It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for his involvement in the Muller investigation.  More than anyone else, Trump sees McCabe as a traitor, because to Donald Trump, the chief goal of the FBI is to protect DOnald Trump and his interests.  McCabe refused to play that game and was fired days before his retirement pension became effective.  Trump has been grumbling about McCabe on Twitter ever since.

But last week McCabe was hired by CNN as an on-air commentator, and that was Trump's final straw.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who became one of President Donald Trump’s top enemies within his own administration, is joining CNN as a contributor, a network spokesperson said. His first day is Friday.

McCabe spent two decades in the FBI before he was fired in March 2018 by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions just more than 24 hours before his planned retirement.

The CNN gig comes as McCabe is fighting that termination in court. Earlier this month, McCabe filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging that his removal was part of a scheme by the president to remove government employees “because they were not politically loyal to him.”

McCabe’s hiring was reported earlier by CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.

The Justice Department said he was fired because he broke FBI rules by improperly disclosing information to the press related to an investigation into Hillary Clinton. A Justice Department inspector general report later found McCabe had “lacked candor, including under oath” in describing those disclosures to investigators.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment. A formal response to McCabe’s lawsuit is not due in court until October.

That was last week.  Over the weekend, Trump decided that McCabe is going to jail and his Justice Department is going to bury McCabe in a box somewhere.

Federal prosecutors in Washington appear to be in the final stages of deciding whether to seek an indictment of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director and a frequent target of President Trump, on charges of lying to federal agents, according to interviews with people familiar with recent developments in the investigation.

In two meetings last week, Mr. McCabe’s lawyers met with the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who is expected to be involved in the decision about whether to prosecute, and for more than an hour with the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, according to a person familiar with the meetings. The person would not detail the discussions, but defense lawyers typically meet with top law enforcement officials to try to persuade them not to indict their client if they failed to get line prosecutors to drop the case.

An indictment of a former top F.B.I. official is extremely rare and would be the latest chapter in the saga of Mr. McCabe, who was fired last year over the issue now under criminal investigation — whether he failed to be forthcoming with internal investigators examining the F.B.I.’s dealings with the news media.

An indictment would be certain to draw praise from Mr. Trump, who has made his attacks on Mr. McCabe a centerpiece of his yearslong campaign to discredit the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the Russia investigation.

As Ben Wittes of Lawfare points out, the fact that this story made the NY Times means McCabe is now absolutely facing imminent political prosecution.

Let me translate this paragraph for you: Such meetings generally take place when indictment is imminent; they happen when the government plans to bring charges. You should thus expect charges against McCabe to be forthcoming any day. And if such charges don’t happen, that doesn’t mean they weren’t planned but, rather, that some extrinsic event has intervened.

Why is that shocking? Because as best as I can tell, the facts available on the public record simply don’t support such charges. The only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President Trump demanding McCabe’s scalp.

To be sure, the inspector general’s report that prompted McCabe’s firing paints a deeply troubling portrait of McCabe’s conduct. It describes, in brief, how McCabe authorized an October 2016 disclosure on background to the Wall Street Journal and then misrepresented his role in the story on several occasions—including to the inspector general. I have no reason to disbelieve the inspector general’s account of this episode and no interest in defending McCabe’s alleged conduct. While McCabe has disputed the findings, he has not—at least not as of yet—presented a plausible alternative narrative that accounts for the facts the inspector general recounts. My point here is thus not to suggest that McCabe did nothing wrong.

But criminal charges? At least based on what’s in the inspector general’s report, this is very far from a criminal case. Criminal dispositions on false statements matters in internal investigations are exceptionally rare. Absent some gross aggravating factor, I struggle to think of any other examples. Workplace false statements are normally handled through internal disciplinary means, not criminal charges. There are countless public cases of gross misconduct and lies about that misconduct that are routinely declined as criminal matters.

But not this time, because Trump called up his Attorney General over the weekend and said "This McCabe asshole is not gonna be on CNN, you put him in prison or else."  You can make the argument that CNN messed up by hiring McCabe because he's too close to the news still and it probably did.

But sending him to prison is far worse and far more indicative of corruption and abuse of power. Bill Barr is doing what Trump hired him to do.

Expect more political prosecutions coming.  Lots more.