The former deputy director of the FBI recounts his career; discusses how law enforcement battles terror threats, Russian crime, and attacks by the White House itself on the U.S. Constitution; and offers details of the events leading up to his firing by Donald Trump.
Better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be ... 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 ... a rapid-fire G-man memoir ... 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 ... if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.
Definitely worth the read. The Threat is not just another exercise in score-settling, although there is plenty of that ... should leave the reader worried that our cold civil war is taking its toll on the US and its institutions.
A startling portrait that suggests that the Trump administration’s reputation for baseness and dysfunction has, if anything, been understated and too narrowly attributed to the president ... insightful and occasionally provocative ... overall, the book isn’t the comprehensive account McCabe was presumably capable of delivering. He seems reluctant to reveal details about his role in conflicts at key moments, rarely shedding meaningful new light on areas of the Trump-Russia-FBI timeline established by Mueller, news organizations and previous authors ... McCabe is a keen observer of detail, particularly when it comes to the president’s pettiness ... One of the most frustrating aspects of The Threat is that it steers around scenes where McCabe might have provided more detail or insight.
