370

Lordy I hope there are tapes. That’s what Comey said after Trump threatened there could be tapes of the two’s conversation soon after the firing last year. And the recent Democratic status report on the Russia investigation-after the GOP prematurely shut it down-suggested that there may in fact be tapes.

But even without knowing if there were tapes there were always memos-the Comey memos. Now it emerges that McCabe also kept memos. So now we will eventually get to see The McCabe Memos:

“Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director who was fired late Friday, kept contemporaneous memos about his interactions with President Trump and his conversations with the former director James B. Comey, a person close to Mr. McCabe said on Saturday.

“The memos could bolster the account of Mr. Comey, whose own memos and testimony describe repeated requests by Mr. Trump to clear his name. Mr. Comey said Mr. Trump also asked him to shut down a criminal investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Both matters are under investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is considering whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.”

“Mr. McCabe’s memos were left at the F.B.I., which means that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have access to them as they work to corroborate Mr. Comey’s account. Mr. Trump has denied pressuring Mr. Comey to end the Flynn investigation. Mr. Comey was fired last spring, and the revelation of his conversations with Mr. Trump helped lead to the special counsel’s appointment.”

“Mr. McCabe is known to have had at least three meetings with the president. In one, he asked Mr. McCabe how he had voted in the presidential election. In each, he asked about Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill, who ran a failed campaign as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate. Mr. McCabe has identified as a lifelong Republican but did not vote in the 2016 presidential race.”

The existence of his memos was first reported by The Associated Press.

It is heartening to see McCabe is fighting back and has already retained a lawyer:

“He was among the first F.B.I. officials to scrutinize possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. Mr. Trump has taunted Mr. McCabe both publicly and privately, and Republican allies of the president have cast Mr. McCabe as the center of a “deep state” effort to undermine the Trump presidency.”

His lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said Justice Department officials had rushed to fire Mr. McCabe before he could qualify for his pension. “This distortion of the process begins at the very top, with the president’s repeated offensive, drive-by Twitter attacks on Mr. McCabe,” Mr. Bromwich said late Friday.

Richard Painter says it well:

Didn’t think of that did you DT?
Firing McCabe to discredit him as a witness won’t work.
Mueller is coming.

Mueller has McCabe memos documenting conversations with Trump @CNNPolitics https://t.co/yR2jopNuU6

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) March 17, 2018

For his part, Michael Bromwichis the kind of lawyer you want in a situation like this.

“Andrew McCabe, formerly the deputy director of the FBI, has lawyered up. Michael Bromwich of the Bromwich Group confirmed to The Daily Beast that he is representing McCabe for the purposes of the matter that led to his firing.”

Last night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was firing McCabe, citing “lack of candor”—a fireable offense in the FBI. McCabe immediately fired back; in a lengthy statement, he said he believed he was actually fired because of his connection to special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation.

“This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally,” McCabe said in a statement. “It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day.”

The Washington Post previously reported the news of Bromwich hire. Bromwich, who has been representing McCabe for several weeks, was formerly the inspector general of the Justice Department.

A former Inspector General. After all, it was the selectively leaked IG report that led to the pretext for firing him in the first place.

Again, Trump’s petty vindictiveness stands out like a sore thumb. He wants to deny McCabe his pension just for spite. True he also wants to discredit him as he”s a witness for the Comey firing. But Trump can never control his need for pure spite. A few Democratic Congressmen have already offered McCabe employment-just to get him over the finish line for his pension.

McCabe’s office did not rule it out, out of hand.

UPDATE: However it appears that Mueller didn’t use the McCabe Memos to corroborate Comey’s testimony. Last week it was reported that Bannon had a conversation with McCabe the day after Trump asked Comey to ‘let this thing with Flynn go’ over an inappropriate private dinner-were he tried to get McCabe and the FBI on #TeamTreasonTrump.

Yet based on the redacted Mueller Report the SC didn’t use McCabe”s memos. As to why-perhaps a misplaced abundance of caution as McCabe was fired under the pretext of not being fully candid that he leaked the story about the FBI’s inadequately predicated Clinton Foundation investigation on October 31, 2016.

If this is why Mueller didn’t use McCabe’s memos it seems like rather misplaced caution as he apparently took at face value the prevarications of others with far more suspect credibility at face value-Papadopoulos, Manafort, ‘President Trump’ himself.

It’s certainly pretty ironic for Sessions to have fired McCabe for ‘lack of candor’-we now know that Sessions instructed his staff to lie about when the unreconstructed segregationist from Alabama learned he was being investigated for perjury-he claimed he learned in March, 2018 around the same time he fired McCabe but it was actually two months earlier in January.

Yet Mueller didn’t find Sessions guilty of perjury.