Ex-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired in March 2018 after misleading investigators over his role in leaking to the press, is now suing the Bureau and the Department of Justice, claiming his firing was illegitimate.
The New York Times reported Thursday that McCabe claims in his lawsuit that the DOJ participated in a “politically motivated and retaliatory demotion in January 2018 and public firing in March 2018.” Further, he claimed President Donald Trump “purposefully and intentionally” pressured the DOJ into eventually firing him in order to discredit the investigation into whether he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The Special Counsel investigating the collusion determined there was no evidence.
McCabe has been making this claim since his firing. He told the Times shortly after he was let go that it was for political reasons. He also defended himself in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
One month after McCabe was fired, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report that determined McCabe “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the [Wall Street Journal]” — which is a violation of FBI policy. He also was found to have violated FBI and DOJ policy by disclosing “the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report.”
McCabe’s lawsuit is curiously timed, coming just days after Peter Strzok, who was also fired while working on the investigation into Russian collusion, filed his own lawsuit claiming he was wrongfully terminated.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Strzok was removed from the special counsel’s investigation over clearly anti-Trump text messages sent to another member of the investigation — with whom Strzok was having an affair.
Strzok claimed his text messages were protected by the First Amendment and that his due process rights were violated when he was fired. He had been removed from the investigation for his strong political bias against the subject of the investigation.
In another OIG report, released in June 2018, Strzok and others were accused of showing a “willingness to take official action” in order to keep Trump from becoming president.
The coincidental timing of the lawsuits did not go unnoticed. The Federalist’s Sean Davis suggested on Twitter that perhaps McCabe and Strzok were “trying to get ahead of indictments stemming from the DOJ inspector general’s investigation into FBI corruption and attempting to pose as victims of retaliation.”
The OIG is conducting yet another investigation into how McCabe, Strzok, and other FBI officials handled the Russian collusion investigation. This investigation is separate from one being conducted by Connecticut prosecutor John Durham on behalf of Attorney General William Barr.