Bob Anderson

Our film will start with the moment where [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [FBI Director Jim] Comey, [CIA Director John] Brennan and [Director of National Security Adviser] Rogers go into Trump Tower to deliver the assessment of whether the Russians hacked or not, and in the end, Comey will stay behind, as you know, and have a chat with the president-elect. From what you know, what's the procedure? What's the idea? Why were they going in there?

I can tell you just from experience as the assistant director of counterintelligence and later the executive assistant director, anytime that there's a change in administration with the White House, the president, the vice president, national security staff, there's a series of high-level briefings that are set up to brief the incoming president and his or her staff regarding everything that's going on in the United States intelligence community.

You usually have a series of meetings where the director of national intelligence, the director of CIA, the director of the FBI, will go in and sit down with the president and his senior leadership team and talk about the most important espionage, counterintelligence and national security events to the country.

The sort of threat matrix layout?

Yeah. They’ll look at threat matrixes; they’ll look at threats to our foreign partners and intelligence feeds coming from that. All of these briefings are usually at the TS/SCI level [top secret/sensitive compartmented information], so the highest level of classified information in the United States government. The reason that's done is because in most of those briefings, the information that's being conveyed to the president or his or her staff is coming not only from our intelligence organizations, but from intelligence organizations around the world.

The amazing thing about this moment is for the first time that I know of, they're walking in to talk about something, and certainly the FBI, Comey, has an open investigation of the guy he’s briefing.

That's obviously going to be a very challenging situation for former Director Jim Comey to sit down with the president knowing he has an open case on him. I can tell you, however, that what people don’t realize, even with very high-level officials in the United States government, that happens more than you would think. In an instance that myself and [Special Counsel] Bob Mueller went to the White House to brief the national security adviser to the president, I was sitting right across from Gen. [David] Petraeus, and I knew I was going to search his house the next morning.

Those instances actually happen. Now, the president is a little abnormal, but in very high-ranking parts of the U.S. government, that does happen. Again, it doesn’t mean that somebody's guilty of a crime, but there's at least enough evidence to open a case to look.

What are the hot buttons that you'd want to watch out for if you're Comey in that moment?

I think, one, Jim Comey is a very smart guy, probably one of the smartest guys I've been around. Obviously a seasoned trial attorney, former deputy attorney general of the United States. I think he’s going to look to make sure when he’s interacting with the president that he sticks to the intelligence topics of the day and doesn’t stray into areas that might lead to a conversation about a possible investigation.

Yeah, because there's stuff that's happening. He doesn't even want to start talking about that. From Trump's perspective, not an experienced guy in the government. I know he’s had briefings during the campaign, intelligence briefs, but according to everybody we've talked to, he didn't really listen, wasn't really very interested in it. This moment, does this feel like probably a really important moment to him? If you’ve got those four guys coming your way, it must matter.

Well, it should matter if you have the heads of the top four or five intelligence organizations in the United States sitting down to talk to you to tell you about probably the most important things they’ve got going on. I don't know if he, because of his background and not really coming up in the political spheres, where you're either sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee or the House Intelligence Committee, you're seeing classified information on a daily basis, if he actually understood how significant it was.

I would believe that he was probably almost completely overwhelmed with what was coming out of the mouths of these senior leaders of these organizations. The reason I say that is on a daily basis, every day, at senior levels in my last couple jobs in the FBI, you sit down with the director of the FBI; you sit down with the attorney general of the United States; there's daily trips up to the White House and the National Security Council and the Senate on everything that's going on.

We almost take it for granted because that's the world you come up in, and especially since 9/11, the speed of that intelligence is unbelievably changed. But I would think it would have been almost completely overwhelming for people in that room that had never really understood what was actually going around and going on in our country.

There was a lot of question inside the Justice Department about the dossier and the salacious aspects of the dossier. Do you present it? Comey’s lawyer is saying, “I don't know; it’s a really dicey one." You don’t want to screw the situation up; you want to set it up. You kind of want to get it right with this guy the first time you meet him. Do you really want to go there? Can you give me any visibility on what the arguments might have been about should he or shouldn't he have done that?

Sure. Again, in a lot of different investigations, you will get myriad of information coming in on potential leads to open an investigation. In most cases, to include the case of the dossier, you may or may not even think that the totality of it, or only a very small fraction of it, potentially substantiates information you have from another source. That's what I don't think people were understanding. So although the dossier itself may not be that relevant in a large portion of it, there may have been pieces of it that were relevant.

Now, as far as presenting that to the president, I don't think they would have done that until they were absolutely positive that this was going to be something that was going to become tangible. Now, that's different than if you're going to the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] courts or a FISA judge to try to obtain coverage on somebody. In those instances, you're going to present all of that to the court, and you want the court to review it and understand what pieces you're taking that potentially collaborate on or information you have.

What did you mean by “visibles,” eventually become “visible”?

In some cases, depending on how information is classified or not classified, right—because there's a variety of information you're going to obtain, depending on how sensitive that is, it may or may not ever come out in that investigation. There's a myriad of investigations that just because you see an affidavit or grand jury testimony or a federal search warrant, that doesn’t mean that you have the totality of what the investigators actually see about that case.

Depending on the level of classification and how sensitive it is, not only to the United States government and intelligence organizations but potentially foreign powers that may have provided information to us, you may or may never see that.

So when you step back and look at that, the dossier, the moment the information [was] given to him when you know about what was actually said, a lot of it’s not yet public information, what did you think of that event? What can it tell us about what has happened now?

Well, I think them laying out the dossier in front of him, in most instances, potentially could have been a good thing. I think that there was focus on different parts of that document. I wasn’t in the meeting, so I don't know how it was explained. That obviously some people grabbed a hold of, and you can see depending on which side of the aisle or depending on which side of the case you sit on, they're looking at it totally different. I think if they were going to do it—and again, hindsight is 20/20—I think you would have to be very specific about what your feelings were about the totality of the dossier and potentially any other information that fell within it. That's not all of it, but just small bits and pieces of it.

He said it felt like a shakedown.

Yeah, again, I think, too, one, our president uses very, I think, dramatic terms in a lot of the things that he speaks out loud or even tweets. But the bigger issue is, and this is an important fact, I don't think he’s very familiar, and a lot of his staff early on—now I think it's changed a little bit—really had an understanding of how any of these investigations work or how they actually start.

In a lot of cases, you have investigations that start off with potentially one little lead. That doesn't mean that somebody’s a spy or counterintelligence threat or white-collar criminal, but it may be enough for you to, in good faith, have to look a little deeper. But those pieces, if you don’t do it every day, I think it can cause a lot of confusion.

Then it gets very quickly out in the public, the dossier, at least, first on CNN, and then a couple hours later BuzzFeed hits print, and everybody in the world, including you and me, get a chance to read it if we want to read it. Implications in terms of the relationship? And from an investigator’s standpoint, what are the implications of this?

I think the implications on not only the leaking of the dossier but everything that's been leaked, or potentially leaked, in the last several months since this case has started, I think it does nobody any good on either side, because what happens is information comes out, and in some cases, depending on who has had that information, there's not going to be any follow-up communications or confirmations. So it allows people to speculate. I've seen this rampant in the media and in newspapers, where you can tell people have no idea about the FISA process. You can tell people have no idea how this would be used in a FISA affidavit that are still talking about [it], and I think it clouds the issue and causes confusion.

In some cases, I think people also get very protective of potentially their client or their client’s interests, and they start making accusations. The leaking of this type of material, which, by the way, is more than I've seen in my entire past 20 or 30 years in law enforcement in just the last 14 or 15 months—there's always been leaks around classified information over the years, but in particular about this case, I don't think they’ve done anybody any good.

Comey comes down and gets in the car and starts to, on an FBI computer, type up essentially contemporaneous notes. Why?

I think it's after Mr. Comey learned that these meetings were going to take place. I think it comes largely from his background as a prosecutor and a former deputy attorney general of the United States. It’s not abnormal at all for lawyers or in some cases even FBI agents to take notes depending on how meetings go. Historically, the FBI, when it’s doing investigations, usually documents stuff on what's called an FD-302, which is a testimonial document they use in court, or what's called an insert, basically a plain piece of paper that you type up where you either looked or searched for information. You don’t routinely take notes on conversations that are outside interviews or investigations.

I think that comes more from his attorney background, where he’s in meetings with clients, he's in meetings with different defense counsel over the years, and I think that's part of his policy.

Because he said he’d never done it before, in all the years he’d been investigating or interviewing or having conversations with public officials.

Yeah. In that case, when he became the director, that might be absolutely true. I don't know, I wasn't privy to that portion of it. But to me, knowing Jim, he's a very thorough guy. He does not do stuff willy-nilly. He doesn't go off haphazardly. In all the briefings, and I was in thousands of these briefings these first two years of him, he takes time to think about what everybody’s saying before he makes a decision.

Describe him to me in the law enforcement environment.

Very different director than I've ever worked for. What I mean is that Louis Freeh was federal judge and a former FBI agent. He knew what the FBI did. He understood what agents did. Very much an agent’s agent, very easy to talk to. Bob Mueller, very aggressive guy, did not suffer fools well at all. If you didn't know what you were talking about, you're better off to just be quiet in the briefing room, because he would let you know.

Jim Comey was probably one of the nicest guys I've ever met, probably one of the most articulate and funny men, believe it or not, when he was speaking if he wanted to be, but very methodical about what he thought about. He ran the FBI, in my opinion, more like a corporation. He came from the private sector. He really put a lot of the running of the FBI on the daily mission of the FBI with the deputy director and the executive assistant directors, and he really liked to stay at the top of the organization, slightly different than, again, what Bob Mueller or Louis Freeh would have done.

Not afraid of the spotlight.

I think you're right on that. He was in the spotlight more than any FBI director that I ever worked for. I think in part—and I have not talked to him about this, but just from his background as the deputy attorney general years before he came to the FBI, as most people know when we do press conferences with the attorney general or deputy attorney general, we’ll go up and stand next to them. I did it many times in my career. But the message is usually delivered by the Department of Justice.

I think he was the first director ever to come to the FBI having been the deputy attorney general beforehand, which is actually the boss of the FBI director in real life, and I think he felt that he could use that spotlight in ways that other directors hadn’t used [it]. Trump’s Showdown

What did you guys think of him, think of that part of him?

Well, I think a lot of people thought, look, when you're in the spotlight, bad things can tend to happen, because usually the FBI goes by quiet professionalism. We usually do our job, do it to the best of our ability, and then when there is some type of prosecutorial decision or going to be some type of press, that's done by our parent boss, which is Department of Justice.

What was he risking by standing up there? What is he, putting a bull’s-eye on himself? Was he running a different kind of risk? What did you see it as?

You know, I don't know. By the time he started having the Hillary [Clinton] press conferences, I had been retired. You know, hindsight is 20/20, but I think if I was still sitting in my job in the morning briefs and he had brought that up to me, I would have said, “Hey, boss, we need to think about this." And maybe people had said that to him; I don't know. But it was definitely outside of what I've usually seen with former directors that I've worked for.

Why?

Again, I think he felt that he had done that for years as the deputy attorney general, and I think he has a perspective different than most of our former directors, because none of them had ever risen to that rank in the Department of Justice.

You watched the election last year. You see Trump rising up. You see Trump on the debates. You see what Trump's personality and countenance and bigger-than-life presence is. Could you tell after we knew Trump had won that there was going to be lightning bolts between Comey and—trouble between Comey, independent of an investigation, between Comey and Trump?

I certainly knew that this president in my lifetime was probably the most unique type of president I've ever seen. Just knowing the way the FBI functions and the way that Jim Comey functioned, if I was a betting man, I'd probably bet that there were going to be some type of incidents regarding them. I never would have dreamed that President Obama of the United States would have fired Jim Comey.

When you say the phrase “rule of law,” what do you mean?

Looking at what's right, what's wrong, and not just by how you feel ethically or morally—I think that plays into everybody—but really, what does the law say? Does the law say that if you do this or that, that that means that you've committed wire fraud or you've committed extortion or you committed bank fraud? I think that's the way Jim looked at a lot of investigations. I mean, as his background, I'm positive of it. And I think that's a very good way of actually looking overall at how the FBI administers investigations and tries to administer them without prejudice.

It doesn’t matter [your background]. There's 35,000-plus people in the organization, and everybody’s going to have some type of different religious background; somebody’s going to have a different political background. That [looking at the law] takes all of it out of it, and you're looking at in this investigation what's right, what's wrong.

This battle we've seen between the president and law enforcement now, it really is Trump versus the Justice Department, Trump definitely versus the FBI. That's a battle over the rule of law, interpretations of what is the rule of law, or is it the rule of law versus Donald Trump and whatever he thinks?

No, I think the way that the president and some of his staff has attacked the United States intelligence community, in particular the FBI, is horrible. I don't think it does anyone any good at all. What people don’t understand, and by these communications—years ago I would have told you the FBI has been around for over 100 years, and they would be able to rise up above this, and it’s not going to bother them.

I've never seen anything like this in my whole career. I do think it’s got to the point where it’s played a huge morale issue in the FBI and possibly in the United States intelligence community, because after a while, continually hearing the president of the United States, the men and women of the organizations that are working 18 hours a day, seven days a week to keep us safe, I think it does take a toll on them.

Why is he doing it?

You know, I don't know. It baffles me to death why the president’s attacking our own Justice Department and attacking the men and women of the FBI. When I left, 24,000 of them fell to my side of the organization that I ran, and I can tell you, there are people that have kids and families, and they're working 18 hours a day, seven days a week to try to keep things safe. And after a while of constantly hearing the most important person in the country, at least for our safety and well-being, talking about how badly they're doing their job, it’s starting to take a toll.

“Stormtroopers."

Yeah, I haven’t heard that in a long time. Actually, I heard it the other day with Mr. Giuliani again , which is a whole ’nother thing, quite frankly. We could go on forever about that.

So let’s go backward. There's a moment early, like the third day he's president, when Donald Trump is trying to thank the law enforcement officials who helped with the inauguration. They're in the West Wing, I think, or in the White House, and the way Comey tells the story, he’s hiding in the drapes hoping he won't be seen or called out by the president. The president calls him out. Take me into that scene from your perspective. What's the director of the FBI worried about feeling at that moment of public display?

Yeah, I think the big thing that was in his mind when this happened—and I've not talked to him about it personally, but I think the appearance of any bias. You’ve got to remember, in his mind he knows everything that most people don’t know at that time, that the potential implications of investigations, the potential of Russia collusion, whether it’s proved or not proved, and I think he doesn't want to appear in any way, shape or form biased by a relationship by the president.

I will tell you, it's hard for Jim Comey to hide. He’s 6’8” and a big guy, so whether he stood next to the blue curtains or not, I don't know if he’s going to get away with that. But I think that's why he was worried about that.

This is just a procedural question that you can help us with. We're going to spend some time pulling apart the Michael Flynn case. So Comey sits at his desk, got the thing open, sees the national security adviser has talked on the telephone to [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak the same day or close to the same day Obama has said we're going to throw … 35 [Russian diplomats] out and close down a couple of safe houses. There's been an intercept. They have it; they know what they’ve got. What are his options at that moment? I know he talks to Sally Yates, the acting attorney general: “What should we do? Should we go to the White House and tell him he’s compromised? Then if we do that, we're revealing that we have an open investigation and maybe that we have intercepts, and we know he’s lying if he’s talking to [Vice President Mike] Pence or others." What were Comey’s options, according to the book? I know the book isn't determinative about everything, but what were his options from the perspective of the director?

I think he did what he was supposed to do. I think when he realized that there was a potential of a compromise, or at least information that his superiors, meaning Mike’s superiors should have known about. I think he did the right thing. He reached out to his boss, Sally Yates at the time, who is a great lady and very, very smart, and the job and the role that she did at the Department of Justice—and they had a conversation about it.

From there, though, it becomes strategy, right? Like, where do you actually insert yourself into this conversation with the White House, and how do you do it? Because you've got to look at potentially—and I don't know everything they had going on at that time, but I can tell you from working a lot of very complicated counterintelligence, counterespionage cases over the years, you don’t do that without thinking about it. I think you have to have the initial conversation and determine what's the best route to go. Eventually Sally went up to the White House.

She goes to [White House Counsel Donald] McGahn, not above that, not to the political side, straight to the president’s attorney, basically says: “You got a problem. You need to address this."

Yup.

But she doesn't actually say what the problem is, I guess?

The one thing is when you go to the White House, there's very clear guidelines from the Department of Justice how the FBI or DOJ in any way communicates. … So when you do go up there, that's who you would talk to. You would talk to the general counsel for the president, and that's why she did that.

Then along those lines, when you're talking to that individual, that goes back to the strategy portion of what I've talked about. You, and in many cases I have in different instances, not necessarily the White House but the Senate and the Congress, said: “Listen, we think we might have a problem here. We might have a problem with this individual." That doesn’t mean that you're going to potentially brief them into every aspect of that investigation.

And that goes back to what I was talking about earlier. When you're in this world, especially national security, there's different ways that these cases are worked. They're not worked like traditional gangs, drugs, violent crime investigations. I think a lot of it is the person’s background on understanding when myself or Jim Comey or Sally Yates or whoever walks up to you and says, “Listen, we've got a problem here that you need to know about."

Who is Sally Yates? Who was Sally Yates?

Well, before I retired, in the morning meetings, as I've told you about, every morning we would have briefings usually starting at 5:30, 6:00 in the morning where 15 analysts would come in and talk to me and the other executive assistant director. Basically you divide the FBI operationally in two halves. I had one side, and another individual had the other, and we would go talk to Jim Comey and his executive staff and brief them on everything that has happened bad in the last seven hours any of us have been in the building.

Then you would go downstairs, and you would talk to the attorney general of the United States and the deputy attorney general of the United States—very close, small meeting. Most of the information you talked about was highly classified and some of the most significant cases you're ever going to talk about. In those meetings that's where I first met Sally Yates, and I found her to be an unbelievably competent, smart lady who asked very good questions on investigations and really committed herself to the job.

Comey gets invited to dinner at the White House on Friday night, the same day Sally has gone up in the morning and talked to McGahn. It’s just him and the president, and the president wants to talk about loyalty. Put yourself in Comey’s shoes. What was that like?

I think that had to be a tough conversation. Just knowing that I'm sure he probably did not want to go to the White House. That's my two cents, you know? But he’s weighing: “OK, what do you do with a new president? You want to represent the organization well. At the same time you know that there's different potentially cases and investigations and incidents that you can't talk about."

I think it was probably a hard call for him on whether he went or didn't go. Obviously, he decided to finally go to the dinner, but I think he weighed that probably highly. It wouldn’t even surprise me if he called maybe one or two of his close confidants to ask questions or pick around on that a little bit. I don't know if he did. But I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision.

Usually, historically, with the FBI there's a distance between, for obvious reasons, between the White House and the actual director of the FBI. The attorney general obviously meets with the president; the director of the CIA basically works directly for the president. So they're different kind of relationships than the director of the FBI.

It’s not very long after that that Sally Yates gets fired. If ever there was a message to be sent to the new FBI director, it’s that “I fire people who aren’t loyal to me."

I can tell you, when Sally got fired and that all started kind of cascading down over the next several weeks and months, I think not only in the U.S. IC [intelligence community], but definitely in the FBI and DOJ, [it] really sent shockwaves that a president of the United States would actually start firing individuals in those positions that as most people understand, it takes a long time and a long career to get into any one of these jobs. And as the different individuals started being fired or removed or interchanged with different organizations, that really sent shockwaves, I think, through the United States intelligence community and the Department of Justice, in particular the FBI.

What did it tell them?

Well, I think for the first time—you’ve got to remember, a lot of people in the FBI, nowadays, weren’t even in the FBI when 9/11 happened. I mean, you have people like me that grew up in law enforcement from the early ’80s all the way through 2015 that we've lived all of this stuff. We were there during all of these things. We’d been through ups and downs. A lot of the organization nowadays was never even in the FBI anywhere near 9/11. It was after 9/11. So for them to start seeing this type of kind of traumatic firing and rearranging of the pieces, the stability of organizations really changed.

I don't think the organization has ever seen this much dramatic change. And it’s not just Sally; it's when Jim got fired or [FBI Deputy Director] Andy McCabe got removed the day before he was ready to retire and potentially may be indicted now through charges. That is an immense amount of change to an organization that's never seen that before.

But Sally’s an Obama person. Sally’s not a loyalist. Sally’s not a Republican. Sally’s not a Trump supporter. Why wouldn’t he fire her, especially if she didn't support his policy of the travel ban?

You know, I can't answer that part. The only part of it that really impacted, in my opinion, the organization that I worked for for so many years is the fact that a president actually would do that. And as you know, it started happening with much more kind of quick succession across the organizations. I think that was the bigger issue with it, is that you start seeing—and again, having been in the private sector for the last two or three years, doesn’t surprise me at all. It happens actually quite regularly in the private sector, but coming from somebody and people that had been in an organization for decades that have never been in the private sector, I think it was a shock.

Two FBI agents take the extraordinary step, I think—you'll tell me if it is—of going to the White House and deposing, or whatever they did, interviewing Mike Flynn. Is that the right term for it? Was it an interview?

Probably an interview, yes.

What is the legal implications of lying to those two agents?

Well, the legal ramifications for lying to any FBI agent, regardless of if it was Mike Flynn or anybody else, is you're potentially looking at charges of 1001 [the U.S. code which prohibits an individual from willfully making false or fraudulent statements], which could be a minimum mandatory five years for each individual count. And I can tell you over my career, most people, especially in high-profile cases, would be better off if there was something wrong to just lay it out on the table, and they would be in less trouble than they [get into] trying to potentially lie or change stories that the interviewing agents obviously are going to know before they ask you the question, what it is or what it isn't.

I've seen this so many times in my career, I can't tell you, where people end up doing 20 years in jail and it has nothing to do with the substantive offense for the investigation that we actually started. It's about lying or trying to sway the truth in a way that mitigates what you've done.

Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] for two years and a long-serving decorated intelligence officer. Does it surprise you that it didn't cross his mind that when he talked to Kislyak it was being recorded?

It does surprise me. I've known Mike for years, and I worked with him in many different ways and in different jobs I had in the organization when I was in the FBI. And it does; it does surprise me. Anybody that works counterintelligence or foreign intelligence or espionage investigations, especially Mike when he was over at the DIA, which we worked very closely with and we worked very closely with when I was assistant director in charge of all counterintelligence for the FBI, you would think he would know that.

I think what some people do is they get so consumed in the conversations or what they're trying to do at the time, they stop forgetting about what's going on around them, and I think they make mistakes like that. Then the worst thing you can do after you make a mistake like that is try to cover that mistake up.

So once they had him in the lie, and you're Comey, then what?

Well, depends. Honestly—and a lot of these different types of interviews, and I've said this a lot lately, and it’s true, and it’s different—when an FBI agent comes to finally talk to you, whenever that is, just like whenever they get ready to talk to the president, whether it happens or it doesn't, you can guarantee that 99 percent of the questions they ask you, they absolutely know the answer to. And it’s not by conjecture; it’s by fact either through a subpoena, through a source, through an interview. They're going to know the answer to the question, and it’s not a trick question.

I think what people need to understand is that's just fact. So in a lot of cases, if I know when I'm interviewing you that if I'm going down a set of 10 questions and on number 4 I know you flat out lied to me, at the end of that interview, in most cases, I will come back to you and say, “Listen, let’s talk about number 4 again, because I don't think this is the correct answer to this, and I'm going to give you another chance to make sure you understand that if you lie to me, and it’s proven that you lie to me, this is a criminal offense that carries substantial jail time." And it does.

You'd be surprised how many times people look at that and then: “You know what? Let me think about this for a second and re-answer that question for you." And you give them the opportunity because maybe something slipped their mind. I'm positive that was probably the way that they did that with Mike. I'm not sure because I wasn't there, but usually that's it. If you continue to blatantly lie about any of those facts, regardless if I've asked you once, twice, two, three times, I think you're burying yourself, because when it finally gets down to the point where you're going to either potentially press charges or not, it’s hard to dig out of that hole.

Trump gets real mad after he has to fire him, and this is the beginning of the counterattack. The beginning of the counterattack is Comey first, but it’s also the bureau itself. Could you tell then that there was going to be lots of trouble with Donald Trump and the bureau was in the fight of its life, and Comey was, too?

Yeah, I think you could. I think you could tell, again, this is going to be a president that was not in any way like any other president we've seen before. I think once those pieces, especially after Sally and then Mike’s interview and the way he came after everybody after that, I think the writing was on the wall. Again, I would have never guessed, ever, even after he had fired Sally, and really went to bat for somebody that he considered a friend, Mike Flynn, that he would have fired Jim Comey. But after it happened, I didn't agree with it, and I thought it was horrible, but it didn't surprise me.

He then clears the room in the Oval Office and has Mr. Comey hang around, shoos [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions away, and maybe the most important thing he says to Comey in terms of a potential legal jeopardy: “Can you let this thing go on my friend? He's a good guy. Mike Flynn’s a good guy."

Yeah, I think that had to absolutely startle the director, that the fact that the president would be that blatant about anything. I think he was very—and I've heard in a lot of interviews lately that he’s done, he was obviously very concerned the minute he asked him to stay behind, and he, I think as he’s put it, he was looking at the attorney general to stay with him, but he didn't.

I think it put him in a very, very bad situation. And I think they were the type of situations that hindsight is 20/20 [and] that I think he would have got up and walked out of the room potentially nowadays. But again, hindsight is 20/20.

Yeah. You mean any future—if it was you who gets tapped to be—now you know [to] leave the room.

That's right. But then again, very unorthodox, something that you're never going to see before or probably again, and I think it's a unique position he was in.

… Some people could say that is the manifestation of the loyalty that Trump was looking for from Comey. This is his attorney general. It's a Bobby Kennedy-like figure that that's who Sessions is supposed to be. Of course, eventually he recuses himself. But even through these moments, that's an example that Trump is trying to set of the guy he wants.

I don’t disagree with that. I think Trump almost wants blind loyalty by the people that serve him. And I can just tell you, just knowing Jim Comey and some of the other people we talked about, that job, you can't do that. You have to be fair and just to everybody, not just the president of the United States. So I totally can see why Jim Comey was not only frustrated but very concerned about those situations.

So when they take him out, he’s at the FBI in Los Angeles. Narrate that for me, will you?

It's horrible. It's horrible. He’s at one of our field offices, which as you know we have field offices all over the country. There's 56 main field offices and 400 what's called resident agencies just in the United States. And he was at our Los Angeles field office giving a talk to the office, and behind them on the news it said that Jim Comey was just fired by the president of the United States. Trump’s Showdown

He doesn't believe it in the beginning. He thinks it’s a prank.

He actually makes a comment to the audience like, “Oh, look at that; I just got fired,” thinking that it was a mistake. Then I think one of his staff came over to him and said, “Look, we need to leave; this is real."

And that moment, the resonance of that moment inside the rank and file?

Oh, horrible. Listen, forget how you feel—good, bad, indifferent about Jim Comey. There is no way that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should have ever been fired by the president like that. It’s obviously the president’s right to pick and choose and also determine if people are going to work for him or her, but in honor to the office itself, no one should have been fired like that from the FBI.

Why did Trump do it?

I think that's because how he did it for 50 years in business. I do think a lot of the policies and the way he acts reminds me much more of potential CEOs in the private sector than I've seen in government over my career. And I also think he did it for shock value—that's my two cents—to say, “Hey, listen, I'm the boss, and I'll fire anybody I want to fire."

But I think it devastated Jim Comey. I think it devastated the FBI. I don't think anybody would have told you they thought that was going to happen before it did, even though the relationship was rocky, and I think it really put everybody on edge.

Near-term effect?

I think near-term effect over the last year is the FBI was stunned and is regrouping. I also think it affected and stunned our foreign partners. And I can tell you, having been in that organization for a long time, after 9/11, the need and the scale of information you need from our foreign partners is substantial to keep our country safe. I think it also sent shockwaves around the world that a director of the FBI would be fired by the president of the United States.

[U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein] … then he picks Bob Mueller [as special counsel]. Surprise you?

No, it doesn't surprise me at all that they picked Bob Mueller to run the Russian investigation. Look, he was the longest-sitting director in the history of the FBI except for J. Edgar Hoover. I was in his boardroom when he came back from the president’s office and they gave him a two-year extension. First time in the history of the FBI any director had ever been extended by anybody. It didn’t surprise any one of us that were sitting in his senior leadership meeting that day that they would have done it.

Look, he came in at by far the worst time ever to become an FBI director, right at 9/11. I was in the strategic operations center just a few days after 9/11 standing very near him when he was trying to right the ship after our nation was attacked. He is a very calm, levelheaded man under pressure. He functions extremely well, and he’s just an amazing prosecutor and leader, so it doesn’t surprise me at all.

What did it mean to the rank and file that it was Mueller?

Well, I think to the rank-and-file analysts, linguists and FBI agents that work in the bureau, it was, I think, a morale boost to say, “Hey look, our former director that was here for 12 years is trusted by the Department of Justice and the deputy attorney general to run this investigation." Look, anybody that worked with him for any period of time, and I've said this many times, [knew] that this investigation was going to be worked thoroughly, by the book and to a quick resolution.

I think looking back at it now, if you would have asked people a year, 13 months ago, when this all started, if all this would have happened in the last year, most people that don’t know him would have said, “There's no way all this would have happened." It doesn’t surprise me at all the list of indictments and arrests and different charges and the way people have been interviewed. That does not surprise me at all.

When Mueller sits at his desk the first day, what's sitting on the top of his desk?

I think he starts right at the beginning, right? He starts at the initial allegation and where the case goes from there. I mean, none of these cases or how we work these cases is really a secret. It’s a method, and you start at the beginning. You let logical leads take you where they should be. You don’t un-address or don’t turn a stone over just because you don’t feel like it. You always do that. And you work it until you can't work it anymore. And then if the leads run out, they run out. And I think that's exactly how he’s done this case.

So he opens it up, and he says, “OK, I’ve got the Russia, I’ve got Cozy Bear, I’ve got Fancy Bear, I’ve got DCLeaks, I’ve got Guccifer 2, I’ve got WikiLeaks, and I've got potential collusion with [former campaign chair Paul] Manafort and the Ukraine. I've got all of it." He just walks it all along. And then in one of the great and interesting moments, the lock is picked on Manafort’s door and agents go into the house. An unusual step? You might think, Manafort, he’s a white, successful, upper-middle-class former chairman of a presidential candidate’s lawyers. His lawyers are cooperating. Pretty dramatic step, isn't it, to go kicking the door down and go in there?

It depends. And the reason I say that is the one thing you have to remember with Bob and his team: I can guarantee you nothing they've done in the last 13, 14 months is by accident. So whether that step was because they thought they had exigent circumstances due to information that evidence could be destroyed, don’t know. If that step was to send a message to people, “Listen, we're not kidding. This is a legitimate investigation; we're going to take it to its ends,” there's nothing that I think that team has done in the last 12 or 13 months is by accident.

Lot of the names—[foreign policy advisers George] Papadopoulos [and Carter] Page—low-level guys. It sounds like a classic criminal, get the little guys, flip them, and start moving up. Is that what's happening?

Well, I think two things. One is that is usually what happens in a lot of these investigations and it works. It just does. I did it for years myself. But I also—

Did what?

You start at the beginning, and in most cases you work your way up, whether it’s to LCN [La Cosa Nostra; the Mafia], a drug case, a counterintelligence investigation. You start at the beginning of the investigation, and most times it is a lower-level individual that you're looking at that leads you to bigger or possibly more expansive criminal violations. I think the bigger thing, and the reason that Mueller’s team right now is so successful is he has surrounded himself with some of the best men and women and some of the different areas of legal investigation that he possibly could have.

He has experts in criminal law. He has experts in counterintelligence and counterespionage. He has experts in financial crimes. And nowadays, since 2011, the rules have changed. In the old days, when you were working counterintelligence or counterespionage, those two worlds never met. Like the criminal world versus the counterintelligence, counterespionage world, and the tools you could use to look deeper into your investigation never met.

After 9/11, the laws changed in the United States, and you're allowed to use tools from every part of those different venues, right? The key to where I think his thing is going so successful is he has experts in every one of those areas. He's using every tool available to him in the Department of Justice and in the FBI that he legally can go after individuals to look to see what happened. That's why I think it's so successful.

OK. Help me make sense about one more thing, which is the [Trump lawyer] Michael Cohen-Stormy Daniels turn that's been taken here. What do you make of that?

I just think it’s more baggage that's in his background that's popping up. I'm sure this isn't the end. I'm sure there's more of this type of baggage. Whether it’s another Stormy Daniels or not, I have no idea. The fact that they attempted to pay her off or in some way force funds to her or her business partners to stop her from talking doesn’t surprise me that he did that.

What does surprise me, quite frankly, is the way that his new counsel is talking about it in the media, because in most instances, I think he’s actually hurting his client more than he is helping. And that goes back to Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani.

You think there's more to this? If you were an investigator and you [learned] Michael Cohen had had his fingers in a lot of these different money pots, might be fruitful? You might want to go there? You might want to go toward business and away from collusion?

I don't think Bob Mueller’s team will do that, and I'll tell you why: because what I think he’s going to look at in good faith is what did the investigation initially predicate that we're looking for? And after a while, you start getting off the corners of the paper, right? You start going out on tangents that you shouldn’t be at, and I think that's a large part of the reason when the search warrants happened and the president’s former attorney, or attorney that he uses, Mr. Cohen, that he passed that information to the United States Attorney’s Office in New York to allow them to do those search warrants and allow them to look into potential wrongdoing, I think that's something that he’s going to be very sensitive on as the investigation goes forward.

You mean not doing the [Whitewater Independent Counsel] Ken Starr thing and just keep—

Absolutely right, absolutely right. There's no doubt.

One last thing for me is your view of the way the president has dealt with his attorney general, Sessions. His expectations of— [He] talked about firing him over and over again.

… I don’t get it. It’s not productive. You know, it’s just not productive. It’s not productive at all, I don't think, the way the president—honestly, even the way he’s changing his Cabinet officials around, people don’t understand that these jobs aren’t plug and play, right? They're just not plug and play, and you just don’t bop in one day and be the head of one organization and three months later go become the head of another organization.

It really takes a while for people, even if they’ve been in the organization or in that business for a long time, to understand the feel and how the organization works. I don't think it’s productive at all.