On Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) confirmed that congressional Democrats may seek to subpoena the impending full report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in the event newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr chooses to redact or otherwise only partially release the much-anticipated document.
“The public will feel rightly that there is a coverup” if details are withheld, [Blumenthal] told CNN Thursday.
Blumenthal, who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he hopes the Republican-led panel would be among the congressional committees that seek to compel the release of any details that aren’t forthcoming. The subpoenas could seek the full report or even Mueller himself. “A Senate or House committee can subpoena anyone,” he said.
As Bloomberg notes, Mueller is expected to submit his report’s final prosecutorial decisions to Barr as early as next week. Barr, as Attorney General, then retains ultimate discretion as to how to act (or not) upon the report’s conclusions and recommendations.
As Roll Call notes, Barr has been noncommittal as to whether he would permit Mueller to testify before Congress, as well as whether he would resist a hypothetical subpoena for Mueller’s report.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, echoed Barr’s comments last month. As CNN reported, at the time, Nadler told Anderson Cooper at the time: “If necessary, our committee will subpoena the report. If necessary, we’ll get Mueller to testify. The American people need the information here.”
As The Daily Wire reported earlier today, CNN appears to be actively attempting to lower its viewers’ expectations as to what to expect from the Mueller report’s impending release:
Asked by “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota Wednesday if he believed the Mueller investigation would find “enough” to take down Trump, former National Intelligence Director and rabid anti-Trump CNN analyst James Clapper attempted to temper the audience’s expectations.
“That’s the big question,” Clapper said. …”I think the hope is that the Mueller investigation will clear the air on this issue once and for all. I’m really not sure it will, and the investigation, when completed, could turn out to be quite anti-climactic and not draw a conclusion about that.”
The Mueller investigation has been dominating news cycles for much of the past week, due in no small part to the firestorm caused by fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s remarkable “60 Minutes” interview with Scott Pelley, in which McCabe claims that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment after President Trump’s firing of then-FBI Director James Comey. Last week, The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported:
The New York Times reports that McCabe claims “top Justice Department officials were so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James B. Comey, the bureau’s director,” that they reached out to individual Cabinet members to judge their receptiveness to triggering the removal clause of the 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to “vote out” a president who is incapacitated or otherwise unable to fulfill the duties of his job.
McCabe also claims that Comey’s firing “prompted Mr. McCabe to order the bureau’s team investigating Russia’s election interference to expand their scope to also investigate whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice.”
Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.
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The preparations are the clearest indication yet that Mueller is nearly done with his almost two-year investigation.
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The precise timing of the announcement is subject to change.
The scope and contours of what Barr will send to Congress remain unclear. Also unclear is how long it will take Justice officials to prepare what will be submitted to lawmakers.
But with President Donald Trump soon to travel overseas for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Justice officials are mindful of not interfering with the White House’s diplomatic efforts, which could impact the timing.
The Justice Department and the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Barr has said that he wants to be as “transparent” as possible with Congress and the public, “consistent with the rules and the law.”
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Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller must submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the conclusion of his work, but the rules don’t require it to be shared with Congress, or by extension, the public. And, as Barr has made clear, the Justice Department generally guards against publicizing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals.
As a result, one of the most pressing questions Barr will face in the coming weeks is the extent to which Mueller’s findings should be disclosed to Congress.
The regulations require Mueller to explain in his report all decisions to prosecute or not prosecute matters under scrutiny. Barr would also need to inform Congress if the Justice Department prevented the special counsel team from pursuing any investigative steps.
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Trump said Wednesday that it’s “totally up to Bill Barr” as to whether Mueller’s report comes out while he is overseas in Vietnam next week.
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“That’ll be totally up to the new attorney general. He’s a tremendous man, a tremendous person, who really respects this country and respects the Justice Department, so that’ll be totally up to him,” Trump told reporters in the White House.
Speculation about the end of the probe has been running rampant in Washington. NBC News reported recently the probe would be done by mid-February.
Life after Mueller
While the Mueller investigation may soon come to a close, there continue to be court cases that will be handled by other federal prosecutors.
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In addition, Mueller has referred certain matters that fell outside the scope of the Russia probe to other US Attorneys to pursue. Some of those investigations have already been revealed, including the investigation in New York into former Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. That probe has spawned subsequent federal investigations in New York into the Trump Organization and the Trump Inaugural Committee. It is possible the special counsel’s team has referred other matters that have not yet come to light.
For close watchers of the federal courthouse and the Mueller team, small changes have added up in recent weeks.
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On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week, special counsel’s office employees carried boxes and pushed a cart full of files out of their office — an unusual move that could foreshadow a hand-off of legal work.
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At the same time, the Mueller prosecutors’ wo
-rkload appears to be dwindling. Four of Mueller’s 17 prosecutors have ended their tenures with the office, with most returning to other roles in the Justice Department.
And the grand jury that Mueller’s prosecutors used to return indictments of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and several Russians hasn’t apparently convened since January 24 the day it approved the criminal charges against Stone.
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Even with these signs of a wrap up, the DC US Attorney’s office has stepped in to work on cases that may continue longer than Mueller is the special counsel.
That office has joined onto some of the Mueller’s team’s casework, including the cases against Stone, a Russian social media propaganda conspiracy, and in an ongoing foreign government-owned company’s fight against a grand jury subpoena.
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Mueller and his prosecutors are still reporting to work as frequently as ever — with some even coming in on recent snow days and Presidents’ Day. But also visiting them more often than ever before are the prosecutors from the DC US Attorney’s Office and others in the Justice Department who’ve worked on the Mueller cases.
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In one court case, against Concord Management for its alleged support for the social media conspiracy prosecutors told a judge in January there’s still a related “matter occurring before the grand jury.”
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In other cases, including Manafort’s, the Mueller team has made heavy redactions to its recent public court filings, including to protect pending investigations and people who haven’t been charged with crimes.
Empire actor Jussie Smollett has hired high-powered attorney Mark Geragos amid reports he orchestrated a racist and homophobic attack on himself last month in Chicago. Fox 32 Chicago reporter Rafer Weigel, citing sources at the Chicago Police Department, tweeted Wednesday that an indictment of Smollett may come in “a matter of hours. Not days.”
Geragos recently represented former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his lawsuit against the professional football league.
The report comes as police are seeking to re-question Smollett amid allegations that he staged the attack with the brothers — Abimbola “Abel” and Olabinjo“Ola” Osundairo — who were extras on Empire. According to CBS Chicago’s Charlie De Mar, Smollett directed one of the brothers to purchase the rope which was used in the alleged staged attack at the Crafty Beaver hardware store. De Mar also said Smollett paid the brothers $3,500 and promised an additional $500 later.
Smollett told police that two masked individuals had sprayed him with an unknown chemical substance as they hurled racist and anti-gay insults at him on January 29. The actor also claimed that his attackers had looped a thin rope around his neck and screamed “This is MAGA country!” before darting from the area.
Meanwhile, the Fox Broadcasting Company, the network behind Empire, said in a statement Wednesday that Smollett is a “consulate profession” who will remain a regular on the show.
Not only is Smollett believed to have staged the assault, but may also be behind a threatening letter sent to him on the set of Empire.
Chicago’s local CBS affiliate, WBBM Channel 2, reported Tuesday evening that the actor “orchestrated” the assault after the letter failed to garner an adequate reaction.
FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service officials are currently probing whether he played a role in the letter’s January 22 delivery. The letter, which contained powered aspirin and the phrase “Die black fag,” is undergoing analysis at an FBI crime lab, ABC News reported.
In a statement to ABC News, Smollett’s lawyers said their client was “angered” and “further victimized”by claims that staged his own attack.
“As a victim of a hate crime who has cooperated with the police investigation, Jussie Smollett is angered and devastated by recent reports that the perpetrators are individuals he is familiar with,” Smollett’s lawyers, Todd Pugh and Victor Henderson, said. “He has now been further victimized by claims attributed to these alleged perpetrators that Jussie played a role in his own attack. Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying.”
“One of these purported suspects was Jussie’s personal trainer who he hired to ready him physically for a music video,” the statement continued. “It is impossible to believe that this person could have played a role in the crime against Jussie or would falsely claim Jussie’s complicity.”
A 2016 DOJ criminal investigation was suppressed and buried by the DOJ/FBI that involved a major NY Democratic power broker, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.
The investigation revolved around the illegal sale of controlled US Homeland Security technology to Russia and China in the years before the 2016 election.
The DOJ terminated its internal investigation despite clear and irrefutable evidence of criminal activity and hid it from the public!
The Gateway Pundit will expose this scandal in a series of posts this week.
Today is our initial report on this egregious scandal and coverup.
This story begins with the Clintons and their Clinton Foundation. It includes Russia and China, and ends with another FBI/DOJ cover-up of Clinton crimes. The FBI did such a good job covering this up, that it has not been reported – until today.
This story started before the 2016 Presidential election. In and around 2007, Martin L. Edelman a New York attorney with Paul Hastings LLP, a Bill and Hillary Clinton close friend, and one of their largest donor bundlers met Mati Kochavi, who reportedly made his fortune in NYC real estate market. They came up with the idea of forming a group of companies and purchasing other companies that would develop and sell Homeland Security and intelligence solutions in the US and world-wide.
Edelman (below) became the Chairman of the Board and Kochavi the CEO of their company named AGT International.
AGT International – the firm that the Clintons helped create did all it could to generate revenues, even if it meant flagrantly breaking US law. In 2014, AGT described itself on its website as the following:
Today’s world has more devices and sources of information than ever before, but are they truly interconnected? AGT International is revolutionizing public safety and security by connecting previously unlinked devices and data, making relevant information accessible and actionable for decision-makers and citizens alike.
We use our deep domain expertise to collect, analyze and identify the most relevant data; and our solutions provide enhanced visibility to empower people, governments and businesses to predict, visualize and manage cities and other complex environments.
Since its launch in 2007, AGT ($1B annual revenues) has been a pioneer, making the world safer by leading the integration of devices and new information sources. In the last five years we have connected a greater variety of sensors than anyone else in our industry while successfully delivering some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated public safety and security projects.
AGT International leverages three of the most compelling current technology trends to revolutionize public safety and security: the Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing. Our advanced proprietary software powers cloud-based knowledge solutions that make connected sensors and data accessible and delivers services that aid complex problem solving.
AGT is privately held with headquarters in Switzerland. The company is proud of its diversity: more than 50 nationalities are represented among its 2,400 employees.
AGT’s International Management Team –
AGT International incurred massive growth and went from $0 to over $8 billion in contracts and $1 billion in revenues in about 5 years. The Clintons were compensated for their support and endorsement by Kochavi and Edelman through payments to the Clinton Foundation. These payments totaled millions of dollars.
AGT Statistics from company presentations –
AGT Introduction – slide detailing company offering and experience –
In 2016 at the time when there was a DOJ investigation into AGT and its illegal actions related to selling its highly sensitive defense and Homeland Security products to Russia and China, AGT updated its website and purged some references to the sensitive nature of its products. The company also shutdown most of its operations in the US.
Edelman and Kochavi were both involved in the business. For example, an AGT Management Meeting that includes executives from all of its business units, included Martin Edelman from Paul Hastings at the top of the list –
AGT’s flagship platform was called “Wisdom” and “Urban Shield”. The C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) system and some of the other derivatives technologies were ITAR regulated.
Former President Bill Clinton endorsed AGT CEO Kochavi through public appearances and by using himself and Hillary to help the venture with political clout and support in the US. For example, in July 2012 President Clinton joined Kochavi and Maria Bartiromo on Wall Street Journal Review promoting Kochavi’s business venture –
Emails released by WikiLeaks show the significance of the relationship between Edelman and Kochavi and the Clintons. In an email dated November 18, 2011, describing the various donors to the Clinton Foundation there is a paragraph describing their relationships –
Mati Kochavi President Clinton recently turned down a 2 year, $8 million offer to become Honorary Chairman of Mati Kochavi’s new media business venture. Mati is a former client of Teneo who we were referred to through Marty Edelman. I went back to Mati and proposed a new structure without any business connectivity other than 4 speeches for $1 million and $250k to the foundation should President Clinton choose to accept it. That would also include any broadcasting of foundation events or anything President Clinton would like exposure for on his website. This offer will be presented to President Clinton in Walker speech invitations which he can choose to decline or accept with no role or relationship with the company.
The email lists over $50 million in donations to the Clintons in return for personal work and lists $66 million more in expected future donations from various sources, including Edelman and Kochavi.
In another email released by WikiLeaks, Edelman sent an email to Hillary Clinton and shared the message that a Middle East Shiek was coming to Washington, D.C. –
Sheikh Muhammid apparently coming 1st week in may. List of visits includes secstate, sectreas. Just heard. Marty
The Sheikh most likely referred to by Edelman, is Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan from the Abu Dhabi Royal family. It’s suspected that the Sheikh provided capital through the Mubadala investment Company to Edelman and Kochavi to start up their AGT venture. Not surprisingly, the Clinton Foundation also received millions in donations from related entities in the Middle East –
Former US President Bill Clinton has been paid $5.625 million since 2011 by Dubai’s GEMS Education to lead the company’s charity arm, according to tax returns released in the US this month [August 2015].
Many Americans are aware of the stories of corruption surrounding the Clinton Foundation since the 2016 election. The Foundation received millions in return for the sale of a significant portion of US uranium to the Russians. Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton denied any wrong doing during the 2016 debates and even spoke of the Clinton Foundation as a superb philanthropic venture.
Future President Donald Trump disagreed with Hillary and stated that the Foundation was a fraud – the people of Haiti, for example, whom the Clintons had ‘helped’, didn’t want the Clintons back –
Hillary denied “pay to play” involving the Clinton Foundation where the Clintons would demand donations to their ‘Foundation’ and in return promise to perform agreed upon actions for these payments. Hillary was not honest.
The Clintons took in millions from Edelman, Kochavi and Sheikhs in the Middle East. In return the Clintons made promises and performed actions for a price. Unfortunately, the actions taken by the Clintons and the companies and individuals who donated to them were often illegal.
In our next post we’ll discuss these actions that the family of companies known as AGT International took in order to build their business worldwide.
In a third post we’ll discuss how the FBI/DOJ got involved but then suppressed and eventually terminated their investigation shortly before the 2016 Presidential election.
In an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe revealed details of the alleged 25th Amendment push to remove President Donald Trump from office.
According to McCabe, current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was the thrust of the push.
“Discussion of the 25th Amendment was simply — Rod raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort,” McCabe said. “I didn’t have much to contribute, to be perfectly honest, in that conversation. So, I listened to what he had to say. But, to be fair, it was an unbelievably stressful time. I can’t even describe for you how many things must have been coursing through the deputy attorney general’s mind at that point. So, it was really something that he kind of threw out in a very frenzied, chaotic conversation about where we were and what we needed to do next.”
“The deputy attorney general was definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time,” he added.
McCabe went on to describe Rosenstein’s effort as “counting votes, or counting possible votes.”
Disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner has been released from prison and placed in a residential re-entry facility. He had been sentenced to 21 months in prison for sending sexually explicit messages to a minor.
Weiner had been sending graphic and sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old North Carolina girl in 2017.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has Weiner listed as being in the custody of a Residential Re-entry Management office in Brooklyn, New York, according to a report from the Associated Press.
The investigation into his chats with the girl led to a laptop being seized from the home Weiner shared with his wife Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton. Two weeks before the election, FBIDirector James Comey announced that emails related to the candidate’s private email server may have been found on a laptop used by both Weiner and Abedin, prompting the agency to reopen their probe into the scandal.
Weiner’s predatory messages to the teen were not his first sex scandal.
In 2011, Weiner tweeted a photo of his crotch, which lead to his resignation from Congress.
During his run for mayor of New York, Weiner’s weiner made headlines once again after porn star Sydney Leathers went to the media with their explicit chats.
During the 2016 election season, the New York Post obtained new graphic chats between Weiner and a “busty brunette,”including a photo of his crotch — taken with his five-year-old son sleeping in the bed in the background.
Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin has worked closely with Clinton since the 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. She has been a top aide to the former First Lady ever since.
Weiner’s sexual scandals were chronicled in a now-popular documentary called Weiner, in which Abedin’s contempt for him was impossible to miss.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wouldn’t say Sunday if he would accept special counsel Robert Mueller being unable to find direction collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
The House Intelligence Committee is embarking on a sweeping investigation into Trump’s financial transactions and Russia, and Schiff adamantly stressed that his panel will continue its work unimpeded regardless of what Mueller says.
During an interview on CNN, Schiff discussed at length all the “evidence in plain sight” of collusion he believes there is, but said “it will be up to Mueller to decide if that amounts to criminal conspiracy.”
However, when he was asked point blank if he would accept Mueller’s findings if no clear evidence of collusion is determined, Schiff demurred. Instead he focused his answer on how his committee will conduct its own inquiry and how he’ll fight to gain access to Mueller’s evidence should it be withheld from public view.
“We’re going to have to do our own investigation, and we are. We’ll certainly be very interested to learn what Bob Mueller finds. We may have to fight to get that information. Bill Barr has not been willing to commit to provide that report either to the Congress or to the American people. We’re going to need to see it,” Schiff said on “State of the Union,” referring to Trump’s newly confirmed attorney general.
“The American people need to see it. We may also need to see the evidence behind that report,” he added. “There may be, for example, evidence of collusion or conspiracy that is clear and convincing. But not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The American people are entitled to know if there is evidence of a conspiracy between either the president or the president’s campaign and a foreign adversary. At the end of the day, the most important thing for the American people to know is whether the president is somehow compromised, whether there’s a leverage the Russians could use over the president, and if the Russians are in a position to expose wrongdoing by the president or his campaign.”
Host Dana Bash pressed Schiff again, asking if he would accept Mueller’s findings separate from his own investigation. Schiff’s response focused on the integrity of Mueller’s operation.
“You know, I will certainly accept them in this way, Dana. I have great confidence in the special counsel. And if the special counsel represents that he has investigated and not been interfered with and not been able to make a criminal case, then I will believe that he is operating in good faith,” Schiff said.
Schiff and his Democratic majority are reopening the House Intelligence Committee’s inquiry into Russian interference after the GOP-led panel in the last term completed an investigation that found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. At the time, the Democrats said the GOP-led effort wrapped prematurely.
Schiff also dismissed a recent assertion made by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., that Schiff’s panel’s Russia investigation has yet to turn up evidence of collusion. He quipped “Chairman Burr must have a different word for”collusion, citing such controversies as the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting and Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, who last year served 12 days for lying to FBI investigators about his contact with people linked to Russia during the 2016 campaign.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says that after President Trump fired his boss, FBI Director James Comey, there were discussions within the Department of Justice about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Last year, the New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said.
In a statement released by the Justice Department, Rosenstein said McCabe’s account of a discussion of invoking the 25th amendment was “inaccurate and factually incorrect.”
Trump responded in a pair of tweets later Thursday morning.
The discussions occurred between the time of Comey’s firing in May of 2017 and the appointment eight days later of special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to the Times, Rosenstein also suggested that he secretly record Trump in the White House. Rosenstein disputed the account, and a Justice Department official said he made the remark sarcastically. But McCabe told Pelley that Rosenstein’s offer to wear a wire was made more than once and that he ultimately took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss.
McCabe, who was named acting director of the bureau after Comey’s firing, launched obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations into whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey.
He told Pelley he did so in order to preserve the FBI’s Russian probe in case there was an effort by Trump to terminate it.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,”McCabe said. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
McCabe’s comments come ahead of the release of his new book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” due out next week.
In an excerpt of the book published Thursday in the Atlantic, McCabe describes a phone call he received from Trump on his first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI. According to McCabe, Trump told him that he had “hundreds of messages from FBI people [saying] how happy they are that I fired [Comey].”
“You know — boy, it’s incredible, it’s such a great thing, people are really happy about the fact that the director’s gone, and it’s just remarkable what people are saying,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “Have you seen that? Are you seeing that, too?”
McCabe was eventually fired in March 2018, less than two days before he would have collected a full early pension for his FBI career.
Trump has since railed against McCabe dozens of times on Twitter. “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey – McCabe is Comey!” he exclaimed last April. “No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
Update: As one might expect, President Trump has chimed in on twitter, where he slammed McCabe for giving Hillary Clinton a pass and accused the former deputy director, who admitted to lying to the DOJ’s inspector general, of giving “Hillary a pass.”
And as Breitbart’s Sean Davis reminds us, Trump’s criticisms are very much justified.
“I was speaking to the man who had just … won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia." Former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe, Sunday on 60 Minutes. https://t.co/IVwcM11BGcpic.twitter.com/m6HwHMOqY9
Trump Jr. took the attack one step further, accusing McCabe of trying to orchestrate a “deep state coup” against his father, before declaring that it’s time that somebody should “investigate the investigators.”
And though Rosenstein has already announced his plans to resign from the DOJ after William Barr has been confirmed, Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows is renewing the call for him to resign immediately following McCabe’s revelations.
In his first interview about the Russia probe since he was summarily fired by President Trump just 26 hours before he was set to retire and collect his pension, and while the possibility of criminal charges over his attempts to cover up his leaks to the press, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe sat for an interview with CBS about the early days of the Russia probe.
In an excerpt of the full interview, which is set to air on Sunday, McCabe described how he quickly moved to start the Russia probe a day after meeting with Trump in May 2017 in the days after James Comey‘s firing, over fears that he would soon be fired. After authorizing the investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, McCabe sought to ensure that the investigation – which was eventually rolled into the probe eventually taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller – would be on “solid ground” even if he was booted from the FBI.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace,” McCabe told CBS.
The interview marked the first time McCabe has ever opened up about his thought process when he launched the probe. In his recounting of his conversation with President Trump, McCabe said he felt intimidated by the president.
“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage,” McCabe said in an excerpt aired on CBS on Thursday. “And that was something that troubled me greatly.”
He compared Trump’s request that McCabe allow him to visit the FBI – a visit that McCabe suggest would have been well outside the bounds of decorum – to tactics used by Russian mobsters that McCabe had once prosecuted.
“In this moment, I felt the way I’d felt in 1998, in a case involving the Russian Mafia, when I sent a man I’ll call Big Felix in to meet with a Mafia boss named Dimitri Gufield,” McCabe wrote. “The same kind of thing was happening here, in the Oval Office. Dimitri had wanted Felix to endorse his protection scheme. This is a dangerous business, and it’s a bad neighborhood, and you know, if you want, I can protect you from that. If you want my protection. I can protect you. Do you want my protection? The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.”
Of course, nobody in the mainstream press has pointed out that the timing of McCabe’s decision to launch the probe would suggest that he was looking for leverage to stop him from being fired along with Comey…though, thanks to his decision to lie to the DOJ’s inspector general, that problem swiftly took care of itself.
He also admitted that he launched the investigation without any actual evidence…just partisan hackery.
In a discussion about the interview, McCabe’s interviewer Scott Pelley said McCabe affirmed that there had been discussions about invoking the 25th amendment to remove Trump – something that was the subject of a series of leaks last year…
.@ScottPelley on what McCabe told @60Minutes: "There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment." pic.twitter.com/iVAyrEV4MF
…about a plot allegedly concocted by Rod Rosenstein (Rosenstein, for what its worth, has issued a statement denying McCabe’s assertion that the Deputy Attorney General raised the issue of Trump Administration officials wearing a wire during their talks with the president).
The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the Deputy Attorney General previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the President, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.
Finally, the Deputy Attorney General never spoke to Mr. Comey about appointing a Special Counsel. The Deputy Attorney General in fact appointed Special Counsel Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation. Subsequent to this removal, DOJ’s Inspector General found that Mr. McCabe did not tell the truth to federal authorities on multiple occasions, leading to his termination from the FBI.”
The full interview will air Sunday night at 7 pm. But CBS has published an excerpt below:
Tom's Blog 