Day 422: Trump Takes Next Step to Discrediting — or Ending — Mueller Probe
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe late Friday, the surest sign yet that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is under a partisan attack.
McCabe, the former deputy director for the FBI, was fired just hours before he was set to retire after 21 years of service and receive his full pension.
The reasons for his firing remain unclear, but Donald Trump has pushed for it for months…
…and publicly celebrated the firing when it was done.
It seems that political pressure led Sessions to fire McCabe, despite how rare such firings of high-ranking person are.
The decision put the embattled attorney general in an exceedingly awkward spot. Dismissing McCabe surely pleased President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly slammed McCabe on Twitter and in person. But the federal government does not normally fire high-ranking career officials with 22 years of service except in the face of extraordinary evidence of serious wrongdoing.
“To look at removing a person, potentially, two days before they retire, the factual basis of this has got to be really, really strong for them to do that,” said Michael Rochford, a former head of the FBI’s counterintelligence section
McCabe, unsurprisingly, blamed one thing for the firing: the Russia probe.
Last month, the lifelong Republican, said the same.
“But at some point, this has to be seen in the larger context,” said McCabe, 49, who says he has voted for every Republican presidential nominee until he sat out the 2016 contest entirely. “And I firmly believe that this is an ongoing effort to undermine my credibility because of the work that I did on the Russia case, because of the investigations that I oversaw and impacted that target this administration.”
Ironically, the man who fired McCabe is the reason the special counsel exists in the first place. It was only after Sessions lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings that he was forced to recuse himself from any Russia investigations, triggering the appointment of Mueller.
In perhaps the biggest news, Trump’s personal lawyer — who later confirmed he was speaking for Trump — called for Mueller to be fired too.
Republicans have stayed largely mum on this issue and attempts to put a bill protecting Mueller’s investigation have gone nowhere in either chamber of the GOP-controlled Congress.
Political firings, Trump using his lawyer to call for the probe to end, silent politicians, bills going nowhere: the writing is on the wall. Mueller, if he has any hope of finishing his investigation, needs to pick up the pace.
422 days in, 1040 to go
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