https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a27303320/asha-rangappa-interview-cnn-fbi/

“Having seen how the sausage is made,” she says, “I feel less worried about it.”



On a quiet Tuesday evening in the suburbs of New Haven, Asha Rangappa is discussing propaganda with her children. “Have you ever come across white nationalists on YouTube?” she asks her adolescent son. He pauses, prodding at his pasta and twisting his mouth. “You took too long to answer,” she says, “so you have!”

This, it seems, is typical; when your mom was once an FBI agent, you expect some dinnertime behavioral analysis. As the meal winds down, her son tells me that polygraphs are largely inaccurate and therefore inadmissible in court, and that “butt clenching” is a sign of lying. Expressionless, his little sister lies: “My name is Laura.” “Yeah, but did your butt clench?” She tells him, firmly, no.

I’m at Asha Rangappa's dinner table because, for the past few years, her commentary on CNN and Twitter has helped hundreds of thousands of people understand the news. The Trump administration’s lies, scandals, and erratic behavior can make the average person’s head spin, but Rangappa—a former FBI counterintelligence agent and a lecturer at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs—answers all of my most pressing questions: Is the travel ban illegal? If the President didn’t collude, then why does he act like a Russian asset? Can he pardon himself?



Rangappa’s humor and intellect have won her a formidable following. In Twitter comments, her fans ask legal questions, post political memes, and compare her to Alex Parrish, the former FBI agent protagonist of Quantico, played by Priyanka Chopra. On TV, Rangappa's presence is disarming. Surrounded by men in dark suits, she wears bold colors—flamingo pinks, splashes of teal—that offset her glossy hair and luminous bronze skin. She speaks with an animated gravity, opening her eyes wide and lingering on important phrases to make her points. “I don’t think she uses the pronoun ‘I,’” her former FBI mentor Jack Eckenrode tells me. “She’s pointing to the record, and to history and precedent, and she’s looking at what has come before and interpreting it for people in an objective manner.” She’d rather lay out the legal threshold for impeachment than weigh in on what she thinks Congress should do.

If you could invent a political commentator with bipartisan credibility, she might look like Asha Rangappa: the child of immigrants from a military family, a woman of color with experience in law enforcement, and a passionate advocate of national security whose politics trend left-of-center. There is “no other commentator I know of who is coming from the perspective of a counterintelligence agent,” says fellow CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti. This gives Rangappa rare and critical insight into the Mueller investigation, which was, at its heart, a counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election (collusion is merely a piece of this). Rangappa knows from experience how the FBI handles Russian spies and disinformation; add to the mix her professorial skill at explaining complex ideas, and she is ideally positioned to break down the bewildering political events of recent years.