In an interview with CBS News, Barr made it clear that he was concerned about all of the lying and spying that had occurred before he took the helm at the Department of Justice:
These counterintelligence activities that were directed at the Trump Campaign, were not done in the normal course and not through the normal procedures as far as I can tell.
. . . It has to be carefully looked at because the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it’s a serious red line that’s been crossed.153
On May 13, 2019, Barr appointed US attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham to get to the bottom of it all.154 Mueller’s report had determined that there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. In so doing, the special counsel has exposed the “dossier” as fictive and the “collusion” narrative as a hoax. How in the world did the “witch hunt” ever take flight?
The attorney general described the Durham investigation as focused on “a small group at the top,” not the FBI or the DOJ as a whole. The actions of people such as Comey, McCabe, and Strzok would surely come under the microscope. In a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the DOJ outlined the parameters of Durham’s probe, noting that it would include the “U.S. and foreign intelligence services as well as non-governmental organizations and individuals.”155 That meant Clapper and Brennan would be scrutinized and British and Australian intelligence would be examined. The actions of Simpson, Steele, the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Fusion GPS, and many others would almost certainly be looked at closely and carefully.
Barr fully realized that the media, which in their reporting are supposed to hold government accountable, would never do their job faithfully. “The fact that today people just seem to brush aside the idea that it is okay to, you know, to engage in these activities against a political campaign is stunning to me especially when the media doesn’t seem to think that it’s worth looking into,” he said. “They’re supposed to be the watchdogs of, you know, our civil liberties.”156 Sadly, they are not.
In their arrogance and ambition, the indomitable media seem more determined than ever to obscure facts and shade the truth in their dogged desire to pick winners and losers. Such matters, they reason, should never be left to mere mortal Americans.
Chapter 4
The Attempted Coup
QUESTION: Do you still believe the president could be a Russian asset?
MCCABE: I think it’s possible.
—FORMER ACTING FBI DIRECTOR ANDREW MCCABE, CNN, FEBRUARY 19, 2019
So many lies by now disgraced Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein . . . look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught.
—PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, TWEET, FEBRUARY 18, 2019
Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein are living proof of the “Peter Principle.” It is a concept that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence.1 Both men well exceeded their respective levels. Even worse, their ineptitude was surpassed only by their malice. That was a dangerous combination for the nation.
McCabe rose to become second in command at the FBI. When his patron saint, James Comey, was fired by President Trump in May 2017, McCabe briefly became acting director of the Bureau. But he was in command long enough to further encumber a presidency and cause lasting damage to the FBI. Rosenstein was deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrongfully recused himself from any matters involving Russia, Rosenstein was elevated to acting AG, presiding over the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 presidential election.
McCabe and Rosenstein, acting independently and at times in concert, abused their positions of power. Meeting privately in the aftermath of Comey’s termination, they plotted a course of action to destroy the new president. They behaved rashly and out of vengeance. McCabe, furious that his boss had been fired, launched a new investigation of Trump without merit or cause. Rosenstein, in a fit of anger and wishing to deflect blame, appointed a special counsel to pursue Trump without justification. The two men secretly discussed deposing the president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment and recording him without his knowledge. It is of little consequence that they eventually abandoned their scheme as unworkable. Their willingness to embrace ethically reprehensible, if not lawless, conduct underscores how their stewardship was poisoned by enmity and arrogance.
The Malevolent McCabe
It should be deeply troubling to all Americans that someone like Andrew McCabe rose to the top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He was eventually fired from the FBI for dishonesty. But that is only a fraction of the sordid story. Before he was sacked, McCabe sought to punish the president of the United States because he disliked Trump’s foreign policy statements and objected when the president dared to declare publicly that he had done nothing wrong. In addition, the president had the audacity to exercise his constitutional power to terminate McCabe’s mentor Comey. To McCabe, these were unforgivable sins. In totality, they made Trump a traitor and only confirmed the acting director’s belief that the president was in league with the Russians and trying to cover it up by obstructing justice. McCabe, a person possessed of chronic misjudgment, an inflated sense of self-importance, and utter disregard for both the law and executive authority, should never have been employed at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Unfortunately, he is an all-too-typical example of the sort of elitist bureaucrat who rules our federal institutions and controls the narrative.
When McCabe voiced his opinion in February 2019 that the president might still be “a Russian asset,” he was promoting his book The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, a title aimed not so subtly at Trump. The implication was that the constitutionally elected president was a threat to democracy because McCabe, an unelected and inferior government officer, thought he was. When asked why he believed Trump had been collaborating with Russia, he offered this explanation:
From the very beginning, the president is referring to the investigation and our efforts as a witch hunt, as a hoax.
In addition to that, he approaches Director Comey and asks him to drop the case against Mike Flynn. And after Director Comey fails to drop that case, he is in fact fired.2
From that statement, we gain three valuable insights into McCabe. First, he deemed the president’s protestation of innocence and attack on the FBI’s unjustified investigation to be an admission of guilt and, hence, evidence of treason.
Second, he had no qualms about misrepresenting the known facts about the president’s conversation with Comey about Flynn. Nowhere in the memo that memorialized the president’s alleged remark did Comey claim that it was a demand to drop the Bureau’s investigation. But even if “hoping” that the fired national security advisor would be cleared is construed as a request to drop an FBI investigation, the president would have been authorized to do so.
Third, he linked Comey’s firing to his unwillingness to drop the Flynn case, even though there was no evidence that the FBI director was dismissed because of Flynn. Not even Comey has made that assertion. He was fired for insubordination in the Clinton email case and his refusal to repeat publicly what he was telling the president privately—that Trump was not under investigation in the Russia “collusion” case.
It’s clear that McCabe’s actions were driven by the liberal narrative, not the available facts. If the facts were not what he wanted, he twisted them to fit or manufactured outright lies to make his case.
In his book and during television interviews, McCabe offered another reason why Trump must be a Russian “asset”: the president had been skeptical of a US intelligence briefing he had received on North Korea’s ballistic missile capability, allegedly stating that President Putin had provided contrary information.3 McCabe
viewed that as a red flag of treason.
McCabe’s presumptuousness was remarkable and disconcerting. Since when is the FBI entitled to substitute its judgment for that of the president in foreign policy? The Constitution grants the president the primary power—both expressed and implied—over foreign affairs. Other powers over foreign affairs were delegated to Congress. Americans and their political parties are free to disagree with decisions made or opinions expressed by a president, but they are not permitted to wrest control away from him or her through a bureaucratic agency. Change can always be effectuated every four years at the ballot box. Yet McCabe thought he knew better than Trump and sought to undermine the president by abusing his position of power at the FBI by targeting Trump. Whether the president was right or wrong in his rejection of intelligence information is immaterial and irrelevant. To put it bluntly, it was none of the FBI’s business. Some presidents, such as George W. Bush, have relied, to the nation’s detriment, on faulty intelligence and wished, in retrospect, that they had been less trusting.4 Others, such as Barack Obama, have chosen to overlook negative intelligence in order to achieve a foreign policy objective such as the Iran nuclear accord.5
McCabe harbored a fundamental misunderstanding of the law and the Constitution. This is a peculiar characteristic in a trained lawyer serving as the deputy director of the FBI—until you consider all of the other misjudgments he has made. A pattern emerges. Like so many senior officials at the Bureau under Comey’s misbegotten reign, McCabe considered his investigative operations to be autonomous and sacrosanct, as if he were answerable to no one but himself. That kind of pretension in law enforcement is exceedingly dangerous because it inevitably leads to abuses of power. And so it did.
In his book, McCabe laid bare his ignorance of constitutional law when he asserted, without evidence, that “Presidents don’t weigh in” on federal investigations and prosecutions because “it is inappropriate.”6 He called it “a breach of propriety and of historical norms.”7 In truth, it is neither. Presidents do weigh in, and they have done so for more than two centuries. McCabe was stunningly wrong. Past presidents have involved themselves—sometimes quite directly—in federal cases because they have a duty under the “take care” clause of the Constitution to see that “the laws be faithfully executed.”8 We will examine this in more detail in chapter 5.
The important point is this: McCabe’s misguided interpretation of presidential authority was what animated several of his own mistaken decisions at the FBI involving Trump and the Russia investigation. For example, McCabe decided that the president had, without doubt, committed obstruction of justice when he had removed FBI director James Comey.9 Of course, neither the law nor the facts supported this. A president is empowered to fire an executive department head for any reason or no reason at all, as Comey admitted in a letter to his staff.10 Moreover, when the director was fired, the FBI’s investigation was, according to Comey, a counterintelligence matter, not a criminal case. It was impossible for Trump to have obstructed a counterintelligence probe since the information collected was for his own benefit. A person cannot, by definition, obstruct himself.
McCabe also alleged in his book that “on at least two occasions, the president asked the director to drop the inquiry regarding Mike Flynn,” which was more evidence of obstruction.11 Yet that was not what actually occurred, as confirmed by McCabe himself. Two days after Comey was fired, McCabe appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and conceded, “There has been no effort to impede our investigations to date.”12 His testimony clearly contradicted the revisionist story he was marketing to unknowing readers. Which was true? Comey unwittingly provided the answer. Six days before he was fired, he informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that no one had told him to stop anything for a political reason. “It’s not happened in my experience,” he said.13 Days after Comey’s termination, Rosenstein also told Congress, “There never has been, and never will be, any political interference in any matter under my supervision in the United States Department of Justice.”14
Not only did those key people involved in the Russia case affirm that the president had never interfered or obstructed their investigations, but there was no other evidence that Trump was working for the Russians that would have justified the FBI’s decision to launch its new investigation. Both Comey and FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified before House investigators that by the time the director was fired and Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, there was no hard evidence of “collusion.” The investigation had been running for ten months. Comey admitted, “In fact, when I was fired as director, I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”15 FBI agent Peter Strzok, who had led the Bureau’s investigation for all those months, texted Page about his reluctance to pursue the case under the new special counsel because there was no evidence of “collusion.” On May 18, 2017, he wrote, “You and I both know the odds are nothing.” He then added, “I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”16 Nevertheless, Strzok joined Mueller’s team as a lead investigator.
Strzok, Page, McCabe, and Comey all knew the allegations against Trump were bereft of any proof and without merit. Nevertheless, McCabe opened a new or renewed investigation of Trump in May 2017 without sufficient evidence and in direct violation of FBI and DOJ regulations. Plainly, that decision was motivated by political bias and personal animus, not sustainable facts or credible evidence.
McCabe’s anamorphic view of the law was so myopic that he actually believed that “there should be no direct contact between the president and the FBI director,” except on matters of national security.17 This is patently absurd, but it underscores how McCabe regarded many of Trump’s actions through a distorted lens of presidential power.
It wasn’t just constitutional ignorance that motivated McCabe, however, but a personal hatred for the president that is immediately evident in his book. McCabe’s disregard for Trump’s authority was compounded by his personal disdain for the man. Throughout his book, he revisited his real-time feelings whenever the president took some action that impacted the FBI. He blamed Trump for a “dank, gray shadow of uncertainty and bleak anxiety” in Washington.18 Worse, he accused the president of “trying to destroy” justice in America.19 Hyperbole aside, it is impossible to read McCabe’s denunciations without recognizing that they must have dramatically influenced his decisions to target Trump. Passages in his book drip with contempt for the president. He seethed when Trump dared to exercise his right to free speech by “calling the Russia investigation a witch hunt.”20 In McCabe’s cloistered world of law enforcement supremacy, falsely accused people are never entitled to proclaim their innocence. Such public expressions, according to McCabe, are witness tampering and obstruction of justice.21 They are not, of course. Even a president has First Amendment rights.
McCabe also nursed deep resentment toward the president over the public comments that Trump had made while campaigning in 2016. They came about when the Wall Street Journal broke the story of how a close ally of Hillary Clinton had arranged exorbitant financial contributions to McCabe’s wife when she had run for a state senate seat in Virginia.22 McCabe had supervised the primary Clinton email investigation and been intimately involved in clearing her of criminal charges. The story immediately raised legitimate suspicions that the $675,000 in donations—which was an astronomical amount for a local race—might have had something to do with the favorable treatment Clinton had received, especially since Comey’s explanation for declining to press criminal charges had made little sense. In his book, McCabe raged against Trump for raising that subject at a campaign rally, stating “His hatred was palpable. The crowd’s angry response was chilling.”23 Only after the story was published did McCabe recuse himself from the Clinton probe when it was briefly reopened and closed. By that time, it was too late. Clinton had been cleared months earlier by Comey, on July 5, 2016. McCabe had endorsed that decision and taken an active role in absolving her.
Infuriated, McCabe went after Trump the moment he took the helm of the FBI from Comey. Unlike the previous counterintelligence probe of Russian interference and potential involvement with the Trump campaign, McCabe’s new two-part investigation focused squarely on Trump himself.
Witch Hunt Page 16