In March 2018, Jeff Sessions, Attorney General in the administration of President Donald Trump, fired Andrew McCabe, the Deputy Director of the FBI, two days shy of the date on which McCabe, who had already announced his retirement from the Bureau, would be eligible to receive a pension. McCabe was nominally fired on the grounds that the Inspector General for the Dept. of Justice determined that McCabe had (1) improperly released information to the
Wall Street Journal in 2016 that was derogatory about the Clinton Foundation and (2) had lied to FBI agents investigating that release.
It's ironic that McCabe's boss, FBI Director James Comey, was also fired by the Trump administration supposedly for having released information derogatory to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
McCabe disputed both of the IG's claims, and in 2019 he filed a lawsuit against the Dept. of Justice for wrongful termination. In the meantime, the DOJ attempted to prosecute McCabe for lying under oath but could not get a grand jury to return an indictment.
I think Trump pressured Sessions, and that the real reason McCabe was fired was that he had overseen parts of the Russia investigation, including having authorized an investigation, as Comey's temporary successor, into whether Trump's firing of Comey constituted obstruction of justice. McCabe had also opened an investigation into whether Jeff Sessions lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings when he claimed not to have met any representatives of the Russian government in 2016.
Today McCabe and the DOJ
settled the lawsuit. His firing has been changed to a retirement, and he gets his pension.
Now someone get FBI Director Christopher Wray to say whether he still believes, as he said at the time, that McCabe's firing was "by the book" and not motivated by political interests.
