I’m not sure how this is really a major story. McCabe’s wife has public campaign finance reporting requirements, so there’s nothing particularly hushed about that. I’m sure it wasn’t that much of a secret that McCabe worked at the Bureau. I just don’t see this being a story, except for Republicans who deliberately want to rewrite history.
The real story here (that the media isn’t reporting) is how the Republican party has managed to politicize the criminal investigations and the criminal justice system at the federal level in this country, to the point where ordinary people now have doubts about the objectivity of the Justice Department, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. Yet there never should have been these doubts at all. People are now at a point where they’re not sure of what the truth really is, and that is a grave danger to a democracy.
This is not to say that agencies aren’t influenced by politics - they always are. A Republican DoJ is going to operate differently and have different priorities than a Democratic-led DoJ - that’s always been the case. But what’s remarkably different now is how the priorities have shifted from relatively ordinary differences in law enforcement policy (i.e. incarcerating more drug dealers vs. giving them more supervised probation and job training) to basically using the criminal investigations against political opponents, starting with Hillary Clinton. That’s the story.
Regarding the OP, my guess is that Wray is ready to move on with putting his own personal stamp on the FBI. McCabe was already on his way out and at this point, he was just serving as a distraction to Wray. Put yourself in Wray’s shoes: you’ve inherited a Bureau that is now facing stinging criticism and rebuke from a major political party. You want to find a way to somehow allow the organization to function. One of the major lightning rods for that criticism is there but doing nothing. Why not just get him out of the way? McCabe was serving no good purpose at that point, and only bringing in negative attention. Beyond that, yes, it’s possible that McCabe may have done something that caught the attention of the IG.
I’d add that again, the real issue isn’t McCabe or Comey – they were placed by congressional Republicans in the impossible decision of responding to a potential criminal complaint over a relatively minor set of infractions involving the use of private emails and serves that have been committed by every single administration going back to George W Bush at least. They were placed in the impossible position of trying to decide how to conduct an investigation that might have merit while knowing it probably didn’t, and they were faced with the wrath of a political party that used their law enforcement agency to prosecute a political opponent, and was enraged when Comey and McCabe (and presumably many others) didn’t agree to frame the outcome the way that they wanted. That’s the real story here, not McCabe, not the IG.
The significance of all this is that, we’re in deep shit as a country right now.
The part of that article which interested me more was something else:
The thing about the email probe is that the bottom line about the underlying facts is not going to change. Which means it will be very difficult for the details of that investigation to ever become a big deal unless there’s particularly egregious wrongdoing, which is unlikely. By contrast, the CF itself is potentially a much bigger deal, so there’s a possibility that there was more serious political favoritism at work.
Again, that’s not to say anything nefarious was actually happening WRT either. But if we’re keeping an eye on potential developments, ISTM that the CF investigation might offer more potential.
Apparently, Strzok was the one to write the initial draft of the letter giving the expected result of the Clinton case, which charged her with gross negligence (or whatever the term was):
And he’s the one to trigger reopening the case against Clinton.
It’s also useful to keep in mind that Clinton has a history of covering things up needlessly - IMO the email probe wouldn’t have gained so much traction if she had just treated it as a minor thing instead of initially denying everything and only later admitting to it. I think there’s a reasonable chance that she (or someone on her behalf) pushed the FBI to ditch the CF investigation even if there’s actually no problem with the CF in the first place. If there was pressure to close the investigation early, it’s going to look bad (and be repeated by Trump), even if there’s absolutely nothing (or something incredibly minor) to the CF allegations.
There probably never should have been an investigation in the first place. Almost any elected official could be investigated for something and the congressional special investigators and/or the DoJ could probably find something in the criminal code to justify their investigation. Investigating someone because they can be investigated and investigating someone because they should are two different things. The Republicans have over the past 3 decades been increasingly investigating political opponents because they’ve had the power to do it. They intentionally put federal investigators in a situation where they’re required to make a call, and now they’re getting the Monday morning QB treatment because of being placed in an impossible situation, which is trying to conduct a criminal investigation of a major political candidate during a presidential campaign. This never should have happened.
The previous administration had exactly zero charges against anyone, despite constant attempts to create scandal and find something to investigate. The only one in my lifetime. Surely you can’t be suggesting that the previous, crime free administration led to this festering corruption of an administration, can you? :dubious:
Yes, we just have to forget that her files from the Rose Law firm disappeared during the investigation that convicted 15 people in the Whitewater investigation. 4 of whom were pardoned by Bill Clinton.
And we need to forget she attacked the women who accused her husband of assault. She was too busy cashing in Weinstien’s checks.
We need to forget she lied about Beghazi. Or that her department was in charge of security and ignored requests to increase it.
We need to forget she hired someone to build a server in her private residence to circumvent government communications and then permanently erased 30,000 files.
We need to forget she paid for a phony document and use it to spy on her political opponent.
She’s not the most persecuted politician, she’s the least prosecuted.
Uh huh. 1, 3, and 5 require cites. 2 is undesirably common behavior from women who feel their SO is unjustly attacked. 4 is false, at least about in motivation.
I take that back. 5 is such a ridiculously mangled falsehood that the only thing that makes it look remotely plausible is the ridiculously mangled falsehoods in the Nunes memo.
One note about that. There’s no hint in that article to support your claim that the Horowitz investigation has been expanded to include the Trump-Russia probe, and indeed the article suggests that Horowitz has been reluctant to get involved in matters which might conflict with the Mueller investigation.
I know this is like a week old at this point, but to clear up some confusion here, gov’t employees can deal with accrued leave one of two ways – terminal leave or a cash equivalent. That is to say, if I say I’m going to retire on 30 March of this year, and I have 30 days of accrued leave, I can choose to stop working on the last day of February and still collect a paycheck until my actual retirement on the 30th. Or I can keep working right up to the 30th and get a check for a month’s salary.
Most people choose to use terminal leave, because they collect benefits while not working which makes it more lucrative than getting a cash equivalent, but it’s very possible that McCabe had a sense of duty or simply a desire to see out certain projects. Therefore, it’s possible that he was “fired” in the sense that he was strong-armed into using his accrued leave as terminal leave instead of accepting a cash equivalent like he had planned, just to get him out of the building. That wouldn’t have affected his retirement date or his pension.
I assume that you’re talking about the part where the article comments on Trump’s Obstruction of Justice interactions with the FBI.
I don’t recall saying that Horowitz would look into Trumpian obstruction of justice at any point before? That’s all post-election.
Horowitz is looking at 2016, to check whether the FBI was partisan in its handling of the Clinton investigation. That investigation has been extended into questions of whether there was a partisan, “deep state” effort to manufacture a conspiracy theory around Trump (e.g., at the behest of Democratic interests).
It’s possible that you or I misunderstood each other. Though that said, I think I did specify that I was relaying my takeaway from Christopher Wray’s first public hearing with the House Judiciary Committee and his regular deflection, to refer them to Horowitz’s investigation, on pretty much every single politically sensitive question in that meeting. If you care about the subject, you would do better to watch that and see if your takeaway is the same.