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      James Comey: ‘I’d like to take readers inside the White House’

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      After a long career as a state attorney in New York, James Comey became director of the FBI in 2013. He was due to serve 10 years, but was dismissed by President Trump in 2017, having ordered an investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey has subsequently published two bestselling accounts of his time in office. His first novel, Central Park West, a crime thriller set in the New York district attorney’s office where Comey once worked, will be published this month.Have you always been a fan of crime fiction?I found it too hard when I was dealing with crime or terrorism in my day job to read about those things. The FBI job was really a 24-hour thing and I didn’t want to fill any spare moments reading fiction about my work.Do investigators and writers share an eye for detail?I think that good journalists and good lawyers think and communicate in stories. Even as a kid, I was always someone who would try to remember details so I could go home and tell my family the story at our dinner table.There must have been an element of nostalgia in locating this novel in the New York law courts where you once worked?I enjoyed travelling back in my mind to those places. I could picture myself in courtroom 318, where a lot of the action in the book takes place. But here’s the thing that made it both slightly strange and wonderful for me: when I was writing this, my oldest daughter was the chief of the violence and organised crime unit in Manhattan, and she was also literally standing in courtroom 318, prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator. That made it easy to make Nora, the protagonist in my book, a woman, and to picture her in those places.The book also draws on your experience of prosecuting New York crime families.My life changed when I watched the bail hearing for the mafia boss “Fat Tony” Salerno and his co-defendant Vincent “the fish” Cafaro [in 1989]. As I watched the young prosecutors in court, I was struck by how they stood up straight. They didn’t interrupt answers. When they didn’t know something, they said they didn’t know it. It was like being struck by proverbial lightning sitting there in that old federal courtroom. I always hated bullies. I’d been bullied as a kid. And I thought: here’s a way of [taking on] some of the biggest bullies in the world. I went home and called my girlfriend, now my wife, and said: I figured out what I want to do.You wrote in your memoir, A Higher Loyalty, of your immediate sense that President Trump shared characteristics with some of those mafia mob bosses you had prosecuted. In particular in the demand for loyalty above truth…Yes, I saw it so early that I resisted that sense to begin with. But something I was seeing was reminding me of scenes from my prosecutorial life. Those impressions can be misleading. But this one was dead on.The extraordinary thing was how quickly his extreme behaviour was normalised?I think it was. For the great bulk of people, there was an inability to get their mind around how bad this person is, because he was occupying an office that we endow with all kinds of dignity and importance. I remember cases I was involved with as a prosecutor, where fraud victims came to the fraudster’s sentencing to speak for him, because they simply could not acknowledge they had been defrauded. It was too painful. Supporters of Donald Trump, they see the images of January 6, which shout to them: “You fool! Look what you did!” Some people can face that. But most people turn from that pain and retreat deeper into the lie.Do you see yourself writing fiction about that period as well?I do. My wife is my ideas person. Her view is that it’s too close to write about now. I have in mind doing a trilogy [of novels] based in New York. And I’d like to write a trilogy based in Virginia, where I was a prosecutor for many years. And then I’d like to take readers inside the White House and the FBI and the justice department of the CIA. I’ve spent a lot of time in those places.You have insisted many times that you will never run for political office. Are there other ambitions still in public life, or is that chapter over?I would never, as you said, run for office. It’s just not something that suits me. And I think I’ve disqualified myself from other [legal] roles, because I intentionally became a political partisan after I got fired, because I thought the existential danger to democracy was so great from Donald Trump. So I’m going to try to write novels until I’m old and foolish, and also try to be, as some of my coffee mugs already claim, the world’s greatest grandfather.It sounds like your wife is the big reader of fiction in your household. But are there novels that have been guiding lights for you in taking on this new career?The first sustained reading of fiction I did, in thinking about this, was Le Carré. Partly because I knew he had struggled with the question: how do I write about my work? The criticism of his early books was that he hewed too closely to the truth of his job: desks and files and so on. At some point, his letters reveal, he realised he needed to get the Berlin Wall and some barbed wire in there. I’m no Le Carré, but I’ve tried to do something similar in Central Park West. I don’t think my friends [from the FBI] are going to find significant unrealistic details. But I’ve tried to see if I can keep it real and entertaining at the same time… More

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      in US Politics

      Robert Hanssen, ex-FBI agent convicted of spying for Moscow, dies in prison

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      Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who took more than $1.4m in cash and diamonds to trade secrets with Moscow, in one of the most notorious spying cases in American history, died in prison Monday.Hanssen, 79, was found unresponsive in his cell at a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, and later pronounced dead, prison officials said. He is believed to have died of natural causes, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of Hanssen’s death and spoke on condition of anonymity.Hanssen had divulged a wealth of information about American intelligence-gathering, including extensive detail about how US officials had tapped into Russian spy operations, since at least 1985.He was believed to have been partly responsible for the deaths of at least three Soviet officers who were working for US intelligence and executed after being exposed.He got more than $1.4m in cash, bank funds, diamonds and Rolex watches in exchange for providing highly classified national security information to the Soviet Union and later Russia.He didn’t adopt an obviously lavish lifestyle, instead living in a modest suburban home in Virginia with his family of six children and driving a Taurus and minivan.Hanssen would later say he was motivated by money rather than ideology, but a letter written to his Soviet handlers in 1985 explains a large payoff could have caused complications because he could not spend it without setting off warning bells.Using the alias “Ramon Garcia”, he passed some 6,000 documents and 26 computer disks to his handlers, authorities said. They detailed eavesdropping techniques, helped to confirm the identity of Russian double agents and spilled other secrets. Officials also believed he tipped off Moscow to a secret tunnel the Americans built under the Soviet embassy in Washington for eavesdropping.He went undetected for years, but later investigations found missed red flags. After he became the focus of a hunt for a Russian mole, Hanssen was caught taping a garbage bag full of secrets to the underside of a footbridge in a park in a “dead drop” for Russian handlers.He had been serving a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole since 2002, after pleading guilty to 15 counts of espionage and other charges.The story was made into a movie titled Breach in 2007, staring Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as a young bureau operative who helps bring him down.The FBI has been notified of Hanssen’s death, according to the Bureau of Prisons. More

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      Trump lawyers meet with DoJ to stave off indictment in Mar-a-Lago case

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump met with top US justice department officials on Thursday to complain about perceived misconduct in the criminal investigation into the former US president’s handling of national security materials and obstruction, according to two people familiar with the matter.The meeting involved Trump lawyers Jim Trusty, John Rowley and Lindsay Halligan speaking with the special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the investigation, and a senior career official to the deputy attorney general, one person said. CBS News first reported the meeting.Trump’s lawyers made a general case as to why Trump should not be charged in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and suggested that some prosecutors working under special counsel Jack Smith engaged in what they considered prosecutorial misconduct, the people said.The exact allegations are not clear but Trump’s lawyers for weeks have complained privately that Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and espionage section at the justice department, once sought to induce a witness into confirming something they declined to, one of the people said.Complaints of that nature result in an internal note to the special counsel and are unlikely to delay the criminal investigation.The meeting comes weeks after Trump’s lawyers asked the justice department for a meeting with the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to raise grievances about what they considered as unfair treatment of Trump over his handling of classified documents compared to other former presidents.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion,” said the letter written by Trusty and Rowley.While it is not unusual for lawyers to seek a meeting with prosecutors near the end of an investigation, it typically is not with the attorney general. That is especially the case in special counsel investigations, where charging decisions can only be overruled if department rules were not followed.The development comes as prosecutors have recently asked witnesses before the grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Washington whether Trump showed off national security materials, including a document concerning military action against Iran, people close to the case said.Prosecutors have seemingly been trying to identify whether that Iran document was the same document Trump referenced on an audio recording in which he said he could not discuss it because he did not declassify it while in office – though he should have, the Guardian previously reported.The investigation has also examined whether the failure by Trump to fully comply with a subpoena last year demanding the return of any classified documents was a deliberate act of obstruction, the people said.Last June, the since-recused Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran found 38 classified documents in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and told the justice department that no further materials remained at the property – which came into question when the FBI seized 101 additional classified documents months later.The Guardian has reported that Corcoran later told associates he felt misled in the subpoena response because he had asked whether he should search elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago, like Trump’s office, but was waved off. Corcoran’s notes also showed he told Trump he had to return all classified documents in his possession. More

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      Republican faces questions over whether he lied under oath to key panel

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      A key Republican witness is facing questions over whether he lied under oath about receiving financial aid from an ally of former US president Donald Trump.Garret O’Boyle, a former FBI field agent turned purported whistleblower, testified last week to a congressional panel investigating what Republicans assert is the “weaponisation” of the federal government against conservatives.At one point, O’Boyle was asked by Democrat Dan Goldman whether Kash Patel, who held multiple roles in the Trump administration, is helping finance O’Boyle’s legal counsel. The witness replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”The answer has raised eyebrows because, during a previous interview with the House of Representatives’ weaponisation subcommittee in February, O’Boyle disclosed that his legal fees are being paid by a nonprofit organisation called Fight With Kash, also known as the Kash Foundation and run by Kash Patel.Furthermore, a Democratic staff report published in March notes that Patel arranged for Jesse Binnall, who served as Trump’s top “election fraud” lawyer in 2020, to serve as counsel for O’Boyle. Binnall sits on the Kash Foundation’s board of directors and has acknowledged working on past lawsuits funded by the foundation.In light of these details, Democrats are concerned that O’Boyle was not fully truthful before the committee chaired by Republican Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump backer. Lying to Congress carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment.Goldman told the Guardian: “Mr O’Boyle’s answers in the subcommittee hearing on Thursday appear to contradict his previous testimony in the transcribed interview with subcommittee staff. In order to ensure witnesses are truthful when they come before the subcommittee, Chairman Jordan must determine whether or not Mr O’Boyle lied under oath on Thursday.”O’Boyle was an FBI special agent from 2018 until earlier this year. He was among several former FBI employees who accused the bureau of politicisation at the hearing, which took place a day after the FBI announced that two of them had their security clearances revoked after either attending the January 6 insurrection or espousing conspiracy theories about the attack.The Congressional Integrity Project, a watchdog monitoring the Republican investigations, had previously noted that the witnesses on Thursday included anti-vaxxers, election deniers and supporters of far-right groups.Jordan and other Republicans on the committee hailed the ex-FBI employees as patriots who were facing retribution for speaking out against government abuse. Democrats dismissed the testimony, calling the hearing another partisan attempt by Republicans on the committee to help Trump.Stacey Plaskett, who represents the US Virgin Islands, said: “This select committee is a clearinghouse for testing conspiracy theories for Donald Trump to use in his 2024 presidential campaign.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a series of contentious exchanges, Democrats complained that one of Thursday’s witnesses was only interviewed by Republican members of the committee. Many pointed to House rules that state minority and majority staff are required to have equal access to witness testimony, whether it is a whistleblower account or not.O’Boyle’s testimony could pile pressure on Jordan over the credibility of the weaponisation subcommittee, seen by critics as a brazen attempt to damage Joe Biden ahead of next year’s presidential election.Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, said: “Mr O’Boyle’s testimony in this week’s hearing should be investigated immediately by Chairman Jordan’s subcommittee. The fact that O’Boyle’s own lawyer has such deep ties to Kash Patel, a January 6 co-conspirator and close ally of Donald Trump, is already enough to call any of his testimony into question.”Jordan’s office denies that O’Boyle lied under oath. Russell Dye, a spokesperson for the chairman, said: “Yet again the Democrats distorted the facts in their report on our brave FBI whistleblowers. Jesse Binnall is representing Mr O’Boyle pro bono.”Dye pointed to a transcript of O’Boyle’s interview in which Binnall sought to explain his role. Binnall told the subcommittee that “although Mr O’Boyle was not aware of this directly, his representation by counsel is actually not being paid by anybody because it’s pro bono”.However, Democrats rejected this argument at the time. They wrote in their report that “O’Boyle’s own testimony concerning his interactions with Kash Patel undercuts Binnall’s apparent attempt to distance himself and his client from Patel.“Committee Democrats note further that as recently as February 12 – two days after O’Boyle testified – Patel praised Binnall on Truth Social, calling him ‘Americas lawyer.’ Binnall and Patel appear to operate out of the same Alexandria, VA, office building.” More

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      in Elections

      FBI broke own rules in January 6 and BLM intelligence search, court finds

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      FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the January 6 insurrection and racial justice protests in 2020, according court order released Friday.FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and justice department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which has legal oversight of the US government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence released a heavily redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency.“Today’s disclosures underscore the need for Congress to rein in the FBI’s egregious abuses of this law, including warrantless searches using the names of people who donated to a congressional candidate,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.“These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It’s clear the FBI can’t be left to police itself.”At issue are improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US.That program, which is set to expire at the end of the year, creates a database of intelligence that US agencies can search. FBI searches must have a foreign intelligence purpose or be aimed at finding evidence of a crime. But congressional critics of the program have long raised alarm about what they say are unjustified searches of the database for information about Americans, along with more general concerns about surveillance abuses.Such criticism has aligned staunch liberal defenders of civil liberties with supporters of Donald Trump, who have seized on FBI surveillance errors during an investigation into his 2016 campaign. The issue has flared as the Republican-led House has been targeting the FBI, creating a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of government.In repeated episodes disclosed on Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed. The April 2022 order, for instances, details how the FBI queried the section 702 repository using the name of someone who was believed to have been at the Capitol during the January 6 6 riot. Officials obtained the information despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose”, the order said.The court order also says that an FBI analyst ran 13 queries of people suspected of being involved in the Capitol riot to determine if they had any foreign ties, but the justice department later determined that the searches were not likely to find foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.Other violations occurred when FBI officials in June 2020 ran searches related to more than 100 people arrested in connection with civil unrest and racial justice protests that had occurred in the US over the preceding weeks. The order says the FBI had maintained that the queries were likely to return foreign intelligence, though the reasons given for that assessment are mostly redacted.In addition, the FBI conducted what’s known as a batch query for 19,000 donors to an unnamed congressional campaign. An analyst doing the search cited concern that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but the justice department said only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard”.Officials said the case involved a candidate who ran unsuccessfully and is not a sitting member of Congress, and is unrelated to an episode described in March by congressman Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, who accused the FBI of wrongly searching for his name in foreign surveillance data.Senior FBI officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to reporters under ground rules set by the government, attributed the majority of the violations to confusion among the workforce and a lack of common understanding about the querying standards.They said the bureau has made significant changes since then, including mandating training and overhauling its computer system so that FBI officials must now enter a justification for the search in their own words than relying on a drop-down menu with pre-populated options.One of the officials said an internal audit of a representative sample of searches showed an increased compliance rate from 82% before the reforms were implemented to 96% afterward. 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      in US Politics

      Conspiracy theorists to address US House subcommittee, watchdog warns

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      Witnesses set to testify to Congress about the “weaponisation” of the US government on Thursday have links to far-right groups and a history of supporting conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines and the January 6 insurrection, a congressional watchdog has warned.In February, Republicans in the House of Representatives created a panel on what they say is the politicisation of the FBI and justice department against conservatives. Critics saw it as an attempt to entangle Joe Biden in spurious investigations ahead of next year’s election.On Thursday the judiciary subcommittee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, an ally of former US president Donald Trump, will hold its latest hearing on Capitol Hill. Research by the Congressional Integrity Project, a group that monitors the Republican investigations, suggests that its witnesses will come armed with political grudges.Among them is Stephen Friend, a former FBI special agent who claims to be an FBI “whistleblower” despite failing to receive federal whistleblower protections.Last September, the project notes, Friend was suspended from the FBI after filing an official complaint alleging that the “politicised” bureau was using “overzealous” January 6 investigations to “harass conservative Americans”. He had already been declared absent without leave for refusing to participate in Swat raids against insurrection suspects.The project adds: “Friend has a record of collaborating with Trump’s closest allies. He received payments and legal counsel, and even received a job, from a Maga group affiliated with former senior Trump administration official Russ Vought. Kash Patel sent Friend $5,000 almost immediately after they connected in November 2022, and gave Friend a job at a far-right thinktank.“Friend has been celebrated in rightwing circles, especially among Maga pundits, and is poised to release a book with an introduction and foreword by two rightwing figures.”Friend is also a regular contributor to an exposé-style blog run by “an early and prominent promoter” of the QAnon conspiracy theory and has suggested that Covid-19 vaccines were ineffective, with public health restrictions designed to engineer “societal changes”.Witness Garret O’Boyle is a former FBI special agent who last year filed a complaint alleging that the FBI was exaggerating the threat of domestic terrorism. Soon after, he alleged that the FBI suspended him, claiming, “The FBI retaliated against me for being a whistleblower.”O’Boyle is a prolific Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theorist, and once compared Covid-19 vaccine mandates to the Nazi regime. He signed on to a major federal lawsuit against the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal employees and once referred to a subset of vaccinated individuals involved in an FBI investigation as “blind sheep”.The project says O’Boyle has supported and publicly engaged with an “early and prominent” QAnon influencer known as Tracy Diaz, who has been banned from Patreon, Facebook and Twitter and is labeled as an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.O’Boyle is an election denier who has liked tweets claiming “two blatantly stolen elections”. He claims the FBI has retaliated against him for resisting investigations into the January 6 insurrection, writing: “The government has an obsession with ‘Insurrectionists.’ They hate them. They [want to] round them up, hold them in perpetuity.”Another witness is Marcus Oryan Allen, a staff operations specialist for the FBI who was suspended and had his security clearance revoked after the bureau found he “espoused conspiratorial views … which indicates support for the events of January 6th”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast December, Allen filed a lawsuit claiming that his suspension violated his first amendment rights, arguing that the FBI’s rules “regarding loyalty to the United States is overbroad”. The FBI called these claims “meritless”, pointing out that Allen’s complaint “identifie[d] no speech” that was being violated.The project says Allen is represented by Judicial Watch, a far-right group that has spread false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, warned of attempts to “rig the 2024 election” against Trump, and condemned Trump’s recent indictment as a “hoax” and “bunk”.Witnesses also include Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, which describes itself as a “legal watchdog” and, the project says, has downplayed the seriousness of the January 6 riot or sought to shift the blame elsewhere.Leavitt represents a number of suspended or retired FBI employees who claim to be “whistleblowers” and helped congressional Republicans’ highly politicised investigation targeting Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, said: “These witnesses are extreme for even Jim Jordan’s standards, but we shouldn’t be surprised he’s continuing to hand-pick conspiracy theorists and insurrection supporters to appear before the so-called ‘weaponisation’ subcommittee.“The witnesses are Trump loyalists who will go to any lengths to defend the former president’s lies, just like Jordan himself.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘America is broken’: FBI criticized for mass-shooting survival video

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      A newly resurfaced FBI video purportedly training Americans to give themselves their best chance of surviving a deadly mass shooting is drawing scorn across the US and abroad.In the video, released in 2020 by the US’s top law enforcement agency, actors portraying everyday Americans explain to viewers ways in which they could at least survive – or, preferably, even stop – a mass shooting once the bullets start flying.“If European countries want to deter brain drain to the US they should just play this FBI video to their soon-to-be graduates,” the European tech investor Michael Jackson said on his LinkedIn profile, which has more than 134,000 followers.Jackson, who shared a link to the video, added that the well-documented gun problem in the US – where rates of mass gun violence are much higher than they are in Europe and in many other parts of the world – was hurting its standing with tourists and its companies’ prospects of hiring talented employees from overseas.Another typical reaction to the video was on Twitter from an Oklahoma scholarship foundation leader who wrote: “America is broken. Instead of addressing the cause of the carnage, we’re talking about how to survive a massacre like it’s a damn tornado.”The video begins with a scene of a bustling bar filled with people. A fight breaks out and then the sudden eruption of gunshots sends the crowd into a panic, with people rushing to find an exit or a hiding spot.A waitress spots a neon red exit sign and proceeds to explain to viewers techniques to avoid getting shot.“Running makes you harder to hit and improves your chances of survival,” she says as she runs down a stairway with a group of people.When she makes it downstairs and out the door, she is confronted by police pointing a gun at her. Still out of breath and distressed, the waitress reminds the camera to always keep “empty hands up” and “follow their instructions” when faced with law enforcement.Another woman hiding under a table then says to find another room and barricade the door if it’s not possible to escape. She ushers every person around her into a nearby closet and reminds viewers to turn their phones off.She then says to find anything that could be wielded as if it were a weapon – a fire extinguisher or a flower vase would do – and prepare to attack if the shooter breaks down the door.“Lock and barricade the door,” she instructs viewers as the gunshots can be heard firing in the background.It doesn’t address what to do if the attacker has a high-powered rifle and can fire through the door and walls enclosing the room.Someone is later shown not having a tourniquet but still properly applying pressure to a woman with a bleeding gunshot wound.Toward the end of the video, a man is shown trapped behind the bar with all exits blocked. He tells his audience: “I gotta stay hidden. But I’m no victim. I’m ready for this.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe lays out an elaborate plan that ends with him seizing the shooter’s gun, which occasionally happens but can cost people their lives if attempted unsuccessfully.The video ends with a narrator offering a word of encouragement – “you can survive a mass shooting if you’re prepared” – and directs viewers to the website fbi.gov/survive.The video resurfaced recently as the US is on pace this year to set the record for the highest number of mass killings in recent memory, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.The online reference site’s data recently showed the country in 2023 was likely to see 60 mass killings, which involve four or more victims who are slain.There were 31 mass killings in 2019, 21 in 2020, 28 in 2021 and 36 in 2022.As of Monday morning, there had been at least 224 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured or killed.Congress has been unable to meaningfully restrict access to guns despite the accelerated pace of mass shootings in the US this year.Actually stopping a mass shooter as a civilian is exceptionally rare, according to Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center. Less than 3% of more than 430 active attacks in the US ended with a civilian firing back from 2000 to 2021.A bystander who confronted and disarmed an attacker during a mass shooting that left five people dead and 17 others wounded at a Colorado LGBTQ+ club last year was a US army veteran who had previously gone to war. Richard Fierro had served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. More

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      in US Politics

      The Last Honest Man: Frank Church and the fight to restrain US power

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      Frank Forrester Church sat in the US Senate for 24 years. His tenure was consequential. A Democrat, he battled for civil rights and came to oppose the Vietnam war. He believed Americans were citizens, not subjects. Chairing the intelligence select committee was his most enduring accomplishment. James Risen, a Pulitzer-winning reporter now with the Intercept, sees him as a hero. The Last Honest Man is both paean and lament.“For decades … the CIA’s operations faced only glancing scrutiny from the White House, and virtually none from Congress,” Risen writes. “True oversight would have to wait until 1975, and the arrival on the national stage of a senator from Idaho, Frank Church.”For 16 months, Church and his committee scrutinized the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and their many abuses. Amid the cold war, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress grappled with the balance between civil liberties and national security, executive prerogative and congressional authority.Political assassinations, covert operations and domestic surveillance finally received scrutiny and oversight. A plot to kill Fidel Castro, with an assist from organized crime, made headlines. So did the personal ties that bound John F Kennedy, mob boss Sam Giancana and their shared mistress, Judith Campbell Exner.Giancana was murdered before he testified. Before John Rosselli, another mobster, could make a third appearance, his decomposed body turned up in a steel fuel drum near Miami.One subheading in the Church committee’s interim report bears the title: “The Question of Whether the Assassination Operation Involving Underworld Figures Was Known About by Attorney General Kennedy or President Kennedy as Revealed by Investigations of Giancana and Rosselli”.Against this grizzly but intriguing backdrop, Risen’s book is aptly subtitled: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. The Last Honest Man is a gem, marbled with scoop, laden with interviews.In 2006, Risen won the Pulitzer prize for his coverage of George W Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Risen was also part of the New York Times team that snagged a Pulitzer in the aftermath of September 11. He endured a seven-year legal battle with the Bush and Obama justice departments, for refusing to name a source. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, backed off. But he earned Risen’s lasting ire.In 2015, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”. Holder, he said, “has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States”.And then came Donald Trump.Risen now describes Dick Cheney’s efforts to block Church’s committee, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford. To Cheney’s consternation, the president “refused to engage in an all-out war”. So Cheney nursed a grudge and bided his time.In 1987, Cheney and congressional Republicans issued a dissent on Iran-Contra, blaming the Church committee for the concept of “all but unlimited congressional power”. Later, as vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney zestily embraced the theory of the unitary executive, the global “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.The Last Honest Man also doubles as a guide to high-stakes politics. Risen captures Gary Hart and the late Walter Mondale on the record. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls – Mondale the candidate in 1984, Hart the frontrunner, briefly, in the 1988 race – after sitting on Church’s committee. The three senators were competitors and colleagues. Paths and ambitions intersected.Church entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary late – and lost to Jimmy Carter. Carter weighed picking Church as his running mate but opted for Mondale instead.“I think he had seen me on a Sunday news talk show, talking about the Church committee, and he liked how I looked and sounded,” Mondale told Risen.It was for the best. Church never cottoned to Carter, failing hide his disdain. Carter and his aides returned the favor. They “hated Church right back”. David Aaron, a Church aide and later deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, recalls: “I know that whenever Church’s name came up, Brzezinski would grimace.”In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush beat Carter and Mondale in a landslide. The election also cost Church his seat and the Democrats control of the Senate. Four years later, Mondale bested Hart for the Democratic nomination, only to be shellacked by Reagan-Bush again.Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, leaves his mark on Risen’s pages too. He played a “previously undisclosed role in the Church committee’s investigation of the assassinations of foreign leaders”, Risen reports in a lengthy footnote.In an interview, Ellsberg says he “met privately” with Church in 1975, as the committee investigated assassination plots. In Risen’s telling, Ellsberg cops to handing Church “a manilla envelope containing copies of a series of top-secret cables” between the US embassy in South Vietnam and “the Kennedy White House”.The messages purportedly pertained to the “US role in the planning of the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese president [Ngô Đình] Diệm that resulted in his assassination”. The Church committee interim report referred to cable traffic between the embassy in Saigon and the White House but contained no mention of Ellsberg.In other words, assassinations and coups carry a bipartisan legacy. It wasn’t just Eisenhower and Nixon, Iran and Chile.Risen hails Church as “an American Cicero” who “offered the United States a brief glimpse of what it would be like to turn away from its imperialistic ambitions … and return to its roots as a republic”.He overstates, but not by much. Iraq and its aftermath still reverberate. But for that debacle, it is unlikely Trumpism would have attained the purchase it still possesses. Our national divide would not be as deep – or intractable. Church died in April 1984, aged just 59.
      The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy is published in the US by Hachette More