Ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Sues DoJ Over Firing
Ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Sues DOJ Over His Firing
(Bloomberg) -- Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe sued the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr, claiming he was illegally fired last year for allegedly failing to fully disclose leaks he authorized to reporters about pending investigations.
Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, fired McCabe in March 2018, just before he would have retired, after President Donald Trump railed against the former FBI deputy on Twitter. Trump celebrated the firing in a March 16 tweet.
In a complaint filed Thursday in Washington federal court, McCabe asked for a judge’s order deeming him to have retired as an agent in good standing, fully eligible for his pension and health benefits, as he said he planned.
The 48-page filing touts McCabe’s 21 years of service to the bureau, which ended amid his participation in the probe of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its possible coordination with Russian government efforts to tilt the election result in Trump’s favor.
“Defendants responded to plaintiff’s two decades of unblemished and non-partisan public service with a politically motivated and retaliatory demotion in January 2018 and public firing in March 2018 -- on the very night of plaintiff’s long-planned retirement from the FBI,” according to the filing.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec declined to comment.
Trump and Sessions pressed for McCabe’s dismissal, according to the filing, prompting FBI Director Christopher Wray to threaten to resign if those efforts continued. Nevertheless, in January 2018, Wray demoted McCabe without explanation. Disciplinary proceedings were instituted a month later.
In April 2018, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report stating that McCabe hadn’t been completely forthcoming about his role in providing information to a reporter about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation, a charitable organization run by former President Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea.
Horowitz found that McCabe didn’t tell his then-boss, Comey, that he’d authorized disclosure of the information to a Wall Street Journal reporter. The inspector general “concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in this manner violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”
Trump claimed the ex-deputy director had gone easy on the email probe of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- the president’s opponent in the 2016 election -- because Clinton’s ally Terry McAuliffe, then governor of Virginia, had given money to McCabe’s wife’s unsuccessful state senate campaign, or to McCabe himself. It was an allegation Trump would return to time and again.
Sessions said that McCabe’s ouster was based on the Horowitz report, McCabe responded that his termination came only after he’d told the House Intelligence Committee he could back up Wray’s predecessor, fired FBI Director James Comey’s recollection of conversations he had with the president.
McCabe said he’d opened the obstruction and counter-intelligence probes of potential Trump ties to Russia after Comey had been fired in May 2017.
In May of this year, according to the complaint “Trump publicly threatened McCabe with execution by falsely accusing him of treason.”
McCabe also sued the FBI and Wray. It comes one day after former FBI agent Peter Strzok sued the same people over his firing last year. The men are represented by different law firms.
The case is McCabe v. Barr, 19-cv-2399, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Harris in federal court in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Heather Smith
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