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What Trump did to Andy McCabe last night was both vindictive and yet another case of his obstruction of justice.

UPDATE: Does this belong in the FBI section?

UPDATE: CF with the other chapter where I discuss how McCabe along with other FBI officials who were potential witnesses to the Comey firing were systematically targeted and forced out and fired by Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.

It was completely petty and vindictive as it was totally unnecessary-he was already leaving-his retirement was going to start in 26 hours. Just how vindictive and petty it was is underscored by Trump’s own need to spike the ball.

It was also yet another case of Trump’s obstruction of justice as McCabe is a material witness for the Comey firing.

That he’s been accused of unethical or even illegal behavior is rich compared with the actions taken by Trump loyalists-or what amounts to the same thing, Clinton haters-at the FBI during the election.

Indeed, the IG report that the allegedly damning information on McCabe comes from was actually commissioned to get to the bottom of why the FBI chose to discuss the email probe 11 days before the election-or did the press conference in July of that year.

But all we’ve gotten so far have been selective leaks about Peter Strozk and Andy McCabe-things that looked at in isolation are beneficial to so-called ‘President Trump.’

This is what we really need to see-the whole IG report not just selective nuggets that prove some phony GOP Trump loyalist narrative.

 

Again, the big picture this is more Trump obstruction; he has declared war on the FBI and this because of the Russia probe and has targeted precisely those senior FBI officials that are likely to testify against him.

It’s certainly heartening to see McCabe fighting back. 

“The president has targeted him in highly personal terms. Conservatives have slammed him as tainted with bias. And on Friday night, the Department of Justice fired Andrew McCabe a little more than 24 hours before his scheduled retirement.”

“The dismissal from his decades-long home at the department marks an ignominious end to a once-storied career for McCabe, who stepped aside as FBI deputy director in January. That departure came ahead of an inspector general’s inquiry that’s expected to criticize his handling of an October 2016 media report on his wife’s failed run for the Virginia State Senate and his handling of investigations into Hillary Clinton.”

UPDATE: May 19, 2019.

We have now seen both the IG report and the unredacted Mueller Report-though not the other part of the IG report that was supposed to cover the rogue anti Clinton pro Trump agents at the FBI.

It’s clear that McCabe was targeted-this Foreign Policy article reported back in January, 2018 that this was a strategy that Trump and his GOP co-conspirators had begun in June, 2017-if you really think McCabe was fired 26 hours before his pension based on him leaking that the Clinton Foundation was being investigated-based on Clinton Cash-three days after the Comey Letter we’ve got some Trump U diplomas for you.

End of UPDATE

Again, as Abramson says, it’s outrageous that these very dubious cases of alleged wrongdoing-what relevance does money his wife received in a failed Senate run have to do with his own work at the FBI when you have those who deliberately manipulated the email investigation successfully Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign?

It also should be noted that if McCabe is going to be fired based on his wife’s politics then Comey should have been fired for donating to both of Obama’s Presidential campaign opponents. Indeed-and this should be irrelevant-McCabe is actually a Republican.

“Look, it’s personally devastating. It’s so tough on my family,” he told POLITICO during a wide-ranging interview conducted earlier this month, before his firing.

“But at some point, this has to be seen in the larger context,” said McCabe, 49, who says he has voted for every Republican presidential nominee until he sat out the 2016 contest entirely. “And I firmly believe that this is an ongoing effort to undermine my credibility because of the work that I did on the Russia case, because of the investigations that I oversaw and impacted that target this administration.”

Let’s be clear: McCabe’s politics should be irrelevant; no one ever saw Comey’s-Republican-politics as relevant. But the idea that he was a Democrat is false. But again-to be clear: if he had voted Democrat that wouldn’t be relevant either. But, of course, there are less Democrats at the FBI-it’s a very Republican place.

UPDATE: Indeed it’s now 2019 and in the FBI’s 110 year history it’s had exactly 0 Democratic FBI Directors.

End of UPDATE

“They have every reason to believe that I could end up being a significant witness in whatever the special counsel comes up with, and so they are trying to create this counter-narrative that I am not someone who can be believed or trusted,” McCabe added. “And as someone who has been believed and trusted by really good people for 21 years, it’s just infuriating to me.”

“The Justice Department’s inspector general was already conducting a sweeping inquiry into the FBI’s decision-making process in closing its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, then disclosing the discovery of new Clinton emails in a message to Congress in late October 2016.”

UPDATE 3.0 Still what’s notable is that the IG interrupted it’s investigation into the handling of Emailgate to rush out a separate report on McCabe. Meanwhile we still haven’t heard a word about the promised sequel to the IG report on the rogue agents who flipped the election.

Why is all this? Others can furrow their brows and pontificate on how we just don’t know but I think the dots we need to connect are pretty clear-there is certainly probable cause to surmise that Trump has subverted the IG investigations-if there ever was a report on the FBI rogue agents it’s on a shelf somewhere in the Hoover building over in DC.

End of UPDATE 3.0

Which is rather surreal as the FBI ended up-wrongly-making an announcement about maybe-maybe not reopening the email probe in late October. Considering that the FBI won the election for Trump it’s not clear what else the GOP wanted them to do-McCabe didn’t stop the letter from coming out-which would have been the right thing to do in any case.

UPDATE 4.0 Although Randol Schoenblog has argued that the reason Comey barred McCabe from the discussion of wether or not to do the letter-based on the idea that McCabe wasn’t trustworthy because of his wife; Comey should have recused himself with his long history of Clinton hunting and support for the Republican party!-is McCabe would have pushed back.

Lisa Page’s texts at the time seemed to indicate she wanted McCabe at the meeting to push back. To be sure what McCabe did in revealing the existence of the Clinton Foundation probe was hardly about helping Hillary Clinton quite the opposite he did this to show that he wasn’t a Democratic loyalist because his wife was running as a Democrat for the Senate.

What was Lisa Page referring to when she texted to Peter Sztrok about Rep. Jason Chaffetz on the evening of October 26?

Bill is Bill Priestap, head of counterintelligence and Peter Sztrok’s boss.

 

Back to Politico:

“That inquiry includes a deeper look at the propriety of McCabe’s pre-election actions, and is the biggest of several unanswered questions raised by critics who say his bias should have disqualified him from playing such a central role in politically volatile investigations. In addition to the Justice Department’s inspector general, McCabe faces an Office of Special Counsel review into whether he violated a law prohibiting government officials from engaging in campaign activity.

“Among the issues under the inspector general’s purview was whether McCabe himself “should have been recused from participating in certain matters.” Fuel for that political conflagration, which ultimately snuffed out McCabe’s career and now threatens his full pension, stems from Wall Street Journal reports in October 2016 that raised questions about $467,500 in contributions that his wife’s state Senate campaign received in 2015 from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally.”

“Republicans have cited the six-figure donation as proof of a pro-Clinton bias by McCabe and the FBI more broadly.”

“That’s a lot of money for one state Senate seat,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said last year during an FBI oversight hearing, warning that “a cloud of doubt hangs over the FBI’s objectivity.”

So they say that McCabe who has voted Republican in every election until 2016-where he didn’t vote at all-engaged in campaign activity and their proof of that is his wife raised a lot of money? That’s enough to trash his reputation and rob a life long civil servant of his pension?

UPDATE: By the way wouldn’t it be nice to have a press that pointed out such hypocrisy rather than playing the GOP’s dutiful stenographer? Is this asking too much?

Some in the GOP got more alarmed when McCabe showed up in politically charged text messages between FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and bureau attorney Lisa Page, who began a romantic affair before the election and while both were working on issues that included the Russia and Clinton investigations. Mueller later fired Strzok from his team after learning of the texts and another Justice Department inspector general inquiry into them.”

Oh they’re ‘alarmed’-more faux alarm.

Of course, the MSM credulously believes they’re honestly ‘alarmed’ rather than playing the usual GOP Nixoniaon Roger Stonian dirty tricks.

Again, no matter how they quibble about unimportant details-and no matter how often the MSM takes the bait-at the end of the day the FBI won it for Trump.

In one text message to Page, Strzok says that “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was among those seeing further proof of McCabe’s entanglement in pro-Clinton bias.

“That sounds very worrisome to the American people that high-ranking FBI agents were actually conspiring to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president,” Paul told MSNBC in January.

I don’t know how Rand Paul came by this knowledge of what worries the American people-many more are worried about the House GOP shutting down the Russia investigation and declaring ‘no collusion!’ before they even spoke to Papadopoulos.

UPDATE: I’ve since realized this is a typical Rand Paul tick-everytime he defends indefensible ‘President Trump’ he puts words in the mouth of the American people-does he mean the Russian people?

End of UPDATE

“But when it came to his wife’s campaign, McCabe went into painstaking detail trying to dispel the notion of impropriety that Trump has burnished into Washington’s consciousness.”

It’s a sad commentary about how media elites insist on believing Trump’s lies-so often it seems they believe lies much more easily than the truth; the key to understanding the Conventional Wisdom is that most people will rather believe a lie that makes sense to their prior preconceptions than a truth that unsettles them.

In this sense it’s very useful to employ the premise suggested by Jess Zimmerman that I’ve expanded on in this book that in American politics gender lines aren”t draw simply between male and female politicians but between Republican and Democratic politicians-the same sexism that is used against female politicians is used against Democratic politicians.

How else can you explain why the MSM is so quick to give credence to GOP lies about McCabe? Why do they never point out the evident hypocrisy? As for Comey’s hypocrisy-barring McCabe because of his wife’s political affiliations while he himself was a lifelong GOPer who hunted the Clintons for 21 years going back to when he came up with Ken Starr-again there are different rules for men and women and by the same token for Republicans and Democrats. We’ve never had a Democratic FBI Director in 110 years of the FBI but no one thinks to point that out as the real FBI bias-even though it is.

Preconceptions say the opposite-Clinton got special treatment and it was biased against Trump-that it was full of anti Clinton agents-in his book Comey relates giving workshops to FBI agents current and former who believed she should have been indicted-a fiction that Comey himself had a large hand in propagating-assuring them it wasn’t. As for McCabe what’s sad is that he only leaked word of the Clinton Foundation to reassure that he-a lifelong Republican-wasn’t biased for Clinton.

So McCabe tried to fight the lies of the anti Clinton agents by kicking Clinton in the teeth yet again. Now Trump and the GOP co-conspirators swoop in and declare this was proof that McCabe was a Clinton loyalist who lied-Trump lies 100 times a day but somehow only the lies of Trump’s perceived opponents matter-and destroy him.

McCabe was right to fight back but he did it in the wrong way-fighting credulously against GOP lies isn’t the answer-you have to come in with an understanding that they never act in good faith and not take absurd accusations at face value-learn not to dignify them with a response. That’s the trouble with the Democrats-they’re always defending and losing. 

“Jill McCabe had voted for Republicans and Democrats, as her husband tells it, before getting approached about a state Senate bid after giving a quote to The Washington Post for a story about McAuliffe’s tour of the pediatric emergency room she helped run. McCabe told a Post reporter that day in 2014 that the Democratic governor’s pitch to expand Medicaid under Obamacare “has to be part of the solution.”

After his wife decided to run, according to McCabe, he “immediately got counsel from my attorneys, ethics professionals at the bureau,” to determine how to construct a firewall between his FBI work and her campaign.

“I’ve never met Hillary Clinton,” he said. “My wife has never met Hillary Clinton. Neither of us have ever met any Clinton, for that matter. She was supported by the governor of our state, who happened to be the leader of the Democratic Party in that state.”

See what I find worrying actually is that to prove he’s innocent of doing anything wrong he has to swear on a stack of bibles that he and his wife have never met Hillary Clinton-it’s like a political loyalist test-‘I am not and have never been part of the American Communist party!’

McCabe is reduced to trying to prove the negative.

Why does a life long Republican have to assure the world he doesn’t know Hillary Clinton-even his wife is held to be ok as she’s voted for Republicans in the past too. Comey, McCabe-and Mueller for that matter-are life long Republicans there has never been a Democratic Director of the FBI in 110 years and and yet no one ever asks if maybe the actual bias was against Clinton-spoiler alert: it was.

 

And yet, Trump used THIS as the flimsy, absurd basis to fire McCabe:

“But when a Wall Street Journal reporter called in late October 2016 — nearly a year after Jill McCabe’s election loss — to ask about the propriety of his supervising the Clinton email investigation given his wife’s campaign donations, the deputy director authorized the FBI’s then-chief public affairs official to engage with the reporter.

“Such a practice, empowering the sharing of background information that can’t be directly cited, is relatively routine at federal agencies when reporters dig into complex stories. McCabe said he was “one of only three people in the FBI” empowered to approve the sharing of information with the press.”

“When the reporter called the FBI again, asking about allegations circulating around the bureau that McCabe had bowed to Justice Department pressure to wind down a probe of the Clinton Foundation, McCabe said he again authorized the disclosure of more details in order to reorient the story in what he believed was a more accurate direction.”

The prospect that the Journal reporter “would put this incorrect narrative into his story, I thought, would be very damaging,” McCabe said. He acknowledged the obvious — “It would be damaging to me personally” — adding that “the more important factor is that it would be damaging to the FBI.”

Ironically if there really was DOJ pressure to wind down the CF probe it was correct as there was no there there-it was predicated on Peter Schweitzer’s yellow journalism a la Clinton Cash.

Yet I’m not so ready to believe-absent some pretty compelling corroboration-there was much pressure-Loretta Lynch-alas-was largely allergic to confrontation-which is why Comey and the anti Clinton rogue agents was successful in roiling her twice.

“That decision to share information about an open investigation, and McCabe’s later handling of inspector general inquiries concerning his actions, forms the bulk of the critical report that propelled his firing on Friday. McCabe had long planned to retire on his 50th birthday, which is Sunday.”

But bigger picture is this: in December, 2017 he testified before Congress that he could verify Comey’s version of events in his firing. Soon after there was talk that the DOJ would expedite only his part in the IG investigation into the email probe.

What he wonders about now is the chain of events that began after he testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. “Within hours,” as McCabe put it, leaks to the press revealed that he had told lawmakers he could corroborate Comey’s recounting of conversations with Trump before the president fired his FBI director.

And soon after that, as McCabe tells it, he heard that the Justice Department inspector general would expedite the portion of its long-planned report on the Clinton investigation that related to him. “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 23. “90 days to go?!!!”

“I don’t know if anyone from the White House or within the Department influenced the IG,” McCabe said. “It’s a striking coincidence. One that can’t be seen outside the context of the president’s own public communications.”

And that’s the one big lesson from Watergate 2.0: the rigged 2016 election. While coincidences happen you should always be suspicious of those that are too convenient.

He doesn’t know. See this is the problem-everyone is so timid in connecting the dots. According to his own theory of the case-he was fired for beginning the Russia investigation, it’s clear Trump or his flacks did just that. Why else did the IG put the McCabe report to the top of the line while we’re still waiting for the report on the anti Trump pro Clinton rogue agents?

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