100th anniversary ofy the new school, so congratulations on your anniversary and 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 self interests. The model of the fbi is the fidelity, bravery, and integrity. So it begins with fidelity. Fidelity, what is that . The quality or state of being faithful. And. And what is faithful . According to merriamwebster, hateful is steadfast and affection or allegiance and loyal. So 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 a attorney other miserable attorneys in the ideas . York city so i know there are some miserable attorneys in the audience. I feel you. [laughing] i was working. I really wantlo onto the idea of becoming an agent while i was in law school. The fbi was under a hiring freeze cycle graduate from high school. I went to work att a small firm and camden, new jersey, wonderful town. [laughing] i merely put my application in as soon as they started accepting them, and i waited and waited. And i remember, i remember most viscerally on april 19, thank you 95, sitting in my office the day that Timothy Mcveigh drove a ryder truck up to the front of the alfred p. Murrah Federal Building in oklahoma city. He detonated that truck killing 168 americans and injuring about 500 others. And i spent the entire day sitting in my office staring at the wall listening to the radio, with no work. I could not break away from the coverage of that event. It 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 dont need to be a part of that, to be in the rubble, inside the smoking hole helping those innocent people have been touched so dreadfully by terrorism, and most importantly, the part of that team is going to have the responsibility to find the people who were responsible and bringing them to justice. Cyber never that time as being particularly stuff, waiting for the fbi to give me the call. I did get it eventually join 1997 so on that sunday night packed up my stuff, go down to quantico, virginia. At quantico is a very regimented place. You are told exactly where to be at every b 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 in 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 of course you wouldnt say Andrew Mccabe your you would say your own names. Dont get hung up on that. Do solemnly swear that i will support and defend thetu 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, the i will defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which is strike an important 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 the same constitution, that binds us all to the principles of freedom,ri fairness, and justic. That is the source, thats what you become loyal to when you make that both. Notably oath. Notably, there is no, president in that oath. There is no a little cool party in that oath. There is no race, no gender, no debt shoe 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 and the United States takes. Government takes. With each oft 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 agent on the Russian Organized Crime Task force. I know, ironic, right . [laughing] coincidence or not . [laughing] not sure. Nott 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 have dedicated themselves to those values in a visceral and daytoday level. Also had the opportunity to wor 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 what the immigration status was or anything else. Probably the best example i can give of this is my first big case on my squad. Still very new in the new york office, i knew enough that our short up early, which no one in the new york office does. I was not seasoned enough to realize that our days dragged on into the evenings and it was better to come in a little later. Nevertheless, i was the only one there when the phone rang one morning, and on the phone i hear this gravelly voice of a man with a heavy russian accent who says to me first, i had to introduce myself. I said hello, mccabe, fbi. Then i giggled because i couldnt believe i was actually saying it. [laughing] and the manwa on the other end said, i think i am being racketeer. I was like, thats extraordinary. I never thought of that word as a verb sorted in that way. [laughing] but okay, lets go with it. I talked to him and he laid out a story for me. Felix was a richer store owner, he was here on a green card, had been in many years and he was the community about the Furniture Store owners, all russian, hardworking people, not making a a lot of money but making their way in this country, paying taxes, living their lives inn the same way tht all of us do. Earlier in his career he had a partner, a guy named Dimitri Dimitri left the store, went back to russia, spent a year in moscow and then returned to brooklyn with an approach on life. Dimitri decided he would become a gangster conflate built around itself a small crew of thugs and he set about doing what gangster do which is taking advantage of people in their own communities and extorting them for things like protection money and collection kidnappings and things like that. So dimitri had come to felix and said im going to get all the Furniture Store owners together andd theyre all going to start paying me for protection, and i need you to help you with this. I need you to pull them altogether. Felix was outraged, outraged. He was nervous because he had a family and children. Dimitri knew them well, where he lived, but he was outraged and humiliated and what dimitri was demanded from him and his friends. And 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 f enforcement officers that he interacted with daytoday. But here it was different. Here he had that sort of faith and trust inth our system. He knew that as a member of this esteemed institution, the fbi, that i would remain loyal in my oath and to those principles that my organization stands for, and i would actually help him. And we did. That was why felix was inclined when we asked him to go to a meeting, to organize this racket, wearing a concealed recording device. He didnt want to do it. He was scared that he trusted us and he did it anyways. And thats why when we came ouf that meeting andou dimitri saido him on the street, referring to a woman who owned a store who refuse to pay, i want the woman beaten and of water in the hospital for at least two weeks. And with that recording, were able to make what turned out to be an unbelievable case. But it was experiences like that, working cases with people that we interactedrk with across every sector of life in the city, we saw the value in the strength that our own loyalty place in the people that we worked with and have it translated into justice. I also had the chance at that time here in new york and, of course, later at headquarters to work for great leaders, leaders who taught me about creating environments of trust within the people you lead. So my first later hit in newark was a guy named ray, our squad supervisor, alleged in the new York City Field Office. Ray would come in every morning around eight, 8 30 and is in the office until 8 30, nine, ten a clock every night. The last few hoursrs of everyday ray would spend just talking to us, talk to us about our cases, talking to us about our performance can listen to his complaint 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 in the backyard. He was just therefore pose. He was a guy guy who connected with us on a very personal level, and he exemplified a level of excellence and honesty and integrity that we all aspired to mimic in our own lives 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 is he is exactly the guy that you heard about. He fits the description to i. T. People that really got this guy figured out. He is the consummate investigator, the prosecutor, the cross examiner. Director mueller never met a case he didnt love, and wanted to get right down in the weeds of everyone every one of it. And would use that knowledge tot grill us at the table in the morning. He would ask usthin questions, constantly challenge our knowledge of effects and whether or not we followed up on the things he asked herow to do the dayus before. And although that was mildly terrifying and stressful at the time, i realize later as a leader in the fbi of what he was doing was teaching us and communicating the level of excellence, the level of understanding that he demanded of each of us. 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. My shock whengine 2017, evening of may 9, after having been informed half an hour earlier by the attorney general that he had to fire the ,bi 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. , president ed in 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. Oflaunched into a tirade 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] happy about this at the fbi building . Isnt this great. Isnt this terrific . Yeah, fortunate he did with the question. He said, i heard you were part andhe resistance, [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. Wayaid, you objected to the he worked to these cases, is that right . 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. , 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 . ,hat 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. He andway he tried his advisors tried to manipulate me into inviting him to speak at the hoover building that week. Reflexivelyy he again and again came back [indiscernible] campaign in a state of virginia the state of virginia in 2015, consistently referring it to it as that mistake that i made. This was not a leader who was creating an environment of trust. These were obvious efforts to coerce me into a position to take that loyalty i had and shift it to loyalty to a person rather than to an ideal, rather than to 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. 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 landens. Knewand through 2015, we 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. 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. May ofwnst to us, in 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 isw the russians have taken 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. In 2016, wef july 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