The FBI (Quietly) Throws Comey, McCabe Under the Bus Following Durham Report Release
This is hardly a win for justice, but it’s something.
On Monday special counsel John Durham released his long-awaited final report, which was based on “more than 480 interviews” and “one million documents consisting of more than six million pages.”
The report is likely to make few happy.
Trump supporters are angry no one is in handcuffs after the report’s findings, while FBI apologists and Trump opponents decried Durham’s conclusion that the FBI never had evidence of any collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign and should have never launched the investigation.
Andrew McCabe, the former Deputy Director of the FBI who in 2018 was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, defended the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation on CNN.
“You stand by the initial Russia investigation?” asked Anderson Cooper.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” replied McCabe. “I stand by the investigative decisions that we made first to open the investigation first on the Trump Campaign, and the possibility the Russians were trying to influence it, and later on Donald Trump himself.”
That McCabe would defend the investigation is no surprise, since he’s one of its architects. CNN’s decision to have McCabe speak on the report in his official capacity as “senior law enforcement analyst” for the network is a questionable move, since it’s obviously a matter he cannot speak objectively on. (At least CNN did mention that McCabe’s own name appears in the report 58 times.)
Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School, offered a more honest assessment of Durham’s report.
“…it is a scathing indictment of the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media for one of the most successful political hit jobs in history.
The report shreds the FBI and Justice Department for abandoning standards and ignoring the lack of evidence to launch and prolong the investigation. The report notes that the treatment of the unsubstantiated allegations in the Steele Dossier, funded by the Clinton Campaign, was ‘markedly different’ from the government’s level of interest in Clinton’s campaign when it faced such allegations.
Durham’s report confirmed that the FBI ignored intelligence it received from ‘a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.’”
Turley said that the FBI’s admission that it made “missteps” is comical understatement for an agency that targeted a “duly elected president for three years in a faux conspiracy.”
He’s right. And though he says the statement demonstrates “a lack of remorse” on the part of the FBI, separate reporting makes it clear the FBI is distancing itself from McCabe and his former boss, James Comey, and the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
In response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times, the FBI sent a letter to the paper the agency wrote to Durham.
“In that letter, the FBI agreed with the flaws identified in Durham’s report and detailed the steps the agency has taken, under Director Christopher Wray, to ‘identify’ shortcomings’ and prevent similar incidences going forward.”
You can read that letter for yourself here.
What’s even more interesting, however, is that the FBI added to the Times that the misconduct described in the report happened under previous leadership and that “all senior executives overseeing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have left the FBI as a result of termination, resignation, retirement.”
From these statements it’s clear that Wray’s FBI endorses the findings of Durham and is distancing itself from the rogue Crossfire Hurricane operation that McCabe continues to defend. In doing so, the FBI is effectively throwing McCabe and Comey under the bus.
This is hardly a win for justice—parties trying to essentially frame a president for treason deserve more than a rebuke—but it’s something. Don’t get me wrong: I do not expect people—especially the media—to pay attention to the Durham report or the FBI’s quiet admission. Indeed, Turley noted CBS/WTOP covered the Durham report in a 20-word segment before shifting to a lengthy feature on more important news: 81-year-old Martha Stewart appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
But I wasn’t expecting justice from an agency that has been out of control and operating without accountability for decades. So I’ll settle for the FBI’s admission that the Durham report is true, and its tacit admission that the tactics of Comey and McCabe were unacceptable.
That’s a low bar, to be sure. But truth has to start somewhere, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us that one drop of it “can outweigh an ocean of lies.”