Last Call For A Late Deadline

The Trump regime has made its Friday Night News Dump™ and it's a major development: two days before his scheduled retirement with full benefits, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions late Friday night fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a little more than 24 hours before McCabe was set to retire.

Sessions announced the decision in a statement just before 10 p.m., noting that both the Justice Department Inspector General and the FBI office that handles discipline had found “that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions.”

He said based on those findings and the recommendation of the department’s senior career official, “I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately.”

The move will likely cost McCabe a significant portion of his retirement benefits, though it is possible he could bring a legal challenge. McCabe has been fighting vigorously to keep his job, and on Thursday, he spent nearly four hours inside the Justice Department pleading his case.

Michael R. Bromwich, McCabe’s attorney, said in a lengthy statement responding to the allegations that he had “never before seen the type of rush to judgment — and rush to summary punishment — that we have witnessed in this case.” He cited in particular President Trump’s attacks on McCabe on Twitter and the White House press secretary’s comments about him on Thursday — which he said were “quite clearly designed to put inappropriate pressure on the Attorney General to act accordingly.”

Let's not forget the real reason McCabe was fired: obstruction of justice of Robert Mueller's investigation against Donald Trump.  Trump's multiple tweets taunting McCabe and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling McCabe a "bad actor" yesterday while openly admitting McCabe's termination before his retirement eligibility was now something Trump wanted to happen all but gives the game away here, but then somebody spotted a Fox News draft story announcing the move published several hours before McCabe was actually fired.

Someone at Fox News accidentally published the draft of a "McCabe fired" story, even though the firing hasn't happened. Twitterers are starting to share the link, thinking it's real. pic.twitter.com/QZPkLcyFLN

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 16, 2018

Surprise, it was real, just that it was published hours before it happened.  What a coincidence.

For his part, McCabe is firing back hard.

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.

But McCabe sees bigger forces at work in the Justice Department inspector general’s inquiry — which he views as part of a broader campaign to impugn him for his role in handling the FBI’s Russia investigation and his ties to special counsel Robert Mueller.

“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.”

“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.”

What McCabe is describing there is obstruction of justice.  Period.