October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election

October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election

October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election

October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election

Audio CD

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Overview

The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary's blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center.


In September 2016, Hillary Clinton was the presumptive next president of the US. She had a blue wall of states leaning her way in the Midwest, and was ahead in North Carolina and Florida, with a better than even shot at taking normally Republican Arizona. The US was about to get its first woman president. Yet within two months everything was lost. An already tightening race saw one seismic correction: it came in October when the FBI launched an investigation into the Clinton staff's use of a private server for their emails. Clinton fell 3-4 percent in the polls instantly, and her campaign never had time to rebut the investigation or rebuild her momentum so close to election day. The FBI cost her the race.

October Surprise is a pulsating narrative of an agency seized with righteous certainty that waded into the most important political moment in the life of the nation, and has no idea how to back out with dignity. So it doggedly stands its ground, compounding its error. In a momentous display of self-preservation, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and key Justice Department officials decide to protect their own reputations rather than save the democratic process. Once they make that determination, the race is lost for Clinton, who is helpless in front of their accusation even though she has not intended to commit, let alone actually committed, any crime.

A dark true-life thriller with historic consequences set at the most crucial moment in the electoral calendar, October Surprise is a warning, a morality tale and a political and personal tragedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781549133688
Publisher: Public Affairs
Publication date: 09/29/2020
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Devlin Barrett is a reporter with The Washington Post where he covers national security and law enforcement. He started as a copy boy at the New York Post, and since then has written about the NYPD, federal courts, and the Justice Department for several publications including The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.


He lives in Washington DC.

Tony Hendra attended Cambridge University, where he performed frequently with friends and future Monty Pythons John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was editor in chief of Spy, an original editor of National Lampoon, and he played Ian Faith in This Is Spinal Tap. He has written frequently for New York, Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal, and Esquire. Father Joe was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York.

John Bedford Lloyd, a graduate of Yale's School of Drama, has appeared in a host of major motion pictures, including The Bourne Supremacy, Crossing Delancey, The Abyss, The Manchurian Candidate, and Philadelphia. His television credits include Suits, Pan Am, Law & Order, Spin City, and The West Wing. His critically-acclaimed audiobook narration includes reading for authors such as Michael Crichton, Nicholas Sparks, Paul Doiron, and Atul Gawande, among others.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Fidelity

1 Missile Fire 3

2 The Comey Effect 12

3 The Rise of Andy McCabe 22

4 But Their Emails 31

5 Loretta and Jim 37

6 An Already Big Fire 51

Part 2 Bravery

7 Radical Transparency 65

8 Asymmetrical Politics 84

9 Russia Was Listening 90

10 Predicate 100

11 Dangle 117

12 Travellers Club 129

13 FISA 135

14 Laptop 139

15 Are You Kidding Me? 148

16 A Letter to Himself 164

17 Roller Coaster 178

18 Leak Hunting 187

19 The World of Really Bad 196

20 "The Death of Me" 206

21 Halloween 218

22 Margin of Error 229

Part 3 Integrity

23 Hangover 243

24 The Storm 255

25 Text Machine 270

26 Investigating the Investigators 275

27 The Comey Effect 283

Acknowledgments 293

Notes 295

Index 309

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