McCabe-Rosenstein feud

Shortly after Robert S. Mueller III was appointed to investigate possible coordination between President Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin, he was drawn into a tense standoff in which Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe each urged the other to step aside from the case, according to people familiar with the matter.

[...]

Trump had just fired James B. Comey as the bureau’s director, and almost immediately afterward, FBI officials had opened a case into whether the president had obstructed justice.

Some in the bureau eyed Rosenstein warily, because he had authored a memo that was used by the administration to justify Comey’s termination. If the president had obstructed justice, they reasoned, Rosenstein may have played a role in that. Justice Department officials, meanwhile, were concerned that the FBI — and McCabe in particular — may have acted too hastily to open an investigative file on the president after Comey was fired and that the move could be painted as an act of anger or revenge.

[...]

Rosenstein, according to McCabe, suggested secretly recording the president’s conversations to gather evidence against him.

According to a memo McCabe wrote [...] Rosenstein had also suggested trying to muster support among Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.

[...]

McCabe was summoned to meet with Rosenstein and Mueller to talk about his possible recusal. [...] While the accounts of current and former officials familiar with the confrontation differ in some key respects, they agree on the basic terms of the discussion — Rosenstein wanted McCabe out of the Russia probe, and McCabe felt differently, arguing that it was the deputy attorney general, not the head of the FBI, who should step away from the case.

[...]

A photo of McCabe wearing [a T-shirt supporting his wife’s campaign for a state Senate seat in Virginia] had been posted on social media during the campaign, leading some to later question whether he had violated rules that limit government employees’ advocacy for political candidates.

[...]

Two people familiar with the meeting said McCabe brought with him to the meeting a document from FBI ethics officials that said McCabe had abided by ethics rules.

One person familiar with the confrontation denied that the T-shirt or his wife’s campaign was part of Rosenstein’s rationale, saying the proposed recusal had to do with McCabe’s recent public and private statements expressing deep loyalty to Comey and unhappiness over his firing.

[...]

In the end, neither Rosenstein nor McCabe recused from the Russia investigation.

  WaPo

And, apparently, neither got over their animosity toward the other.

McCabe was fired earlier this year over what the Justice Department’s inspector general said were falsehoods he told to internal FBI investigators. That matter is now the subject of a grand jury investigation.

[...]

Some lawyers have argued that Rosenstein should have recused, given his central role in the Comey firing and conversations with White House officials leading up to that moment.

I can certainly see the point of that argument.

Lawmakers had sought a private question-and-answer session with Rosenstein on the issue to be held Thursday, but on Wednesday officials announced that the meeting had been postponed indefinitely.

Last year, one of the most explosive reports that emerged about President Donald Trump’s early efforts to take the reins of the Justice Department was an allegation, first uncovered by The New York Times, that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested that he and his colleagues “wear a wire” while talking with the president — something that members of the Trump administration have tried to claim he only said sarcastically.

But CBS anchor Scott Pelley confirmed that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told him, in a 60 Minutes interview, that Rosenstein was not only serious, he went out of his way to discuss his concerns with FBI lawyers.

[...]

Pelley also confirmed that McCabe detailed how the Justice Department considered removing Trump under the 25th Amendment.

McCabe, who served as acting FBI director after Trump fired James Comey, is out with a new book detailing what was going on at the FBI during the 2016 presidential election, and the aftermath of Trump’s decision to fire Comey leading up to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

[...]

McCabe says he was the one who initially made that decision [to investigate whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice]. Possibly for this reason, McCabe was a frequent target of ire by Trump, and was fired by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions last March, just days before his scheduled retirement.

  Alternet

A spokesperson for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein pushed back against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s statements Thursday, labeling McCabe’s “recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect."

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“The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references,” the statement claims—although, notably, it doesn’t address McCabe’s claim that Rosenstein considered wearing a wire.

  Daily Beast

As far as I know, we don't yet have laws against considering something. Thought police may not be far in our future, however.

The statement also took shots at McCabe, noting that he was removed from the special counsel’s investigation and subsequently fired from the FBI after an inspector general report determined that he lied on multiple occasions.

Rosenstein, who has overseen Mueller’s continuation of the Russia investigation due to Sessions’ recusal, has pledged to step down after the confirmation of Sessions’ planned replacement, William Barr, whose nomination is currently being debated by the Senate.

  Alternet

In "The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump," McCabe reportedly writes that Rosenstein was deeply uncomfortable with Comey's firing, telling him at the time that writing the memo "wasn't his idea," according to excerpts obtained by The Guardian.

“He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe writes.

[...]

Excerpts from the book follow reports from The New York Times last year that Rosenstein's colleagues said he looked “shaken,” “unsteady” and “overwhelmed,” following Comey's ouster and expressed concerns that writing the memo had damaged his reputation.

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“To be clear, he was upset not because knowledge of the existence of the memos would have changed the [deputy attorney general's] decision regarding Mr. Comey, but that Mr. McCabe chose not to tell him about their existence until only hours before someone shared them with The New York Times,” ][Justice Department spokeswoman] Sarah Isgur Flores said.

  The Hill

[In his book, McCabe] writes, “The FBI has always been the nemesis of criminals. Today the FBI is under attack by the president of the United States.”

[...]

A career FBI agent, a lifelong Republican married to a Democrat, he oversaw the FBI inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russian election interference. Frequently targeted by Trump for his wife’s failed bid for a seat in the Virginia legislature, in March 2018 McCabe was fired, less than two days before he was slated to retire, by Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, on a recommendation from the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

  Guardian

They didn't want to pay him his retirement?

According to Sessions, McCabe “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor” during an OPR review of the FBI and justice department’s handling of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, a charge repeatedly denied by McCabe. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, stated that the firing was not political but was done “by the book”. Suffice to say, many remain unconvinced.

[...]

The Threat is not just another exercise in score-settling, although there is plenty of that.

McCabe paints a portrait of Trump as a mob boss, an observation in sync with Bloomberg’s Josh Green in The Devil’s Bargain and James Comey, the fired FBI director, in A Higher Loyalty. McCabe, however, goes further.

[...]

The Threat contrasts the independence of the FBI and justice department under Trump and Barack Obama, with McCabe saying “Obama probably came closest to [the] ideal. The current administration is … like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

Pulling no punches, he takes to task Loretta Lynch, Obama’s second attorney general, for her refusal to recuse from the Clinton email investigation while attempting to maintain a show of being above it all. As McCabe sees it, Lynch and Sally Yates, then deputy attorney general, wrongly viewed “the investigation of Hillary Clinton … likely nominee of the Democratic party, who was being supported by the president of the United States, to whom they owed their jobs … as a case they could handle without prejudice”.

[...]

There is Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport and again McCabe does not mince words: “The tarmac meeting was a horrible lapse in judgment by Loretta Lynch. She should have recused herself … she did not – she made things worse.”

[...]

McCabe takes a shot at Rosenstein for his wish for advice on the appointment of a special counsel. In McCabe’s telling, Rosenstein said: “The one person I would like to talk about this situation is Jim Comey.” McCabe returned to his office, he writes, in a state approximating “shock”.

I don't doubt he was shocked, and I bet McCabe was, too.

We are never going to have a clear understanding of the disaster Trump has visited upon the world, but we WILL have lots of tell-all books to read about it.

We're never going to dig our way out of this mess, are we?