Over at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes explains the tragedy/farce farce/tragedy of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe’s dismissal and now impending indictment for false statements made in the course of an internal investigation. The record is perfectly clear: Andrew McCabe was fired immediately prior to the vesting of his pension and now very likely will be facing criminal charges in federal court for the sin of making Donald Trump angry.
This is not the first time that unscrupulous Republican politicians have bent the FBI to their will. Not too long ago, then FBI director James Comey got on his high horse to lecture Hillary Clinton on her non-criminal misbehavior while secretary of state, which is not the FBI director’s job. House Republicans called Jim into a hearing, where they ripped him several dozen new ones—one for each representative—for not personally locking up Hillary for life sans trial. As I wrote following Hillary’s defeat
When Comey first testified before the House Oversight Committee on July 7 regarding his decision not to recommend the prosecution of Hillary Clinton on charges of mishandling classified information, he (probably) expected that if he explained himself honestly and fairly, Republicans on the committee would realize that he had been honest and fair. He soon learned, however, that Republicans on the committee did not want an honest, fair account of what James Comey had done. What they wanted was Hillary Clinton’s head on a pike, and until he gave them that, they would loathe him with the same unreasoning hatred as they loathed Hillary herself. And it is a rare federal bureaucrat with the courage to stand up to the loathing of Congress.
When Trump took over, he naturally fired Comey for not accommodating himself to Trump’s every need. But of course that wasn’t enough for Trump. He had to punish others as well. McCabe was deprived of his pension in an extremely unjust manner and now it appears he will have to undergo the agony of a criminal trial. And Republicans are calling this justice.
Afterwords
The FBI, of course, has a long and sordid record. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI spent millions spying on possibly subversive types, everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to John Lennon, with no legal justification whatsoever. Hoover’s original “plan”—supposedly—was to keep track of everyone who could be considered “dangerous” in wartime (my word) and then lock them up sans indictment and sans trial when and if war arrived. When World War II did arrive, naturally, Hoover did not lock up anyone (the FBI was not a part of interment of Japanese residents and citizens), but old habits are hard to break, and Hoover continued his spying until the day he died.
More recently, the FBI has been arresting, and convicting, all sorts of “terrorists” whose only crime was being dumb enough to fall for FBI entrapment schemes. But subjecting high ranking government officials to vindictive criminal prosecutions takes things up to a whole ‘nother level. It was Republicans who prepared the hog wallow, and it was Herr Donald who jumped right in.
And James Comey? Sometimes he was too full of himself. He’s also the guy who insisted on charging Martha Stewart with a felony for a trivial lie and sending her to jail. Comey explained that he once sent an “African-American minister” to jail for a year for lying, so why not Martha Stewart? Were the lies similar in significance? Was it a good idea to send the minister to jail for a year in the first place? Details make a difference.
Rod Rosenstein (yeah, that Rod Rosentein) gave the following reasons for condemning Comey’s treatment of Hillary, which I strongly agree with:
Announcing that Clinton would not be prosecuted: “It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said that the F.B.I. had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.”
“Compounding the error, the Director ignored another long standing principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.
“Concerning his letter to Congress on October 28, 2016, the Director cast his decision as a choice between whether he would ‘speak’ about the decision to investigate the newly-discovered email messages or ‘conceal’ it. ‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue. When federal agents and prosecutors quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
At his original press conference, Comey first said that Clinton could not be charged with a crime because she lacked any criminal intent. Then he stated later that if she hadn’t been secretary of state she would have been punished for what she did, implying that she hadn’t been indicted merely because of her office, which contradicted his original statement, though what he “meant” was that she would have been punished bureaucratically, which was mere speculation on his part, which, as Rosenstein observed, was emphatically not part of his job.
UPDATE: More bad stuff about Comey
The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General not too surprisingly treats Comey pretty much as Comey treated Hillary: deplorable but not indictable. Reason's Scott Shackford gives a nice overview, casting shade where shade is due, adding several links for good measure, while I can find another as well, of my own, back in the pre-Hillary/Donald days, when Jim expressed a belief in a "chill wind," one somehow related to the whole Black Lives Matter thing, that was somehow causing cops to, you know, sit on their asses and, you know, not do their jobs.
