The Federalist: For those of us who have yet to be convinced that our president is a compromised traitor operating as an agent of the Russian Federation, the occasional appearance of someone actually familiar with the investigation is a welcome respite from the incessant bombardment of “How guilty is he?” segments brought to us by our friends in the cable news industry every day for the last two years.
Every report of another campaign or administration official called to a special counsel interview instantly generates the production of completely unbiased, objective analysis from the CNN and MSNBC crowd: “Donald Trump cannot be happy with this one—he knows where all the bodies are buried”; “She knows everything that went on with the campaign—Trump’s got to be seething about this”; “If you’re Donald Trump, the last guy you want to see walking into that interview is this guy—he’s got nothing to lose and everything to gain by telling the truth.”
It’s all inevitably topped off with a crowd favorite: “The walls are really starting to close in now.” While I suppose these hyperbolic assertions are catnip to their respective demographic bases, they’re not particularly helpful to anyone interested in a fact-based assessment of what to expect from the hopefully imminent Mueller report.
So when we’re given an opportunity to hear from someone new—someone with unique insight into the origins of the investigation and the evidence that drove the decision-making in those early days—we pay attention. Such was the case when former acting and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe took the stage last week, making the rounds of cable and network television shows to promote his new book, “Establishing the Narrative: Getting Ahead of the Investigation Into My ‘Lack of Candor’ and Making Some Money While I’m At It.”
McCabe’s tour was preceded by that of his former boss, James Comey, whose similarly titled book and powder-puffery performances on cable news sets in New York and Washington set the tone for all aspiring CNN national security analysts, who obviously took notes (as they do).
Andrew McCabe’s Big Media CYA Tour
McCabe touched all the bases, starting with the Big Reveal on “60 Minutes,” where he accidentally on purpose broke news with his totally unintentional revelation of alarming and unbalanced behavior by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who happened to play a principal role in the firing of both McCabe and his mentor.
McCabe fell victim to unrelenting pressure from “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, whose concise questioning and follow-up left McCabe no choice but to give up the goods on Rosenstein’s talk of wearing wires and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president. While I don’t have the transcript in front of me, I believe Pelley’s question was, “This would be a good time to tell me the stuff about Rosenstein you said you wanted me to ask you about.” I could be wrong. It could have been, “Would you like another glass of water?”
In any event, McCabe’s studio tour included all of the usual suspects—“Anderson Cooper 360,” “The View,” “Good Morning American,” Andrea Mitchell, Stephen Colbert, et al.—all of whom watched the interviews preceding theirs, took notes, consulted with their staffs, reviewed transcripts of McCabe’s congressional testimony, identified areas of interest or conflict with facts known to them, and conducted probing, challenging interviews of the man who opened counterintelligence and obstruction of justice investigations on the president of the United States.
I’m kidding, of course. They didn’t do any of that. They all asked him the same questions, and he repeated the same answers he gave Pelley in his first interview.
Despite this collective display of dereliction, there were a number of items of interest to be gleaned from the McCabe tour, not least of which was his confirmation, albeit unintentional, that the FBI had no articulable, factual basis—including classified, non-public reporting—to open a counterintelligence or obstruction of justice investigation into Donald Trump.
Take It From McCabe’s Own Mouth
Asked in each interview to describe the factual basis that informed his decision to open the investigations, McCabe repeatedly listed the following: Trump was obviously unhappy with the ongoing investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia, and had tweeted his opinion that it was a “witch hunt”; Trump asked Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn, then fired Comey when he didn’t go easy on Flynn; and Trump told Lester Holt he had fired Comey because of the Russia investigation.
According to McCabe, after considering these factors, “We were in a position to say this is so clearly an articulable factual basis upon which to believe that a federal crime may have been committed and that a threat to national security exists, we are obligated to open up a case under these circumstances.”
Consider this exchange with Anderson Cooper, which is representative of what he repeated in all of his interviews when asked to describe his reasoning for opening the investigations on the president:
COOPER: The — you’ve said it wasn’t simply the Comey firing that led the FBI to open an investigation of the president. There were concerns whether or not he posed a national security threat, had it in your words been building for some time.
Are there other things that haven’t been made public at this point that contributed to the opening of the investigation of the president?
MCCABE: I’m not so sure that there are things that haven’t been made public, but I think the important thing is to think about — put yourself back in May of 2017 and the position of the investigators, right? The investigative team. And the things that are really standing out for them go back as far as the early fall, where we’re conducting the investigation.
From the very beginning, the president is referring to the investigation and our efforts, at least from the beginning of 2017, as a witch hunt, as a hoax. He’s continuously publicly undermining the effort that we’re undertaking. So, that causes you as an investigator to think, why is the president doing this? Clearly, he doesn’t like what we’re doing.
In addition to that, he approaches Director Comey and asks him to drop the case against Mike Flynn, which of course, we don’t do. And after Director Comey fails to drop that case, he is in fact fired. So, it’s like a series of building events and facts that ultimately when the director is fired, the president makes the comment about thinking about Russia when he fired the director, we were in a position to say this is so clearly an articulable factual basis upon which to believe that a federal crime may have been committed and that a threat to national security exists, we are obligated to open up a case under these circumstances.
Objectively speaking, for those of us wondering if there could be a chance that the FBI had some secret information that would lead them to believe that Trump was compromised and worthy of investigation, this one-minute exchange ended two years of speculation and convinced us that McCabe and the FBI had no more information available to them than we had available to us before they decided to move on the president. And the information McCabe calls an “articulable factual basis” to conclude that an investigation was necessary is not only insufficient on its face, but is also demonstrably not factual.
It Was All a Lie from the Very Beginning
Looks like the rat-bastard Cohen refuted the rat-bastard McCabe this afternoon.