“A Great Day for Democracy,” Trump Tweets After Andrew McCabe’s Firing

Late Friday evening, ex-Deputy F.B.I. Director Andrew McCabe was fired by the Justice Department—just two days shy of his 50th birthday, and what would have been the first day of his retirement. The firing came after accusations that McCabe had misled members of the Justice Department during a corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and that he had “lacked candor,” a fireable offense in the F.B.I. It puts McCabe’s retirement pension, which he would have been eligible for starting Sunday, in jeopardy.

“A great day for Democracy,” the president tweeted on Friday night in response to McCabe’s ousting. “Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy.”

McCabe, naturally, sees things differently. “This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the F.B.I., law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally,” McCabe said in a statement as the news broke, per CNN. “It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the F.B.I. and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.

“Here is the reality: I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. The O.I.G.’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.”

McCabe had long been a target of Republicans, especially after his wife, Jill McCabe, took money during her Senate campaign in Virginia from a close ally of Hillary Clinton in 2015. The details of the report against McCabe, conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, have not been released, but a source tells CNN that the report claims McCabe misled members of the Justice Department about directing officials to speak to The Wall Street Journal about his involvement in a corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

“After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of Justice procedure, the Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)," Jeff Sessions said in a statement late Friday. "The FBI's OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe. Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor—including under oath—on multiple occasions.”

With McCabe’s firing, the Justice Department inches closer to zeroing in on Robert Mueller—and perhaps ending the growing threat of the Russian collusion investigation. In an e-mail to The Daily Beast on Saturday morning, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd wrote that he hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will follow Sessions’ lead by officially shutting down the investigation.

“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd wrote. He then pasted a passage from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that includes the line, “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity [corruption]... You can smell it. It smells like death.”