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00:08The FBI more than really any institution in the US government is the defender of the idea of the
00:16American dream. The problem is that if it's abused it is way too powerful and it threatens the
00:24freedoms of Americans which is the whole reason we're here. President Bush's nomination of Robert
00:29Mueller to head the FBI comes at a critical time. George Bush and Bob Mueller probably never would
00:36have been friends. George Bush was a guy from Texas who actually liked to go to the ranch. Mueller was
00:43a lawyer, a very exacting boss. But alas they end up being part of history together. We have
00:51unconfirmed reports that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. And
00:57they are tasked with the greatest crisis that the United States has seen since the Civil War.
01:05Thousands of FBI agents taking part in the largest and most comprehensive investigation in our history.
01:11Mueller was close to the president because they were in that foxhole of having to prevent the next terrorist attack.
01:22information was the most valuable currency in the war on terror. Knowing what the enemy is up to was extremely
01:28important.
01:29It is now my honor to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001.
01:35What happened was that under the pressure of the Bush administration, the FBI evolved into something beyond what it should
01:42be.
01:51The relationship between the FBI director and the president has always been complicated.
01:56Sometimes they're in moments of deep collaboration. At other times the FBI is investigating the president.
02:05The relationship has to be characterized by a certain ambiguity and tension.
02:09There are all kinds of things that can happen when those two entities get together.
02:23For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, terrorism was a relatively distant threat.
02:33This was a time of enormous dominance of the United States.
02:39There certainly was a feeling of invincibility or at least not being in a great deal of danger from what
02:44was happening in the rest of the world.
02:47This is a CNN special report.
02:50But you had had this series of warning events.
02:54When devastating car bombings in Southeast Africa.
02:58And then the bombing of the USS Cole.
03:00In Yemen, six American sailors were killed when a bomb exploded alongside the Navy destroyer USS Cole in port to
03:07refuel.
03:08And against the backdrop of that, there was this small team of FBI agents who were beginning to focus more
03:16and more on international threats and particularly al-Qaeda.
03:20We were literally going around the world disrupting plots and arresting operatives from al-Qaeda.
03:27But these did not really resonate at the upper levels of the U.S. government.
03:36You know, when George W. Bush ran for president of the United States in 2000, he framed himself as being
03:43a compassionate conservative.
03:44He was going to help people in need, but he was also going to out-reagan Reagan.
03:49He was going to do tax cuts.
03:51I've got a plan that says children be educated.
03:54A plan that says we'll share some of the surplus with the people who pay the taxes.
03:59Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.
04:01When the Bush administration came over, they did not want to talk about terrorism.
04:05They didn't think terrorism is a priority.
04:07That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.
04:11They were focused domestically, and that's where their policy was going for the Department of Justice and, by extension, the
04:20FBI.
04:21When President Bush came into power, there were threats, international threats we had to be sensitive to,
04:26but President Bush was really focused on the American people.
04:29They're the ones that elected him.
04:32He has a lot of critics.
04:33There are a lot of people who do not like him.
04:35There is a reason why the election was so close.
04:39So much has been made of President George W. Bush's lack of experience, potential lack of interest in the rest
04:46of the world.
04:47The new Prime Minister of India is, uh, uh, no.
04:51You know, we weren't used to a president using the English language in a way that it was not meant
04:58to be used, you know.
04:59But they under- they mis- underestimated what our campaign is about.
05:04I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.
05:08And so George W. Bush tried to get the most competent people around him.
05:15Mueller came with every high recommendation you could imagine, and you could see why he would be on your shortlist.
05:22Agents of the Bureau prize three virtues above all.
05:26Fidelity, bravery, and integrity.
05:29This new director is a man who exemplifies them all.
05:33It was fairly clear to me that he had a high regard for Bob Mueller.
05:36We all felt that he was mature and could be trusted to deal responsibly with any kind of issue.
05:44Thank you, Mr. President, for the confidence you've shown in me. Thank you, sir.
05:49And so here you have freewheeling George W. Bush and kind of rigid, stoic Robert Mueller.
05:58Mueller is in some ways an FBI director out of central casting.
06:02Famous when he was FBI director for always wearing a white shirt and dark suit and tie in exactly the
06:11unofficial uniform of the Hoover era of the FBI.
06:15I would show up in a pearl gray suit, shirt with stripes, white cuffs and collars, gold cuff links, you
06:21know, a Rolex.
06:22And one day he looks down the table during the morning brief and he says,
06:29John, John, John, what are you wearing?
06:32And I said, suit and tie.
06:34He said, we dress like lawyers.
06:35And he said, not drug lawyers.
06:39He was one of the blue bloods, as they say.
06:42You know, he went to the St. Paul School and then Princeton.
06:47And then made in the mid-1960s a very unconventional choice at that point to volunteer for the Marines and
06:56to go to Vietnam.
06:58He may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he ended up being one of those
07:02guys crawling through the mud with a knife in his teeth.
07:05Received a bronze star with valor, a purple heart for wounds in action.
07:09And then came back and basically spent almost the entire rest of his career in public service.
07:16Robert Mueller had been a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice.
07:21He had prosecuted homicides in Washington, D.C.
07:24He had been the U.S. Attorney, which is the head federal prosecutor in San Francisco.
07:30A person who was just focused on getting the job done.
07:36Welcome, Mr. Mueller. Congratulations on your nomination.
07:39Well, Robert Mueller was confirmed by the Senate on a 98-0 vote, and that really was no surprise.
07:44The FBI is in desperate need of strong leadership.
07:48But from what I've learned so far, I believe Mr. Mueller may well be the right person for the job.
07:52When Mueller was first nominated to head the bureau, he thought his mission was going to be modernizing the computer
08:01system of the FBI.
08:04One of the things that the 1990s into the early 2000s marks is that there's a radical shift in technology.
08:12It was a lot of joy that Silicon Valley became the new Detroit.
08:16The FBI missed all of the technology innovations and upgrades of the 1990s.
08:24Every FBI manager, indeed every agent, needs to be computer literate.
08:29He had an agency that had to transform rapidly in a technological age that had no technology.
08:38We were carrying pagers until 98 or 99.
08:43So every time that there is a threat or something, you have to find a pay phone and go and
08:47dial 1-800 number so they can dial you to the bureau when the bad guys were using cell phones.
08:55And I think people sort of had a feeling that we were insulated from some of the things that were
09:01going on around the world.
09:02What I remember, there was reporting that Al-Qaeda was planning something big.
09:08But all the reporting indicated that whatever was going to happen was going to happen overseas.
09:13Bob Mueller was sworn in as FBI director on September 4th.
09:17He literally came to the FBI and he walked into a storm.
09:29It's going to be an ideal day today.
09:32Currently 64 degrees.
09:34It's 59 at Dulles.
09:35I was driving from my house to Capitol Hill.
09:38There's a little cut through, a little shortcut, which runs right next to the Pentagon.
09:42I mean, I was a couple hundred yards away.
09:44I know the wind is down.
09:45It was a beautiful day.
09:49My wife called me when I started out.
09:51She said, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
09:53It is not a normal flight pattern to come directly over Manhattan.
09:56It looks like it has embedded in the building.
10:00And so I just kept going.
10:02And I, I mean, I felt the boom.
10:06We have a large fire at the Pentagon.
10:08The Pentagon is being evacuated.
10:09I saw the fireball.
10:10And I remember this guy next to me.
10:13And I said, do you think that's a chopper?
10:14He said, no, hell, it's too much fuel.
10:17He said, we're under attack.
10:18He sped off.
10:21Does the FBI have any choice but to sit and watch this on television?
10:25They are trying to find out the facts just as we are.
10:28There is an investigation underway.
10:30They saw what we saw, the explosion at the World Trade Center.
10:35At 8 a.m., Tuesday, September the 11th, Robert Mueller is sitting in his first briefing on Al Qaeda.
10:43It's interrupted by someone who comes in and says a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
10:50And George W. Bush was in Florida at a school reading a book to children.
10:55Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills.
10:58Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, steps forward and informs him of the second attack on the World
11:05Trade Center.
11:15Bush finishes reading the book.
11:18He doesn't want to cause a panic in that moment.
11:21And one of his first telephone calls is to Robert Mueller at the Hoover Building in Washington.
11:28Bush basically says, buckle up, this is what we pay you for.
11:33When Mueller was appointed director of the FBI, it was basically the week before 9-11.
11:39It was a deep dive into crisis management.
11:48Immediately, I went back to my office, started rounding up my lawyers who had all been evacuated.
11:53I mean, the main issue was, what authorities does the president have at this moment when we're under attack?
11:58Our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
12:05All of these things shatter what Americans know about their country and what they believe about themselves.
12:13America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time.
12:18In a point in time when the American public is shocked, when it is grieving, when it is in complete
12:25and utter disarray and turmoil,
12:27Bush gives the American public an identity.
12:32We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities,
12:35to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and to find them before they strike.
12:42President Bush's overall job approval rating has been extraordinarily high.
12:47American flags went up everywhere.
12:49It was red, white, and blue bunting everywhere.
12:52I'm pleased to report the culture of the FBI is changing.
12:55Now one in four employees of the FBI are directly involved with the efforts to track down every lead and
13:04to disrupt the evil ones.
13:05Bush and Robert Mueller are tight compadres. They're in it together.
13:10They are the first responders in their own way to what happened on 9-11.
13:16We have 4,000 FBI special agents who are working on the case.
13:21I was a supervisory special agent of the FBI.
13:25I was assigned to lead the team that was looking to prevent the second attack.
13:30I go to sleep thinking about terrorists. I wake up thinking about terrorists.
13:34We identified the 19 hijackers actually very quickly, very quickly.
13:39And that then really expands exponentially from 19 hijackers to several thousand people in several thousand contacts.
13:48The thesis was there's going to be a second operation.
13:52We're going to make the assumption there's a second operation.
13:54Both George W. Bush and Mueller became responsible for thinking about the new security order after 9-11.
14:03Director Mueller started briefing the president and the others in the Oval Office about what the FBI knew about 19
14:10hijackers.
14:11And President Bush, Bush 43, cut him off and said, that's all very well and good, Mr. Director.
14:17I want to know what the FBI is doing to prevent the next terrorist attack.
14:21And I felt like a high school student who had gotten the wrong assignment.
14:26Because I had not thought of that. That's not the way I thought.
14:29President was less concerned about prosecutions as he was prevention.
14:33Obviously, you arrest someone, you want to hold them accountable.
14:37But he would prefer to save lives.
14:38This mantra from the White House of never again is the driving force behind all of the work of the
14:48FBI after 9-11.
14:50We became a kingdom of fear. Everything was now a soft target.
14:55Law enforcement officials have fanned out through America's Muslim communities. Does that amount to prejudice?
15:01Yes.
15:01Suddenly, every cab driver in New York had an American flag.
15:04And you just got the sense that, like, they were just going, please don't hurt me.
15:09And a new CNN USA Today, Gallup poll, shows most Americans think the Muslim world sees itself as being at
15:15war with the United States.
15:17The possibility of camel riding nomads engaging in future terrorist attacks against the West can never be fully eradicated.
15:24They have to be tolerant of our suspicions, which are justified.
15:29I wasn't growing a beard back then. Let's just say that.
15:34America on alert. The nationwide terror state of alert jumps from elevated to high.
15:40After 9-11, we just saw this constant stream of terror threats.
15:45In my opinion, the prospects of a future attack against the United States are almost certain.
15:52When people are afraid and when they are vulnerable, they will allow even their most important and significant of civil
16:01liberties and protections and rights to be compromised.
16:05We're going to have to give some rights up in this country to live the way we like.
16:119-11 was a new world order which gave birth to the Patriot Act.
16:16The Senate has approved a bill that gives law enforcement broader powers to track, detain, and punish suspected terrorists.
16:24Congress was extremely compliant.
16:28And I don't want to say that they were willing to give the president everything he wanted.
16:31They certainly understood that we had a serious responsibility to protect the American people.
16:36We are all trying very hard to do jobs that, frankly, none of us feel fully adequate to do.
16:40And the Patriot Act is saying, look, you might lose a little of your constitutional rights here, but we're going
16:47to have to break in and read people's emails.
16:49We're going to have to tap some more phones.
16:53So there became a big brother feeling coming out of the Patriot Act.
16:57There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorism.
17:04Well, I was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, not because I thought we didn't need legislation
17:08like that, but because it was done in a way that was opportunistic and not limited to the issue of
17:14terrorism, but to a broader power grab by the administration and the FBI.
17:18We needed less red tape, right, because bureaucracy, red tape, institutional pickering is what fragmented the intelligence community.
17:31The Patriot Act has enabled us now to be not only an investigative agency, but an intelligence agency and to
17:37combine those capabilities.
17:39I think it was a wonderful tool in keeping America safe.
17:43But one of the lessons I learned is that laws are administered by humans.
17:48Humans sometimes feel pressure to get certain outcomes.
17:52This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the Internet,
17:59and cell phones.
18:00It allowed them to go after completely innocent Americans, basically to go on fishing expeditions, to say, well, let's go
18:07look at this person's books that they checked out of the library.
18:10It opened the floodgates.
18:19So after the terrible attacks of 9-11, President Bush started convening a morning briefing, a threat briefing.
18:28I work with Director Mueller of the FBI.
18:32He comes into my office when I'm in Washington every morning, talking about how to protect us.
18:37Mueller comes in with this document every day that comes to be called the threat matrix.
18:44And it's basically all of the terror intelligence that the FBI is tracking.
18:49And it skews the perspective of everyone involved in these briefings because it is this firehose of terribleness that are
19:02just hitting the president and the vice president in the face every morning.
19:08When we were getting information from the field about Osama bin Laden, about Al-Qaeda, all these kind of things
19:15were briefed by the director to the president.
19:19And we were getting instructions from the White House through FBI headquarters on follow-up questions and tasks to accomplish.
19:27This level of presidential attention after 9-11 was unprecedented before or even since.
19:35I think President Bush and Director Mueller probably couldn't have been two more different guys.
19:42I won't be a professional golfer.
19:46Bob Mueller and I worked together for a decade under the most stressful, crazy circumstances.
19:54He was not my friend.
19:56He never pretended to be my friend.
19:58I mean, he didn't know the names of my children.
20:00President Bush was, I think it's fair to say, an outgoing person generally.
20:05Director Mueller, not so much.
20:08But they had a friendship that transcended their differences because they had this mutual pressure.
20:15After 9-11, it became important for the president, of course, that we would not have another reoccurrence of that
20:22kind of attack.
20:23The FBI had been focused on crimes had been committed.
20:26And so after 9-11, those are refocused to things that were going to happen in the future.
20:30And so the goal was to have half of the FBI's resources dedicated to national security work.
20:39So being a great agent wasn't about the number of arrests you do or how many cases you take to
20:46court.
20:46Now it's about how much do you understand networks.
20:54What a paradigm shift to move from, I don't care whether you put him in jail.
21:01I need the information in his head.
21:04And I'm not going to get the information in his head if he gets a lawyer his rights in a
21:10jail cell.
21:11It's not going to happen.
21:13Well, the real pressure from the White House was, you've got to prevent that next attack.
21:18The other pressure from the White House is, we're under all kinds of criticism from all kinds of directions.
21:25There's no question that the FBI, for example, did not have as its primary mission a prevention of an attack.
21:36And now it does.
21:38All of us felt guilty.
21:40All of us felt that we failed.
21:41We had a sense of depression about what happened.
21:47There were those critics, both in the White House and on the Hill, who said the FBI should be broken
21:54up because we were an utter failure,
21:56because we didn't prevent the attacks that we should have prevented.
21:59The whole culture of the FBI is antithetical to the skills that are needed in counterterrorism.
22:05Then there was this idea, well, the U.S. will have a domestic intelligence agency, and the FBI will go
22:11back to chasing bank robbers.
22:13This was something that President Bush didn't think was a good idea.
22:17There was a concern that creating those two different regimes, that perhaps it would discourage sharing of information.
22:24The 9-11 Commission was appointed by the President.
22:28With the stroke of a pen, President Bush created the Independent Commission that will investigate all aspects of the U
22:34.S. government preparedness, or lack thereof, for the September 11th attacks.
22:39Can the FBI, an agency steeped in a law enforcement culture, transform itself into a counterterrorism agency?
22:48Mueller feels an enormous pressure from the Commission because he's afraid that they're going to recommend that the FBI be
22:55broken apart.
22:56Splitting the law enforcement and the intelligence functions would leave both agencies fighting the war on terrorism with one hand
23:03tied behind their backs.
23:05And so he devotes an enormous amount of personal time to briefing the commissioners on the transformation that he feels
23:15is underway at the FBI.
23:16The FBI's strength has always been...
23:20I think it was because of Director Mueller's gravitas and his reputation for integrity that the FBI was able to
23:29stay together as an agency.
23:31Nobody has been more cooperative, more available, and more helpful than Director Mueller.
23:37Mueller had to stand up for the FBI in a don't blame us mode.
23:43It was a hard job and a job he did well because he had the full confidence of George W.
23:49Bush.
23:49We have implemented significant reform since 9-11.
23:53Director Mueller has done a fabulous job.
23:56The 9-11 Commission report comes out and makes a number of recommendations about what still needs to change, among
24:02them, building up the intelligence capacity of the FBI.
24:07They were two men in the same mission, which is, we've got to recover from 9-11.
24:14We've got to reshape the FBI and the U.S. government.
24:17But Mueller was really on point.
24:19We know that if we safeguard our civil liberties but leave our country vulnerable to terrorism and crime, we have
24:25lost.
24:25If we protect America from terrorism and crime but sacrifice our civil liberties, we have lost.
24:30We must strike the appropriate balance.
24:44One of the things that I think makes America unique in the world is its civil liberties and the rights
24:50that people have.
24:52Where do those things start to erode in order to protect?
24:59And the decision was made after 9-11 that we didn't trust those constitutional principles.
25:05At the same time that the Patriot Act passed, you also have a secret form of investigation going on.
25:13And that comes in the form of Stellar Wind.
25:16Stellar Wind was a highly classified program initiated a month after 9-11.
25:22It was an NSA program that was geared towards trying to identify the next sleeper cell in the United States.
25:29And that was reinforced by a section of the Patriot Act?
25:34The FBI would take a phone number and say, this is a bad guy's phone number.
25:39They would send that information over to the NSA that would run it through these databases and then come back
25:45with a lead.
25:45In other words, the metadata of who you were talking to, for how long you were talking, where, without any
25:51kind of warrant, without any kind of notification.
25:54The White House Director said, we're going to do this. We're going to collect this information. We're going to do
25:58it secretly. We're not going to run this by Congress.
26:02The Attorney General, John Ashcroft's signature, and the President, George Bush's signature, were necessary for reauthorization.
26:10It was based upon an intelligence report from the CIA saying, this is a threat assessment.
26:15Based on this threat assessment, we believe this program needs to continue. Otherwise it would expire after 45 days.
26:20At some point, Director Mueller looked at the program and said, look, we're way over the line of what we
26:28can do within our understanding of the law and the privacy concerns for America.
26:35And it looks like the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, will refuse to sign off on the renewal of this.
26:46All of these concerns come to a head in early March 2004.
26:51Attorney General John Ashcroft was admitted to the GW hospital with gallstone pancreatitis.
27:00And it falls to Jim Comey as the Deputy Attorney General to renew this program.
27:06We asked, can't Jim just sign off on it until John Ashcroft comes back?
27:09You know, the Attorney General has signed off on this for two years.
27:13And I was the acting Attorney General, so was I who would have to do that, and I was not
27:17going to do that.
27:18I received a call from the ill Attorney General's Chief of Staff to tell me that people from the White
27:25House were on their way to see John Ashcroft.
27:29The President was directing us to go over to the hospital, and we wondered, what if he wasn't competent?
27:36I needed to get to the George Washington Hospital immediately.
27:41I called the then FBI Director, Robert Mueller, who was at dinner with his family.
27:45He ran out of a restaurant and jumped in his armored Suburban and started heading there, and the race was
27:52on.
27:54Mueller calls and tells the FBI agents, under no circumstances are Gonzales and Card allowed to meet with Ashcroft alone.
28:04And then I went into the room and I sat down next to the Attorney General's bed and waited.
28:10And not long after, two guys came in, the White House Counsel and the White House Chief of Staff, and
28:17they started to explain they were there at the President's request on a vital national security program that they needed
28:23to reauthorize.
28:24And if he would just, and at some point in there, Ashcroft interrupted, and then he said,
28:29But it doesn't matter because I'm not the Attorney General.
28:33There's the Attorney General, and he pointed, turned and shook a finger pointing at me, and then he fell back
28:39on the bed.
28:40Both Andy and I, we regret having to go over there, but the President told us to go over there,
28:45so that's what we did. We went to the hospital.
28:47A few minutes later, Director Mueller came in, and I went out into the hallway to take a phone call.
28:53That night ended without resolution of the dispute, and the next day they reauthorized the program with the White House
29:01Counsel signing in the place where I would have signed otherwise.
29:05And then I decided I was going to quit, and so was Director Mueller and the whole leadership of the
29:11Department of Justice.
29:12Yes, I did sign the authorization.
29:15The President went ahead and authorized it without the AG signature because the Madrid train bombing happened.
29:23And so the threat level was, you know, was really, really high, and that's why he went ahead and authorized
29:28it.
29:29Mueller sees this actually as a very easy choice.
29:32He believes that if he is being asked to do something unconstitutional, the only choice is to resign.
29:39I was informed that there was talk about resignations at the Department of Justice, including Bob Mueller.
29:44President Bush did not want to see that happen.
29:46And that collision was averted the next morning when both Bob Mueller and I got the chance to speak alone.
29:52To the President, George W. Bush, he told Bob to tell me to do what I needed to do to
29:57make this program right.
29:59I don't think I've ever told it on camera.
30:01Yeah. Weird.
30:05The threat of Robert Mueller resigning really startled President Bush.
30:10And he said, okay, you know what? We will handle this legally.
30:13I think Bush really understands.
30:16He knows what a straight arrow Bob Mueller is.
30:19And he knows that if Bob Mueller is telling him something is wrong, that's a message he should listen to.
30:25The premises of Stellar Wind were taken into consideration and weren't really reined in to the degree that many civil
30:34liberties advocates would have wanted.
30:37A lot of people in the FBI, to include Mueller himself, tried to hold the line.
30:43But with the haze that characterized the post 9-11 era, with the pressure dialed to 11, that line became
30:55harder and harder to see.
31:10After 9-11, the FBI consolidated a massive amount of power and secrecy.
31:18But this was not the first time.
31:21In the late 60s, early 70s, it's an incredibly fraught time.
31:25We're seeing assassinations.
31:27We're seeing massive student demonstrations with lots of violence breaking out.
31:33The public is feeling deeply unsettled.
31:36This all led to the church hearings.
31:40The church committee started right in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
31:46The church committee, led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, was to get the facts on the table about
31:54what the FBI was up to, and CIA and IRS, in the sense of domestic surveillance.
32:00The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the
32:12air.
32:13It goes on for well over a year, 800 interviews.
32:19Now, why is this investigation important?
32:21I'll tell you why.
32:22Because I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge.
32:27I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America.
32:33The church committee found some outrageous things.
32:37Many of them had to do with the CIA, which, it turns out, had been plotting assassinations of foreign leaders,
32:45orchestrating coups, doing LSD experiments.
32:49The committee's basic finding about the FBI was that it had abused the civil liberties of Americans.
32:55The Senate Intelligence Committee staff today detailed 15 years of FBI harassment of dissidents in this country, from the Communist
33:03Party in 1956 to student protesters in 1971.
33:07The fundamental way that the church committee altered the FBI was to make the FBI accountable to Congress.
33:14And it set a template going forward that lasted for decades of what Americans as citizens could expect in terms
33:23of law enforcement not prying into their private lives, not trying to make up accusations against them based on their
33:31political beliefs.
33:32I think it probably would be good to have regularly scheduled church hearings, kind of like a colonoscopy for our
33:42government.
33:45After 9-11, the country really rolled back many of the reforms that had been put in place by the
33:52church committee.
33:55To the extent guardrails from the church committee were removed during the war on terror, they were done so because
34:00of necessity.
34:02Those guardrails made it, if not impossible, made it more difficult to collect information.
34:10What do you think is the greatest thing you need to focus on?
34:13Human intelligence. The ability to get inside somebody's mind. The ability to read somebody's mail. The ability to listen to
34:20somebody's phone call. That's somebody being the enemy.
34:23Good morning. I'm joined today by FBI Deputy Director John Pistol.
34:27One of the challenges the FBI faced after 9-11 was the recognition that al-Qaeda became much more decentralized.
34:36The convergence of globalization and technology has created a new brand of terrorism.
34:43The military attacks in Afghanistan, the drone strikes, the intelligence operations took a toll on al-Qaeda. But they didn't
34:50give up. They just adapted.
34:52What we have seen is an increase in the lone wolf activity, principally because you have the internet that can
35:01be utilized for radicalizing, can be utilized for instruction, training.
35:05So let's talk about the recruitment of kind of bad guys to be informants, to be assets.
35:14The idea was we have to know not just who is planning an attack, but who might plan an attack.
35:21And in that distinction, you get this very gray area of exactly what informants were being used for.
35:30Understanding whether or not somebody was in a chat room just BSing or serious, you know, the paradigm had changed.
35:39Within minutes, Annie shows me step-by-step instructions for a suicide bomb belt.
35:45That's the kind of pressure that gets them to cross the lines in terms of how to think about building
35:51a case, how to think about using informants in a way that is aggressive.
35:55Yesterday's FBI sting arrest has sparked an intense debate.
35:59You see the FBI facilitating some of these sort of false plots.
36:05Prosecutors say he was trying to sell a surface-to-air missile to government informants posing as terrorists.
36:11In reality, they were FBI agents, part of an elaborate sting.
36:15The fact that we're able to sting this guy is a pretty good example of what we're doing in order
36:19to protect the American people.
36:21Many people end up getting arrested in these sort of headline-grabbing terror plots who never would have been able
36:30to execute a actual plot without the help of the FBI informants.
36:36Law enforcement sources say the men tried to help the FBI informant posing as a terrorist.
36:41I don't think I really took it seriously initially, you know, sort of like, really?
36:45And then you start to realize, like, oh, no, actually, there are areas where there are informants and FBI people
36:55inside mosques sort of undercover disguised as Muslims.
37:00The FBI did a full court press on, let's just find everybody we can at any level of intentionality.
37:08Here's the question. When someone says they want to blow up a Jewish center, do you want us to wait
37:17for them to blow that up?
37:19This guy says he wants to make a car bomb. I have no doubt any idiot could make a car
37:24bomb.
37:25So we manufactured the car bomb for him. He drove it and pulled the detonator on the car bomb.
37:32So what do we do about that?
37:35Here's where the rubber meets the road. In the vast majority of these cases, when both sides were presented in
37:42court, that was the time they were going to decide whether this was entrapment or not. And that didn't happen.
37:49Is that really the way you want to go about using a law enforcement agency?
37:56The FBI was simply expected to identify and investigate terrorism threats in this country against the United States. And that's
38:08that was their mission.
38:10What we've really learned over this period of time is if you erase norms, undermine constitutional principles, it can have
38:18a very long legacy.
38:30In the intelligence community, disputes, disagreements can have the highest possible stakes because it's a situation in which someone can
38:40say, if we don't do this, then people will die.
38:44The post 9-11 world drastically changed the relationship between the FBI and the president of the United States.
38:53And it would have no matter who the president was. You know, the FBI had spent almost 100 years trying
38:59to stay insulated from the White House.
39:01I think what you saw was the FBI become much more responsive to the demands of the president.
39:11Ready?
39:11Yeah.
39:12It became part of a juggernaut of the Bush administration to trample civil liberties on the claim that they were
39:19trying to stop the terrorists.
39:21And then there became in that ratcheting up war on terror, things that much of the public found unacceptable.
39:27America had gone to war, had invaded Iraq. I was talking to my mom about it and I was getting
39:33angry and passionate and she said, let's not talk about it on the phone.
39:40And I was like, what? And she was like, yeah, you don't know. We don't know who's listening.
39:45And it was the first time that that moment happened for me where I was like, oh, is that, can
39:51that happen here?
39:54President Bush's job approval rating has been at or below freezing since the beginning of the year.
40:01One of the lowest ratings for any president ever.
40:06I do think people tend to criticize for one thing or another on the war on terrorism.
40:12But I can tell you that Bush cared about one thing and one thing only and that was protecting the
40:15American public.
40:16So, Director Mueller actually gave President Bush a honorary special agent badge and credential.
40:23We in the bureau consider the honorary special agent award the highest honor the FBI can bestow on individuals outside
40:30the bureau.
40:32And so at the end of Director Mueller's tenure term, they did a search to see who his successor should
40:39be.
40:40And the sense was that he is the best person to continue this transformation in the FBI.
40:49Today, I am seeking a two year extension for FBI director Bob Mueller.
40:55In his 10 years at the FBI, Bob has set the gold standard for leading the bureau.
41:00He actually served for 12 years as the FBI director, so the second longest serving the FBI director.
41:07By the time Mueller leaves office as director, the FBI is the largest, most powerful and far-reaching that it
41:15has ever been.
41:16You have an entirely new set of dimensions of where you can look for information.
41:21And those include your personal communications that are done over the internet.
41:27Part of the reason things didn't go further or were stopped when they went over the line was that Robert
41:34Mueller was the FBI director.
41:36He had those relationships at the White House where he could say candidly, we can't do this.
41:42The risk of giving the FBI so much power lies in the hands of the FBI director and the people
41:48in the White House.
41:49Today, we are living through a time that is, I would argue, much more dangerous than after 9-11 because
41:57of the expansion of executive power.
42:00I'll tell you, once you have guardrails in place for protecting civil liberties, once they are taken down, it's incredibly
42:07hard to get them back up.
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