After McCabe firing, Trump attacks FBI; his lawyer says Russia probe needs to end
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump escalated his assault on federal law enforcement agencies Saturday while one of his attorneys 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 FBI deputy 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 III.
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 in May whom he voted for and complained 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. Both had been probing links between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
McCabe’s firing – coupled with the Saturday comments of Trump and his personal attorney, John Dowd – marked an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between the pres- ident and the special counsel, whose probe Trump has long dismissed as a politically motivated witch hunt. Trump said in a Saturday night tweet: “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!” Dowd said in a Saturday morning 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 cooperate 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 whether 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 ill-advised.
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 investigators found that McCabe had authorized two FBI officials to speak to the media about an ongoing criminal probe and then – in the investigators’ view – misled them 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 has long been furious at Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. White House officials said the embattled attorney general is perpetually trying to prove his worth to Trump and had to have known that firing McCabe would please the boss.
Indeed, Trump hailed McCabe’s dismissal in a gleeful tweet at 12:08 a.m. Saturday as “A great day for Democracy.”
That drew a stern rebuke from former CIA director John Brennan, who responded on Twitter: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America... America will triumph over you.”
After Dowd issued his statement Saturday, Trump reiterated his claim that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russians, and he attacked federal agencies that are under his command. But he stopped short of echoing Dowd’s call for an end to the Mueller probe.