Trump ramps up attacks on FBI
U.S. president applauds ‘tremendous’ firing of top official on Twitter
WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his assault on federal law enforcement agencies Saturday, while one of his lawyers argued that the controversial firing of a top FBI official was reason to end the Justice Department special counsel’s expansive Russia investigation.
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions acted late Friday night on Trump’s publicly stated wishes to terminate former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe — just hours before he was set to retire with full benefits — the president celebrated the ouster as a triumph that exposed “tremendous leaking, lying and corruption” throughout law enforcement. The move emboldened McCabe, who said in a public statement that his dismissal was a deliberate effort to slander him and part of an “ongoing war” against the FBI and the Russia probe being led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Like former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump last year, McCabe kept contemporaneous memos detailing his fraught conversations with the president, according to two people familiar with the records. The danger for Trump is that those memos could help corroborate McCabe’s witness testimony and become damaging evidence in Mueller’s investigation of whether Trump has sought to obstruct justice. Trump asked McCabe in an Oval Office meeting last May who he voted for and com- plained about the political donations McCabe’s wife received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign. In addition, Comey confided to McCabe about his private conversations with Trump, including when the president asked for his loyalty.
McCabe’s firing — coupled with the Saturday comments of Trump and his personal lawyer, John Dowd — marked an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between the president and the special counsel, whose probe Trump has long dismissed as a politically motivated witch hunt.
Dowd said in a statement, “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’s defiance was a dramatic shift for a legal team that had long pledged to co-operate fully with Mueller. The White House has responded to requests for documents, while senior officials have sat for hours of interviews with the special counsel’s investigators.
The statement was first reported by the Daily Beast, which explained that Dowd said he was speaking on behalf of Trump. Dowd later backtracked, telling the Washington Post that he was speaking only for himself. Trump has been known in the past to direct surrogates to make bold claims publicly as a way of market-testing ideas. Dowd declined to say if he consulted with the president before issuing his statement. “I never discuss my communications with my client,” he said.
White House officials had no comment as to whether Dowd’s statement was delivered at the behest of his client, but they insisted it was not part of a coordinated administration strategy and one described it as illadvised.
Still, officials acknowledged that Trump shares his lawyer’s sentiment that the Mueller investigation should come to a swift conclusion.
“We were all promised collusion or nullification of his election or impeachment,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We were promised something that never came to be.”
This official added that Trump “just thinks they should wrap it up. He sees it becoming a big fishing expedition.”
For months now, the president has raged in private conversations with friends and advisers over the intensifying investigation. People familiar with his thinking said he has been especially agitated by Mueller’s probing into the financial and other records of his private business, the Trump Organization — an intrusion he said in an interview last year would be crossing a red line.
Sessions fired McCabe as an outgrowth of an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is examining the FBI’s handling of its probe of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. In the course of that broad review, Horowitz’s team found that McCabe had authorized two other FBI officials to speak to the media about an ongoing criminal investigation, and then — in their view — misled investigators about it.
White House officials said they did not believe Trump had explicitly ordered Sessions to fire McCabe in recent days. But he arguably did not have to: The FBI’s former No. 2 official had long drawn Trump’s ire, and the president has publicly called for his dismissal.
Trump hailed McCabe’s dismissal in a gleeful tweet at 12:08 a.m. Saturday as “A great day for Democracy.”