FBI Director Chris Wray hinted to FBI staff in an all-employee email that a government watchdog investigation played a role in FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's departure Monday, sources who have seen the memo told CNN.
Wray said in the message he could not comment on the coming inspector general report about the FBI's conduct during the 2016 election and defended himself as not being swayed by politics.
A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Wray had informed McCabe he is bringing in his own team, which McCabe would not be a part of, and that it was McCabe's decision whether to stay at the FBI or leave.
The coming inspector general report into the handling of the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation has taken on increased scrutiny as President Donald Trump and his allies have railed against FBI officials like McCabe for months over the agency's handling of sensitive political matters and what they argue is political bias.
The Nunes memo relies heavily on the IG report, but cherry-picks the results and condenses it down to four pages. In order to get out ahead of the report, Republicans have been threatening to release the "classified analysis memo" to the public. Last weekend's revelations that Donald Trump already tried to fire Robert Mueller in June upped the timetable considerably, and indeed the Republicans in control of the committee voted late last night to release the memo, giving Trump five days to block it.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, disregarding Justice Department warnings that their actions would be “extraordinarily reckless,” voted Monday evening to release a contentious secret memorandum said to accuse the department and the F.B.I. of misusing their authority to obtain a secret surveillance order on a former Trump campaign associate.
The vote, made along party lines, threw fuel on an already fiery partisan conflict over the investigations into Russia’s brazen meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Republicans invoked a power never before used by the secretive committee to effectively declassify the memo that they had compiled. It was an extraordinary maneuver, cheered on by President Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt” and a sham.
Committee Republicans said the memo’s release would shed useful light on potential political bias that may have warped the early stages of the Russia investigation without compromising intelligence gathering. Representative K. Michael Conaway of Texas, a senior Republican on the committee, said on Monday that he was confident the Republican memo itself would not present a national security risk and was complete and fair as written.
Democrats called the three-and-a-half-page document a dangerous effort to build a narrative to undercut the department’s continuing Russia investigation, using cherry-picked facts assembled with little or no context. Speaking to reporters after the closed-door vote, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the committee’s top Democrat, said Republicans had voted “to politicize the intelligence process.”
“Sadly, we expect that the president of the United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest,” Mr. Schiff said. “But it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee.”
The memo release now lights the fuse on the time bomb that we all knew was going to come. The two main targets of the GOP mentioned in the memo are McCabe, now gone from the FBI having taken the fall for the Clinton e-mail investigation not turning up anything as of yesterday since former FBI Director James Comey was fired in May (for the same reason) and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller.
The memo and the IG report will be the basis used to fire Rosenstein and appoint someone who will fire Mueller. Trump is searching for his Robert Bork. I agree fully with Charles Pierce that another Saturday Night Massacre is now assured.
That McCabe jumped under pressure seems undeniable, unless you are Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from whom truth fled months ago. The president*, she said, was not part of the process through which McCabe resigned. This, of course, ignores the rather salient fact that there would not have been a “process” at all had not the president* and his people not felt the hot breath of the hounds on their hindquarters almost a year ago. The “process” began when the president* canned James Comey over, in the president*’s own words, the Russian thing.
Nevertheless, the forces are organized and arrayed behind the president* if he wants to crank up the Enola Gay and fire Bob Mueller. (The terrified meeping of Republican senators like Lindsey Graham is of no consequence. Impeachment begins in the House, and that’s where the wild things roam.) They have established within their ranks an excuse that is plausible to the raving lunatics of The Base: that the FBI actively conspired against the president* and in favor of Hillary Rodham Clinton because a couple of FBI lovebirds texted each other about the fundamental absurdity of a Trump presidency*. Oh, and because #ReleaseTheMemo—the phantom document prepared by White House congressional doorstop Devin Nunes that purports to demonstrate to the feeble-minded the depths of FBI perfidy. Now for you, me, the lamp post, and anything with the intellectual depth of a handball, this is a ridiculous notion. We, however, are not the conscripted hoplites of this army of dumbasses.
It's no longer a matter of if Trump wants to fire Mueller, but whether or not the Republicans in Congress will allow him to get away with it. If anything, the House GOP is actively giving Trump the cover he thinks he needs to do it.
The question then becomes "do we allow them to get away with it?" I know just a month ago that I predicted Mueller would be allowed to finish his report and recommend charges against Trump. I said then that it was a big bet, predicated on Trump not firing Mueller.
We're about to find out if I was wrong.
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