I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But I will bear true faith and allegiance to the sea that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will will and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

So help me God, so help me God.

So help me God.

Welcome to the oath. I'm Chuck Rosenberg and I am honored to be your host for a series of compelling conversations with fascinating people from the world of public service.

All of my guests share one thing. They took an oath, mandated by Congress, to support the Constitution of the United States and to defend it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.

My guest today is Andy McCabe. Andy started his career as an FBI special agent in New York City in 1996 and worked his way up from there to become the Deputy Director of the FBI.

That is the highest ranking position that a career special agent in the FBI can hold. Andy briefly served as the Acting Director of the FBI before being fired in 2018, one day before he was eligible to retire.

During his time at the FBI, Andy was a member of the SWAT team, took on Russian organized crime in the streets of New York and defended New York in the wake of 9-11 as the Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, and he also led the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing.

In his book The Threat, Andy discusses the risks and the challenges that the FBI faces today.

Andy McCabe, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Well, I'm looking forward to this. I wanted to really talk to you about your book, which I loved, and about your life, which I only know about because of your book and the bit of time that we overlap and got to work together as colleagues.

I was struck by the fact, Andy, that you wrote in your book that being an FBI agent is not something that you wanted to do from the time you could walk and talk. It came to you later.

That's right. It's a little bit of a different origin story than most people get come across, certainly most agents who will tell you they got hooked on the idea when they were five years old or watching FBI agents on TV or whatever that might have been.

It was a little bit different for me. I didn't even really think about it until I was in law school.

And then really the idea crystallized during my time in turning as a volunteer intern at the Department of Justice.

During one of your summers at Washington University of law school.

That's right. Why did you go to law school?

Because I couldn't do math. I think I'd always kind of like all of us in the school.

That's right. I did horribly in my economics classes at Duke and so I thought, well, it's law school for me.

I think I kind of always assumed I would go to law school. I think certainly through high school and college I thought of a career in the law as being something that I would be inclined towards.

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