Former President Donald Trump has blasted the DoJ over its decision to restore Andrew McCabe’s pension and retirement benefits.
“Isn’t it terrible that all of Andrew McCabe’s benefits, pensions, salary, etc., were just fully reinstated by the Justice Department? This is yet another mockery to our Country. Among other things, McCabe’s wife received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats while Crooked Hillary was under investigation, which was quickly dropped, of course,” Trump said in a statement on Friday.
“What a bad chapter this has been for the once storied FBI – I hate to see it happening, so many GREAT people work there,” Trump added.
Major Russiagater
Trump-era Attorney General Jeff Sessions sacked McCabe with no notice in March 2018, hours before his 50th birthday when he planned to retire, over his authorisation of the leak of information to a news reporter in 2018, and for lying about it under oath. The DoJ decided not to pursue criminal charges in early 2020.
McCabe played a key role in getting the ball rolling on Russiagate – the Democratic Party-pushed conspiracy theory that Russia and Trump were in cahoots during the 2016 election to get the New York real estate billionaire elected president.
In 2020, a classified FBI internal memo revealed that in early 2017, McCabe and then-FBI Director James Comey discussed ways to get erstwhile Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn “to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired” over his conversations with then Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak. Flynn ended up getting convicted of lying to the FBI but was later pardoned, with the DoJ dropping its case against him in May 2020 and a court ruling in his favour in June 2020 after concluding that the FBI entrapped him.
Separately, leaked email exchanges between Lisa Page, special council to McCabe, and Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who interviewed Flynn – with whom she was having an extramarital affair – showed that McCabe discussed an “insurance policy” against a hypothetical Trump presidency even before the 2016 election took place. The former FBI director later insisted that he couldn’t recall such conversations.
16 January 2021, 14:10 GMT
In 2019, a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general on the origins of the FBI’s Russiagate investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, concluded that the agency had made at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign operative Carter Page, as well as the bureau’s reliance on using the Steele dossier. The latter document was a political opposition research report written by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, which contained a number of salacious and sensational claims against Trump’s alleged Russia connections, and sexual preferences, and was later found to have been a fabrication from start to finish. The inspector general’s report found that McCabe personally pushed for the Steele dossier to be included in the intelligence community’s assessment of Russiagate, even as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Director of National Intelligence “expressed concerns” about the document’s sourcing and outlandish claims.
In 2019, McCabe revealed to US media that before his firing, in May of 2017, he and then-deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein explored the possibility of using the 25th amendment to the constitution to declare Trump unfit for office and remove him – a measure which would have effectively constituted a coup d’état.