Andrew McCabe, the former FBI Deputy Director who Donald Trump fired in 2018, said on a podcast that the former president was a "de Facto Russian asset."
When Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service, and co-host of the "One Decision" podcast, asked him if he thought Trump was a Russian asset, McCabe responded, I do, I do."
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe in 2018 on the recommendation of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) for making "an unauthorized disclosure to the news media" and testimony that "lacked candor” in the FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
McCabe continued, “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”
In other words, Trump was not a "Russian asset," but we can call him that because he "gave us many reasons" to question his policy toward Russia. We disagree with him on policy, so we can smear him as a traitor.
McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department. Having written The Threat, a bestselling memoir, he is now an academic and commentator.
Speaking to One Decision, McCabe said: “You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has.
"It may just be from a fundamental misunderstanding of this problem set that's always a problem," McCabe said, suggesting that another possibility was "there is some kind of relationship or a desire for a relationship of some sort, be it economic or business oriented," while adding none of those possibilities "have been proven."
Nothing's been proven, but I'm going to accuse the former president of the United States of treason. People used to call out this kind of baseless smear.
“I do have very serious concerns about what will happen in this country first if Trump loses a close election,” he said. “I think we could be in for a very unstable time here in the country… we could have the possibility of violence and unrest.”
The former FBI official touched on the legal ordeal he himself endured after he was fired by Trump in 2018 in what he claims was a “politically motivated” move by the then-president.
“I know what it feels like to be targeted by Donald Trump. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a campaign political vendetta,” he said.
The OPR is an independent arm of the Justice Department. What happened to McCabe was no "vendetta." It was entirely his fault. McCabe said he had been fired because of the “role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey." But the truth is that he had repeatedly lied about having authorized a subordinate to leak information to the media.
“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity and accountability,” Sessions said at the time he fired McCabe. “As the OPR proposal stated, ‘all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.’”
Integrity certainly wasn't McCabe's brand then. And he keeps proving that to this day.
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