No charges to be filed against exFBI deputy director

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors have declined to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, closing an investigation into whether he lied to federal officials about his involvement in a news media disclosure, McCabe’s legal team said Friday.

The decision resolves a criminal investigation that spanned more than a year and began with a referral from the Justice

Department’s inspector general, which said McCabe repeatedly lied about having authorized a subordinate to share information with a newspaper reporter for a 2016 article about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

McCabe’s lawyers said in a statement they were told in a phone call and letter that the case is closed and “no charges will be brought against him.”

McCabe, a frequent target of attacks from President Trump, has denied that he misled anyone. He has said his 2018 firing — for what the Justice Department called “lack of candor” — was politically motivated.

The investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington arose from an October 2016 story in the Wall Street Journal that described internal debates roiling the FBI and the Justice Department weeks before the presidential election about how aggressively the Clinton Foundation should be investigated. The article recounted a particularly tense phone call between McCabe and a senior Justice Department official about the investigation.

The inspector general’s report said McCabe repeatedly told internal investigators that he had not authorized anyone at the FBI to speak with the reporter and that he did not know who did. The report said McCabe ultimately corrected that account and confirmed that he had encouraged the conversation with the reporter to counter a narrative that he thought was false.

McCabe has denied any wrongdoing.

McCabe has been a target of Trump’s attacks since even before he was elected, after news emerged in the fall of 2016 that McCabe’s wife had accepted campaign contributions from a political action committee associated with former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe during an unsuccessful run for the state Senate there.