Former FBI official McCabe won’t face criminal charges
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has closed its criminal investigation of Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who was fired after an internal review of his role in disclosing a Clinton Foundation probe to the media.
The department notified McCabe’s legal team on Friday that no charges will be brought against him, his lawyers, Michael Bromwich and David Schertler, said in a statement.
The decision not to charge McCabe is likely to be politically explosive because he’s one of President Donald Trump’s prime targets in criticizing the investigations into him and his 2016 campaign. The move by the Justice Department comes a day after Attorney General William Barr publicly rebuked Trump for issuing tweets and public statements that Barr said make it “impossible” for him to do his job.
McCabe was fired in March 2018, one month after the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General completed a report citing instances in which McCabe had failed to be candid with FBI agents and the inspector general’s office about his involvement in leaking confirmation of the Clinton Foundation probe to a Wall Street Journal reporter.
“At long last, justice has been done in this matter,” McCabe’s lawyers said in their statement. “We said at the outset of the criminal investigation, almost two years ago, that if the facts and the law determined the result, no charges would be brought.”
McCabe told CNN that it was “an absolute disgrace” that it took two years for the Justice Department to drop the case.
“The pursuit of political enemies and the use of the criminal justice system and criminal investigations to exact some sort of revenge on political enemies is not something that should be happening in the United States of America,” McCabe said.
Trump has frequently tweeted denunciations of McCabe, including one a year ago saying, “Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged.”
The prosecution was being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. In a letter to McCabe’s lawyers on Friday, prosecutors from the office said: “Based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”
Barr recently appointed one of his top aides, Timothy Shea, to lead the office, and the announcement on McCabe’s case is the second major development to come this week.
A political firestorm was ignited over another case the office is handling — the sentencing of one of Trump’s longtime political allies, Roger Stone.
Prosecutors initially recommended that Stone serve a prison sentence of seven to nine years. Barr overruled the recommendation, prompting four prosecutors to resign from handling the case. One of the prosecutors resigned entirely from the Justice Department.
Trump praised Barr for overruling the prosecutors, feeding allegations that Barr was doing the president’s political bidding.
Faced with mounting criticism from within the Justice Department, Barr issued a rare public rebuke against Trump in an interview with ABC News on Thursday.