Tag Archives: Andrew McCabe

The McCabe Firing & Jeff Sessions

17 Saturday Mar 2018

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By Frank Bowman

Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe late last night, barely a day before his pension would have vested.  This event tells us more about Mr. Sessions than Mr. McCabe.  And to me, whatever McCabe’s transgressions, the man who is leaving the Justice Department looks rather better than the man who, for now, continues to head it.

Let’s begin with a few obvious points:

  • The official reason for McCabe’s firing was a conclusion by the Justice Department’s Inspector General that McCabe had been less than candid about the circumstances under which he authorized the release of information to reporters from the Wall Street Journal about aspects of the Clinton investigation.  I am obviously not privy to the particulars of that IG report; however, I have some acquaintance with Michael Horowitz, DOJ’s Inspector General.  I know him as an excellent lawyer, an honest man, and a nonpartisan straight arrow.  He is an Obama appointee and certainly no Trump flunky.  Hence, it seems very likely that McCabe did cross some professional line.
  • That said, the decision about what penalty to impose for McCabe’s transgression did not rest with Michael Horowitz.  It has been reported that the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended that McCabe be fired. If true, that lends further credence to the notion that McCabe’s transgression was fairly serious, or at least that reasonable professionals could view it as being so.
  • Nonetheless, the timing of the firing, after the business day on a Friday, and mere hours before McCabe qualified for a pension earned for more than 20 years of FBI service — which excepting whatever lapse of judgment got him fired, was by all accounts exemplary — can only be seen as small, vindictive, and mean spirited.  Which is to say that one would see Mr. Trump’s signature in the affair even if that master of pettiness and bile had not publicly complained that McCabe might be allowed to retire with his pension.
  • Jeff Sessions made this call.  He could have followed the advice of the FBI’s professional responsibility office and separated McCabe from government service, but a person of any class would either have allowed McCabe to retire or at worst ordered his termination sometime in the coming weeks.  Instead, he cravenly chose to do the bidding of his dark master and snatch pension benefits from a career public servant.

The result is that Sessions looks far worse than McCabe.  He is exposed as a hypocrite, a weakling, and a fool.

Hypocrite: The idea that Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions combined to fire a career FBI agent for “lack of candor” reeks to heaven of hypocrisy.  Mr. Trump’s incorrigible dishonesty is by now so universally recognized that it no longer elicits much more than weary groans.  He lies to everyone, including foreign heads of state, and then brags about the lies.  But Sessions’ slate is hardly clean.  This is a man who has made repeated misstatements to the Senate about his Russian contacts. When called to account by former colleagues, he feigned outrage at the challenge to his honor, but the display rendered his strategic misrememberings no less incredible.  That this precious pair of dissemblers have the gall to discipline anyone else for lack of candor is very hard to stomach.

Weakling: The decision to fire McCabe when and how he was fired was a transparent bow to the wishes of Mr. Trump.  While the manner and timing of McCabe’s release may not have violated DOJ personnel rules (although that is a contestable point which McCabe may raise in court), it was, so far as I know, unprecedented.  I know of no case where a president publicly campaigned for the firing, humiliation, and financial punishment of a third-tier career public servant.  Still less am I aware of any case where a cabinet officer was so spineless as to acquiesce in such executive bullying.  To give him his due, Jeff Sessions has occasionally shown signs of  independence and a desire to protect the institutional integrity of the Justice Department, most recently his staged public dinner with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and Solicitor General Noel Francisco.  But the McCabe firing demonstrates, at least to my mind, Sessions’ essential hollowness.  Trump is a bully.  Sessions, who for all his well-documented flaws has led a life of far greater accomplishment than our erstwhile president, nonetheless lacks the moral core that moves persons of decency to stand up to bullies.

Fool: Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Sessions’ toadying to Trump by humiliating McCabe is not the meanness or the cowardice, but that, even as part of a selfish calculus of self-preservation, it surely will do Sessions no good.  Trump wants him out because, so long as Sessions is both AG and recused from overseeing Robert Mueller’s investigation, Trump can’t stop or cripple the investigation.  Therefore, Sessions is a dead man walking.  The only questions are when the axe will fall and how Sessions will be remembered once he’s gone.  Sessions is mad to think that the mad king will be sufficiently mollified by the manner of McCabe’s departure to preserve Sessions in office even a single day longer than would be the case had Sessions exhibited some magnanimity and grace.  And by yielding to the vicious whims of the plutocrat in the White House to gratuitously strike at the retirement security of a middle class career FBI agent, Sessions will earn the deserved contempt of all those who have ever been in federal service.

There is, or at least I hope there will prove to be, a sad moral in the tale of Jeff Sessions.  He hitched his wagon to the rising star of a man manifestly unfit for the high office of the presidency.  And he was rewarded beyond any reasonable expectation with his dream job — Attorney General, head of an agency that I think Sessions genuinely reveres.  But what Sessions is likely to find in the end is that his betrayal of principle in the pursuit of ambition will yield only ashes.  His lies to congress in the service of an unworthy boss have cost him the respect of many of his former senatorial colleagues.  His truckling to Trump, including the cruelty to McCabe, will cost him the respect he craves from the professionals of the Justice Department.

Jeff Sessions’ story is not yet ended.  He may yet redeem himself by some act of unexpected political courage.  But at the moment, he risks relegation to the small, sad club of ignominiously failed Attorneys General.  And his name will be spoken, when it is remembered at all, in company with Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell, men too warped and small for the great office they ultimately sullied.

FBI Deputy Director McCabe’s Resignation

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

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By Frank Bowman

It was reported this morning that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, long a target of Mr. Trump’s ire, has resigned.

McCabe has been under attack from the White House and its allies because his wife received campaign donations during her unsuccessful 2015 bid for a Virginia legislative seat from a political action committee associated with Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who in turn was a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton. The implication has been that McCabe was biased against Trump and in favor of Secretary Clinton during the FBI investigation of the Clinton e-mail scandal and somehow influenced the outcome.

Of course, as carefully reported here by Politifact, the facts don’t support the allegation.  As Politifact summarizes the matter:

At the time of the contribution, the candidate’s husband was not directly involved in the FBI probe of Clinton’s email server, according to the FBI. The bureau says that by the time he had some oversight role in the Clinton investigation, the election involving his wife had been over for three months. Meanwhile, the decision not to charge Clinton was a recommendation made by the director of the FBI [not by McCabe].

I am of two minds about McCabe’s departure.  On the one hand, in the short term, it may be just as well to have him out of the picture.  Regardless of the facts of the matter, it is not helpful to the Bureau in the present moment to have a Deputy Director with family links, however attenuated, to Secretary Clinton’s political allies. McCabe’s resignation means one less distraction from the substance of the investigations swirling around Mr. Trump.

On the other hand, McCabe’s departure is profoundly disturbing for at least two reasons. The first is that an honorable public servant should not have his career cut short by unsubstantiated slurs from the President of the United States.

The second, and deeper, concern is that the attack on McCabe is yet another Trumpian assault on essential norms that have long governed relations between the White House and the career civil service generally and federal law enforcement agencies in particular. Central to a functioning modern state is confidence that the government’s ordinary employees perform their tasks free of partisan political bias. To help ensure that civil servants will do so, the Hatch Act of 1939 requires that career federal employees surrender some of the rights of political participation enjoyed by everyone else.  Conflict of interest regulations go still further to prevent, so far as possible, even the appearance of favoritism or bias. Equally importantly, the civil service has for many decades cultivated an ethos of political neutrality, offering professional diligence in the service of the law and the agency’s mission, rather than the party of the moment.

This ethos is particularly strong in the Justice Department and federal criminal justice investigative agencies.  Anyone who has served in these bodies through several changes of administration recognizes that new presidents bring policy changes at the margins, but the focus of the career people remains on finding facts and enforcing the law. The internal norm is that personal political affiliations don’t matter and are usually unknown to one’s co-workers. No one worries that career prosecutors or agents will go harder on targets who are of the opposite party or easier on targets who share their political affiliation.

To be fair, these norms of professional even-handedness are sometimes strained in the highest profile cases. But to an impressive degree federal law enforcement agencies have lived up to the expectation of neutral professionalism.  Which is why both congress and the public have traditionally accorded the results of DOJ investigations a degree of respect they would never offer to the work of state or local governments.

It is precisely in order to protect the tradition of independent judgment so essential to its institutional mission that the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a component) has long jealously resisted White House efforts to meddle in investigations or prosecutions.

Trump’s now-successful attack on McCabe is an assault on the federal civil service in general, and the independence of the Justice Department more particularly.  In effect, Mr. Trump’s argument against McCabe is that a career FBI agent cannot be trusted if his wife ran for state elective office on the ticket of the party opposing the president. And that, in turn, is fast translating into the demand from Trump adherents and their media cheerleaders that no Democrat, or indeed any Republican not slavishly attached to Mr. Trump, can participate in investigations that might reflect adversely on the present administration.  And, of course, Mr. Trump has already embraced the view that he is entitled to “loyalty” — and protection — from “his” Attorney General and “his” FBI Director.

I have written before about the continuing Trumpist subversion of the Justice Department and the grave consequences that will flow if it succeeds.  McCabe’s resignation takes us a tiny step closer to the point of no return.