American Politics Today

Fernand R. Amandi is the managing partner of Bendixen & Amandi, a public comment and strategic communications firm. He also is the 6x lottery winner, the host of the podcast called Strange Days Podcast and a member of MSNBC.

Josh Campbell is a CNN law enforcement analyst. Prior to joining the network, Campbell was a supervisory special agent with the FBI and served as special assistant to FBI director James Comey. He received four FBI Combat Theater Awards for his work embedded with military special operations and CIA teams abroad. Campbell has an MA in communication from Johns Hopkins and a BA in government from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a term member with the Council on Foreign Relations and teaches national security at the University of Southern California. Dan Rather writes of his book Crossfire Hurricane: Inside Donald Trump's War on the FBI (Algonquin Books), “Campbell speaks both from the heart and experience. A dynamite read.” In this gripping fly-on-the-wall narrative, Campbell takes readers behind the scenes of the earliest days of the Russia investigation—codename: Crossfire Hurricane—up to the present. Using both firsthand experience and reporting, he reveals fresh details about this tumultuous period; explains how the FBI goes about its work and its historic independence from partisan forces; and describes the increasing dismay inside the bureau as the president and his allies escalate their attacks on the agency. Appalled by Trump’s assault on the bureau’s credibility, Campbell left the FBI in 2018 to sound the alarm about unfair political attacks on the institutions that keep America safe. Smart, clear, passionate, Crossfire Hurricane will captivate readers struggling to make sense of a news cycle careening out of control.

Malcolm Nance is author of the New York Times bestseller The Plot to Hack America and an intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He is a former career US intelligence officer. In The Plot to Destroy Democracy (Hachette Books ) Malcolm Nance examines how Russia has used cyber warfare, political propaganda, and manipulation of our perception of reality to weaponize American news, traditional media, social media, and the workings of the internet. Its objective, Nance argues, is to attack and break apart democratic institutions from within — and he also warns readers about and what can be expected to happen should we fail to stop their next attack. Utilizing top secret Russian-sourced political and hybrid warfare strategy documents, Nance writes about the plan to undermine American institutions that has been in effect from the Cold War to the present day. Based on original research and countless interviews with espionage experts, he scrutinizes the recent hacking, exposes Russia’s support of right-wing extremists throughout both the U.S. and Europe, and examines how Putin's agencies have worked since 2010 to bring fringe candidate Donald Trump into elections. The Plot to Destroy Democracy provides a better understanding of why Putin's efforts are a serious threat to our national security and global alliances –and is also a blistering indictment of President Donald J. Trump. Kirkus Reviews  note that "Nance traces the revival of Russian enmity to Putin's second term as president, when he turned his KGB training to good use in weakening his American opponents by exploiting their divisions-exactly what those active measures are supposed to do... A convincing...cry that treason is afoot."

Philip Mudd, the author of Takedown, a detailed account of intelligence gathering in the hunt for al-Qa’ida, is the ex–deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the FBI’s National Security Branch. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post. Mudd’s Black Site (Liveright) is an account of one of the most controversial initiatives in American history.  After September 11, 2001, almost overnight, the CIA evolved into a warfighting intelligence service. In Black Site Mudd addresses how far America actually went to pursue al-Qa’ida and prevent another catastrophe. One tool was an interrogation program of suspected al-Qaida members and other terrorists, known internally as “The Program.” Because the methods might have been questionable by American legal, ethical and moral standards, the work was often done in a web of top-secret “black sites” in other countries outsourced to intelligence agents of other governments. Debates about torture ignited in 2014 after the US Senate published a report of the Program. But the report, Mudd argues, did not fully address questions such as: How did the officials actually come to their decisions? What happened at the detention facilities on a day-to-day basis? And how did the officers feel about what they were doing? Based on interviews from dozens of officials―many of whom have never spoken out before― Black Site seeks answers to these questions and more. It shows the tragedy and triumph of the CIA during its most difficult days. Kirkus Review called Black Site “a revealing and engaging account of life in the shadows.”