacted with daytoday, but here it was different. Here he had that sort of faith and trust in our system. He knew that as a member of this esteemed institution, the fbi, that i would remain loyal to my oath and to those principles that my organization stands for. And i would actually help him. And that is why felix was inclined when we asked him to go to a meeting, to organize this racquk racket, wearing a con selled recording device. He didnt want to do it. He was scared. But he trusted us anyway. Thats why when he came out of that meeting, and dmitry said to him on the street, referring to a woman who owned a store who refused to pay, i want the woman beaten and i want her in the hospital for at least two weeks. With that recording we were able to make what turned out to be an unbelievable case. It was experiences like that, working cases with people that we interacted with across every sector of life in this city, we saw the value and strength that our own loyalty placed in the people that we worked with and how that translated into justice. I also had the chance at that time here in new york and later, of course, at headquarters to work for great leaders. Leaders who taught me about creating environments of trust within the people you lead. So my first leader here in new york was ray kerr. He was our squad supervisor. He was a legend in the new york city field office. Ray would come in every morning around 8 00, 8 30, and he was in the office until 8 30, 9 00, 10 00 every night. The last few hours of every day ray would spend just talking to us. Talking to us about our cases, talking to us about our informants, listening to us complain about our prosecutors, which we did fairly frequently. But also talking to us about our wives and our kids and the renovations we were trying to do ourselves on our first houses and how do you put a deck on the back in the backyard. He was just there for us. He was a guy that connected with us on a very personal level. He exemplified a level of integrity, honestry in the way we worked our own lives and in the way we worked our own cases. Later when i moved to headquarters i had the opportunity to work very closely for many years with director mueller. So, the best way i can describe director mueller to you, he is exactly the guy youve heard about. He fits the description to a t. People really have this guy figured out. He is the consummate investigator, the prosecutor, the cross hicrossxmenner. Director mueller never met a case he didnt love. He wanted to get right down in the weeds of every one of them. We 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 or not 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 realized later as a leader in the fbi that what he was doing was teaching us and communicating the level of excellence, the level of understanding that he demanded of each of us. Were in a business with no margin. Preventing acts of terrorism, its not like you can get most of them. You have to get them all. And understanding those demands. Director mueller communicated to us exactly how much emphasis he placed on our expertise. But hes also incredibly fair minded. And although he would push you to the limit at the table, he was the same guy who called me the day after i got hit by a car riding my bike. He called me to find out how i was doing. I was heavily on painkillers at the time so it was a strange conversation that 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. You can imagine my shock when on the evening of may 9, 2017, after having been informed maybe half an hour earlier by the attorney general that he had had to fire the fbi director, i received a call, my staff received a call and said, the president would like to see you in the oval office. I had never been to the oval office. I had been to the white house with National Security counsel, some attended by president obama, but i had never met with a president in the oval office. So, simply as a career government servant going to the oval office is an aweinspiring event, no matter whos sitting in the office at the time. Whether i walked in, President Trump was sitting behind the resolute desk. The incredible, solid, ornate, beautiful resolute desk . And he popped up quickly, came around the desk, hand outstretched and his fingers all stretched out at me. And immediately shook my hand and began talking. I know, youre surprised. President trump is an overwhelming communicator. Hes 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 that he wished me to adopt. He said, so glad youre here. This is going to be great. We got rid of comey. Things are going to be great. Everybodys happy. Didnt you hear, everybodys happy about this. Im sure everybodys happy about it. Are you seeing people are happy about it . Are they happy about it back at the fbi building . What do you think . Isnt it great . Isnt it terrific . You know, fortunately, he did end with a question, because i didnt really know how to respond to those assertions and he said, i heard you were part of the resistance. Toldly caught me offguard. I said, im not sure i understand what you mean, sir. He said, well, i heard you were part of the group that didnt like jim comey. You didnt approve of what he did in these cases and you didnt agree with him. You didnt agree with his decisions and, you know, you objected to the way that he worked these casings, is that right . I said, no, sir, thats not right. I worked very effectively with jim comey and we worked on those cases together. I was apart of most of those decisions. I agreed with most of them. I know that some people have disagreements with the way that we handled some of our decisions, but i was a part of that team and so i dont think youre correct about that. So, in the mean my impulse was simply to answer the question honestly because thats what we do. It was only later that i realized that this was my loyalty test. Jim comey had notoriously had his in his private dinner with the president shortly after his inauguration, where the president came right out and said, i need you to be loyal. There was no interpretation needed there. It was pretty direct. I realized that this was my version of that same loyalty test. The president clearly laid out the i dont want to call them facts. Alternative facts that he wished i would adopt. And then gave me that opportunity. Hung that life line in the water to say, you are either with us or against us. It didnt even occur to me at the time to respond to that in any way other than to correct his misimpression. Over the course of several other interactions with him, the next morning on the telephone and then later that day in the afternoon and 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 that his staff and advisers would sit at aattention in a small row of chairs gathered in front of the resolute desk. I saw the way that he tried to he and his advisers tried to manipulate me into inviting him to speak at the hoover building that week. I saw the way he reflex i havely came back again and again to references about my wifes failed Political Campaign in the state of virginia in 2015, and consistently referred to it as that mistake that i made. Leaders dont this was not a leader creating environments of trust. It was coercing me to take that position and shift it to loyalty of a person, rather than to an ideal, rather than than to the constitution. We all know how this story plays out, unfortunately. Over the days that followed those meetings, i was i had the opportunity or the obligation to make a series of decisions the cases we were working that ultimately i believe is what led to my own firing from the fbi. In some way. Those characterized as acts as of treesing. We have been 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, to draw in viewers and listeners and clicks on the internet. But im going to leave it up to you. Im going to tell you exactly what we thought, exactly what we knew at that time and what we thought about the decisions we were making and you can be the judge as to whether or not those decisions were an act of professional integrity and, in fact, loyalty to the responsibilities we had at that time or some sort of treasonist coup. Im going to ask you for a minute to put on your investigators hats and think about the facts we had in our hands in the period leading up to the firing of jim comey and immediately after. Keep in mind that the standard for opening an fbi case, as given to us by the attorney general and the attorney general guidelines, is when we have information, credible 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. The most robust and capable level of investigative activity that we have. Go back in time through your investigators lens back to the fall of 2014. The fall of 2014 and then through 2015, we knew that the russian government was behind an incredibly aggressive series of Cyber Attacks that were focused on institutions, like government institutions in d. C. At the highest level, academic institutions, and also political think tanks. We went sure why they were doing it but we knew they were behind this activity. That gets us through 2014 and 2015. Into 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 this maligned russian cyber activity. We go through a period of fits and starts where we dont communicate very well with the dnc and telling them they should check their systems and see if they see actual evidence of this sort of probing and intelligence collection that we know the adversary engages in. As we get deeper into 2016 we see that focus specifically on emails a