A reign of in-Justice in capital

It is no longer the Department of Justice in this country now, not after the firing of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday night. No. It is officially out in the open, if it wasn’t previously, that it has become the Department of Obstruction of Justice. That is what we are watching, and what we have. So now James Comey, formerly the FBI director and McCabe’s old boss, has been fired by President Donald J. Trump. So McCabe gets fired just barely over 24 hours before he would retire from a career in public service with his full pension, because of a review process from the FBI that seems to have been conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility at a drive-thru window so Trump and Sessions could punish McCabe by taking away his pension.

And of course you know who would have been next to go if Sessions hadn’t fired McCabe as an act of political retribution that has become an obsession of this President for months? Sessions would have been the next to go. Then a career lightweight like Scott (First Class) Pruitt, from the Environmental Protection Agency, would have replaced Sessions, and Pruitt’s first move once Sessions had cleared out his office, would have been to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel.

People keep saying that Trump will never fire Mueller, because that would touch off a constitutional crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre in the heat of Watergate, when Nixon fired independent prosecutor Archibald Cox, which led to the resignations of his own attorney general and deputy attorney general. But every time you read or hear that, you have the same thought: What, we’re not having a constitutional crisis already?

Certainly one of the best parts of this is when Sessions says in the statement explaining this that McCabe “lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions.” Right. Got it. This comes from a guy, Sessions, who in his own appearances testifying in front of Congress last year on Russia and collusion and what was supposed to be his recusal on all matters Russia said “I don’t recall” so many times you wanted to turn it into the DOJ version of a drinking game.

And it is supposed to be one of those crazy coincidences you get in life sometimes that a few days before Christmas Trump tweeted this out about Andrew McCabe, whom he so clearly sees as the same kind of threat to him on obstruction that James Comey was:

“(McCabe is) racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”

McCabe didn’t make it to 90 days because Sessions was the one racing the clock to fire him on the 89th. We will eventually learn about what is in the OPR report on McCabe, and what the charges are against him, and if reasonable people — it means people outside this administration — consider the charges credible. For now, if this isn’t a Friday Night Massacre, simply because Andrew McCabe was the only one taking the fall for now, it is at least a real good late-night mugging. McCabe loses his job, and his pension. Sessions keeps his job, at least for now. So does Mueller. For now. Even as he continues to close in on the current version of “All the President’s Men” the way Archibald Cox once did until fired.

Here is just some of what McCabe said on Friday night after his firing:

“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.”

“This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness,” McCabe told The New York Times, at the beginning of a weekend when the leadership of the current Justice Department treated his firing like one more buzzer-beater in the NCAA college basketball tournament.

And the President, a little after midnight Eastern time, talks about the firing of McCabe as a great day for the hardworking men and women of the FBI, and for democracy. Sure it is. Trump saw Comey as a political opponent. Now Comey is gone. He saw Comey’s temporary replacement, McCabe, as a political opponent. Now McCabe is gone, practically in the middle of the night. And the President’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, with a straight face, actually stands at the podium and calls Andrew McCabe a “bad actor,” as if he were the FBI equivalent of Stormy Daniels. It’s been suggested that Sessions went along for now, and protected his own job, as a way of protecting Mueller. We’ll see about that.

This is not to suggest that McCabe is Eliot Ness, or a saint. But he deserved better than this. The FBI deserved better than a mean button job like this, months in the planning. As always, the country deserved better than head-banging governance like this.

Everybody knows how much fun “Saturday Night Live” has been having with Sessions’ small stature. But they’re all small. Department of Obstruction of Justice. Making America grate again.