Mark Penn Wants To Tell You Who Upended Our Election Process, Fanned Partisan Political Fames, Distorted Our Foreign Policy By Isolating Us From Russia, And Abused The Powers Of Their Office

Yesterday's big NY Times book review was Dwight Garner's look at The Threat by Andrew McCabe. Fox News has a very different perspective on the book and we'll get to that in a moment. Garner points to McCabe's first sentence-- "Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law"-- and suggests that it demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from Dragnet. It may not be Dostoevsky but Garner is a fan: "McCabe is, of course, the former deputy director of the F.B.I. who was fired last March, just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. He was briefly the F.B.I.’s acting director, after the dismissal of James B. Comey. The president hooted on Twitter: 'Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the F.B.I.-- A great day for Democracy.' This lawman, a registered Republican for the entirety of his adult life, may have been driven out of Dodge. But he has dusted off his white hat and returned with a memoir that’s better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be."

The Threat is a concise yet substantive account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack. It’s an unambiguous indictment of Trump’s moral behavior. “Let me state the proposition openly,” McCabe writes. “The work of the F.B.I. is being undermined by the current president.”

It’s a rapid-fire G-man memoir, moving from the author’s training in Quantico (shades of The Silence of the Lambs) through his experiences chasing the Russian mob, the Boston Marathon bombers and others. The book is patriotic and oddly stirring. It has moments of opacity, where you feel he is holding back at crucial moments, but it is filled with disturbingly piquant details.

...McCabe’s accounts of his baffled interactions with Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, would be high comedy if they were not so dire. They are a highlight, or a lowlight, of this book. We see a Sessions who is openly racist. “Back in the old days,” he says to the author about the F.B.I., “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks, but they could be trusted.”

Sessions seemed not to read his daily briefings. He had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”

Sessions concentrated almost solely on the immigration aspect of any issue, McCabe writes, even when there was no immigration aspect. Similarly, “Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the F.B.I. plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty.”

The portrait of Sessions is of a man for whom merely ordering lunch seems to be above the timberline of his intellect and curiosity.

...Mueller is, in this book, the Mueller we have come to know: punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.

“Ball-busting is his way of expressing affection,” McCabe writes. “If he said, Where does a person even find a tie like that? I knew things were fine: He never went out of his way to insult anyone he didn’t actually like.”

McCabe’s memoir joins a roster of recent and alarming books by high-ranking members of the United States’ justice and intelligence communities, each pushing back sharply against the president’s war on facts and competence.

These books include Comey’s A Higher Loyalty as well as  The Assault on Intelligence, by Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, and Facts and Fears, by James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, written with Trey Brown.

Each is its own Paul Revere ride of warning. Each is a reminder that we will be reading about Trump and his administration for the rest of our lives, for the exact opposite reason that we will also be reading about Lincoln and his for the rest of our lives.

There’s much more in McCabe’s book. He’s good on things like what it’s like to take a polygraph test, and the fastest way to take off a seatbelt.

He wades back through the big muddy of the Benghazi hearings. He writes of his fears about the increasing use of encryption.

He spends a good deal of time talking about Hillary Clinton and her email server. He argues that Comey, whom he admires, made crucial mistakes in how he handled the matter. “As a matter of policy, the F.B.I. does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.”

He recounts the attacks on his credibility, by Trump and others, after his wife, Jill, ran for Virginia’s State Senate as a Democrat in 2015. He hurt his own credibility, according to the F.B.I. inspector general, by making false statements about his contacts with the media.

The Trump-bashing texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, his F.B.I. subordinates, did something worse: They cast doubts about the impartiality of the agency. McCabe rushes past this material too swiftly. Yet if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.

He adds to our understanding of how deeply Trump remains under Vladimir Putin’s sway. After a North Korean ballistic missile test, Trump told an F.B.I. briefer that reports of the test were a hoax. McCabe writes, incredulously: “He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”

About Trump, the author asks, “What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?” He watches this moral limbo dancer go lower and lower. Yet he sees the president as a symptom as much as a disease.

“When is the right time,” he asks, “to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with?”

So many Trump books... which one(s) to actually sit down and read? Fox News knows its audience well enough to be certain the answer, for them, is "none of them." The Threat-- How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump is not going to be on many nightstands of Fox viewers. Sunday Fox published two commentaries on McCabe's book. The first was an OpEd by one of the most odious of creatures inhabiting the swampy fringes of American politics, Mr. Repulsive, Mr. Problem Solvers himself. In fact, his Fox OpEd, shows exactly from where the Problem Solvers world view emanates. "The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey." Pure Trump defense from the phony-center. I wonder if Josh Gottheimer, Penn's contemptible little lap doggie inside the House Democratic caucus, would agree. This is exactly what Fox wants to reinforce in the lizard brains of its viewers:

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

It is now crystal clear that the highest echelons of the Justice Department and FBI had morphed from the world’s most professional law enforcement organization into a Third World rump group. They had the hubris to believe that they-- not the American people or their duly elected representatives-- should decide who governs and how.

They upended our election process, fanned partisan political flames, distorted our foreign policy by isolating us from Russia, and abused the powers of their office.

Remember that McCabe, Comey and the intelligence community heads all publicly testified to Congress even after the Comey-Trump meetings and memos that no investigation had been tampered with in any way. None.

Yet upon President Trump’s firing of Comey, the remaining officials didn’t wait for the proper appointment of a new FBI head. Instead, they worked themselves up into an unfounded hysteria and acted to create an independent counsel over obstruction that never happened – and was never happening.

...[T]he FBI and Justice Department officials acted to keep the investigation they created under their supervision and with their friends whom they would appoint. And so rather than allow the new incoming head of the FBI to make these decisions, they acted to empower their buddy Robert Mueller as a special counsel.

Mueller, in turn, hired only Democrats, including a lawyer for the Clintons, and the “insurance policy” was launched and ensconced in power. So a counterintelligence investigation that was formed without probable cause now became the largest criminal investigation in history of a campaign and a presidency, dragging on since May 2017.

Adding to the intrigue is that Comey, McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all disagree with each other in material ways.

McCabe believes he never lied to investigators and had permission from Comey to leak to the press. Comey says McCabe acted on his own.

McCabe and others say Rosenstein was deadly serious when he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment and wiretapping against President Trump in an effort to remove the president from office. Rosenstein says he was just joking around.

Newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr needs to crack all this wide open. The secret charge to Mueller needs to be released. The FISA warrants need to be declassified.

A grand jury must be empaneled to investigate all this and get testimony from officials under oath, and the certification of the warrants used to wiretap the Trump campaign needs to be fully investigated. Dossier author and former British spy Christopher Steele and Glen Simpson-- founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS-- need to be called to the grand jury.

Operating a year past his commitment to the president’s lawyers, Mueller needs to finish his investigation, shut down his office, and distribute any remaining cases back to the Justice Department that now has a fully empowered attorney general.

If Mueller wants to continue instead, he should be required to balance his team with Democrats and Republicans, removing any former Clinton lawyers.

Rosenstein, who never should have been allowed to run this investigation because he was a fact witness who wrote a memo justifying firing Comey, will be leaving shortly.

McCabe and Comey appear on TV, write books, and have become nakedly partisan, revealing political attitudes no different from Strzok and Page. They readily believed unsubstantiated information and then took power into their own hands.

Every Democrat, Republican and independent should stop angling for partisan advantage and agree, regardless of who is helped or hurt, that these officials acted without proper authority and are responsible for unprecedented damage to our democracy and our political system.

By the way-- a bonus-- this is as good a time as any to let you know which freshmen Democrats have joined Penn's purposefully misnamed "Problem Solvers Caucus." Don't expect any surprises:

• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)

And now, another Fox OpEd willfully trying to distort McCabe's book, this time by deranged conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Andrew McCarthy. (His latest is that Jamal Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood operative and that that's why it was a good thing that Trump and the Saudis had him murdered.) His "review" of The Threat is just a dull regurgitation of the currently circulating far right trope that the FBI and CIA have been plotting a coup against Trump. As self-aware as any Trumpist, McCarthy, a lawyer, starts by asking his readers of they "ever wonder why people hate lawyers." Other than that, his review asserts that "There are really no new revelations in this week’s breathless reporting. The story is a retread, trotted out again because CBS is hoping to generate ratings for its 60 Minutes interview of McCabe on Sunday night, the launch of the McCabe book tour." His main point is that Trump is not unfit.