Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA
I’ve got something to say.
Late on Friday night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. The official reason is that he “lacked candor” during an investigation about contacts with the media during the 2016 campaign. The IG report making this charge was not released, which means that no one can say for sure what evidence it contains.
This is not an accident. It was deliberate, and it was designed to obscure the fact that the charges against McCabe are completely unfounded and the investigation of McCabe has been bogus from the start. The whole thing was the result of Donald Trump’s search for someone to attack during the campaign. This eventually morphed into President Trump’s search for a scapegoat to explain his loss of the popular vote, which in turn morphed into an insane jihad against the entire leadership of the FBI.
Can I prove this? Of course not. That’s the whole point of withholding the IG report. But everyone in Washington is well aware of how this has unfolded. Everyone is well aware of Trump’s insane obsession with getting revenge on his enemies, both real and perceived. Everyone knows what the McCabe vendetta is about.
At this point, to pretend that we don’t know this—maybe McCabe really did seriously breach the rules, we’ll have to wait and see—is little more than a knee-jerk veneration of faux evenhandedness. It is an attempt to remain willfully ignorant when everyone knows what’s happening.
As with the Nunes memo, here’s what I have to say: We’ve seen this movie before. This entire investigation was bogus. The charges against McCabe are bogus. He did nothing wrong. The whole affair is part of a pathological vendetta begun by the president of the United States. Eventually all the evidence will become public and this is how it will turn out. We should all stop pretending otherwise.
