The Threat How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

If you want to read a great fluff piece about and by Andrew McCabe this is the book for you. If you were looking to get your hands on McCabe’s resume, this book will do just fine. The Threat was a well written memoir from a white color lawyer turned FBI douche bag. It was well worth the time invested to hear a few stories from the “inner” FBI, but overall, McCabe is a jackass, a clever jackass, so we are better off not completely trusting any of his perspectives. Two good examples, McCabe glancingly addresses the Snowden revaluations and the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. As far as the Snowden issues go, the author was clearly on the side that wanted Edward not only apprehended but saw him as a terrorist of the worst kind. You can feel the hate McCabe and his kind have for Snowden in the way he talks about the “damage” done by Snowden releasing classified documents. The man shows his true colors and it seems clear that McCabe is a fascist in the sense that he expects the government should have full access to any aspect of all Americans’ lives at all times.

At no point does he attempt any apology for being a part of pre-Snowden law enforcement. Never does he or does he sound capable of questioning the mass illegal spying programs the FBI used and profited from so eagerly and calls Snowden a criminal, of all things. He says there is no reason for private citizens to expect ANY privacy from the US government, and scoffs at the idea of companies like Apple encrypting uses’ data and then refusing to give the FBI the cryptographic key to EVERY single customer. Like I say, the man is a self proclaimed fascist.

It is great to hear McCabe stumble over himself as he tries to explain and justify what happened with Hilary Clinton and her lost e-mails. Until this book I had taken the e-mail “scandal” as nothing more than idiot Fox News Pizza Gate nonsense. But it turns out, Hilary made a massive mess for the FBI. McCabe tells how when Hilary started at the State Department she was issued a government email address and told to use it for all official communication. Instead she choose to pay a private company to run her email for her, not the us government. There was no reason to do this, it cost a lot of money and the only reason to do it would be to keep data private. After she did this for years against all requests and recommendations it turns out that about ½ of her emails had gotten lost my her own employees, a mistake that would never happen had she done what she was told she needed to. Now the FBI didn’t just throw up their hands and say oh well, guess ½ of the Secretary of State’s emails are gone forever, no, its the fucking FBI, they go and get those fucking emails, and thats hard.

McCabe tells about how they had to painstakingly get court ordered access to every email address mailbox that Hilary had potentially sent email to from her officail account, then sort through ALL the emails from ALL the people that she MIGHT have sent an email to. A massive efforts that cost a lot of money explains McCabe, so while not enough to “lock her up”, it was a huge time and money waster and still ended up with thousands of “missing” emails. It did not even end there, the FBI also had to get access to ALL laptops or devices Hiliary might have used, then recovered as much deleted data off the hard drives, another huge effort that should never had to have happen. Comey could have done little else than stating publicly what happened, if anyone else did what Hilary did they would have been disqualified from ever handling secret information ever again, let alone be allowed to hold public office. McCabe makes clear that the email scandal was real and and the FBI did what they did in the best interest of Hilary Clinton, did their best to cover for a massive screw up.