USAToday reports Federal prosecutors recommended seeking criminal charges against Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI and a frequent target of criticism by President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the decision Thursday.
Mark Meadows tweeted:
Wow. Reports that a U.S. Attorney has formally recommended pursuing CRIMINAL CHARGES against former Deputy FBI Director and CNN analyst Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators.
Hopefully this is merely the beginning of long overdue accountability. Justice will be done.
— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) September 12, 2019
Mike Huckabee wrote:
“Andy” McCabe joins CNN, I guess to replace Michael Avenatti who is um…er…kind of tied up. Now McCabe may have to do his “hook-ups” from the “lock up.” THIS is CNN: The Criminal News Network!
"Andy" McCabe joins CNN, I guess to replace Michael Avenatti who is um…er…kind of tied up. Now McCabe may have to do his "hook-ups" from the "lock up." THIS is CNN: The Criminal News Network! https://t.co/LreNxYtRQt
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 13, 2019
McCabe was fired from the FBI just before his retirement in March 2018 after the Justice Department’s internal watchdog concluded that he improperly authorized a leak about a federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign. Investigators concluded that he displayed a lack of candor when asked about the leak.
The U.S. attorney in Washington, Jessie Liu, recommended moving forward with unspecified charges against McCabe, according to people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to comment publicly. McCabe’s lawyers appealed that decision to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who rejected their request, one of the people said. McCabe’s lawyers were informed of that decision Thursday.
The decision clears the way for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to indict McCabe, though it was unclear Thursday whether that would happen. Whether McCabe is indicted will be up to a federal grand jury in Washington.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington declined to comment.
The recommendation that McCabe be charged is the latest fallout from the FBI’s handling of investigations around the 2016 presidential election, when agents investigated both of the major-party candidates. Those investigations – into Russian meddling to help Trump win the presidency and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server – inserted the FBI into the center of fraught political controversies.
Andrew McCarthy of NRO writes, in coverage of the Andrew McCabe investigation, there seems to be a lot of adding two plus two and coming up with five.
The New York Times and Washington Post have reported that a grand jury met on Thursday in connection with a probe involving McCabe, the FBI’s former deputy director. As I write this column on Friday evening, no indictment has been returned against McCabe. From this, and what seems to be some hopeful speculation about “hints of the case’s weakness” that could possibly have caused grand jurors to “balk,” the Times and the Post suggest that maybe the grand jury has voted against an indictment.
This supposition has prompted a letter to the Justice Department from McCabe’s attorney, Michael Bromwich — a former colleague of mine who, besides being a skilled and shrewd attorney, is a Democrat and was last seen representing Christine Blasey Ford, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser. Bromwich says he is hearing “rumors from reporters” about the filing of a “no true bill” — i.e., a grand-jury vote rejecting a proposed indictment of McCabe.
While conceding that he “do[es] not know the specific basis for the rumors,” Bromwich intuits that they must be reliable because the newspapers ran with the story. Mind you, neither the Times nor the Post claims to have been told by any grand jurors that they declined to indict McCabe; nor do they report hearing from any knowledgeable government official that a no true bill was voted. Nevertheless, McCabe’s legal team is demanding that the Justice Department disclose whether an indictment was declined and refrain from seeking an indictment in the future.
This gambit, of course, floats the narrative that the case against McCabe must be crumbling — the media reports spur the Bromwich letter, which spur more media reports, rinse and repeat. But even allowing for the erosion of standards, this is thin gruel for both news reporting and legal claims.
Read more here.
This article was written by the staff of TheConservativeOpinion.com
