ProgDem Swamp Panics as FBI's Fired McCabe Threatens to Take Everyone Down with Him

THERE'S ONLY ONE PIECE OF REAL NEWS TODAY. McCabe fired. • • • TREY GOWDY GOT IT RIGHT. Gowdy told Fox News Sunday that : “Andy McCabe has undercut his credibility all by himself. If he’s got credibility issues, he need to look no further than himself.” But, the real Gowdy zinger hit a homerun -- Gowdy said : “Make no mistake -- the FBI is who recommended that he be fired. It wasn’t crazy House Republicans and it wasn’t the Trump administration. It was his own fellow bureau agents.” • That should be posted everywhere and especially after every ProgDem or lapdog media squeal about the McCabe firing. • • • McCABE THREATENS ALL PROGDEMS. And, that probably shortens his lifespan somewhat, if the analysis of past deaths related to efforts to reveal serious ProgDem failures is to be believed. • InfoWars reported on comments made by journalist Sarah Carter to Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Friday. Carter said that recently fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said if he faces criminal prosecution, he’s going to take down everyone else involved in FBI and DOJ wrongdoing related to the Hillary Clinton email probe with him : “McCabe is worried. And one thing that I did hear is that McCabe has said over and over again, ‘If I go down, I’m taking everybody else with me.' Plain and simple, he lied. A lot of current and former FBI agents that I’ve spoken to said ‘I hope he’s fired. Is he going to get fired today?’ That’s all I kept hearing all day because they realize that if they had done this, they would have been fired, too.” • McCabe released a statement in reaction to his firing, claiming it was an effort to undermine FBI special counsel Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign : “This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.” • To "taint" the FBI would take a lot of work these days. The bureau, sadly, is just about as "tainted" as possible. But, Carter's statements may, according to InfoWars, "explain why Obama officials like former CIA Director John Brennan unleashed extreme attacks on President Trump following the news Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe on Friday night : he’s worried he may go down with McCabe for his role in misleading the FISA court about the accuracy and origins of the Steele dossier. • • • DEMOCRATS LAUNCH ABUSIVE BARRAGE AGAINST McCABE FIRING. As InfoWars put it : "Former Obama officials and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee went into hysterics following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe just days before he was set to retire with full pension benefits. The stunning development is a strong signal by the Justice Department that top brass in the FBI and Obama-era DOJ officials could face consequences over FISA abuses in the Russia probe and the handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, which may explain why the following tweets are more vicious than the usual anti-Trump attacks. • Here is a sampling of ProgDem tweets following McCabe's firing. Representative Eric Swalwell of California tweeted : “Gloat now, but you will be fired soon. And it’s not going to be done cowardly, as you’ve done to so many who’ve served you. There’s a storm gathering, Mr. President, and it’s going to wipe out you and your corrupt organization all the way down to the studs." Swalwell sits on the House Intelligence Committee. Ranking member Adam Schiff, another Californian, called McCabe’s firing a “flagrant abuse of power,” despite the fact that the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility recommended Sessions fire McCabe. Schiff, the House shill for all Swamp attacks on Trump, said : “Obstruction of justice is no less a threat to our democracy when done in the open than behind closed doors. Every representative should condemn this flagrant abuse of power or stop pretending devotion to duty.” And, Obama confidante and Attorney General Eric Holder labeled the move “dangerous” -- rather ironic given he’s the only Attorney General in American history to be held in both civil and criminal contempt of Congress. Holder tweeted : "Analyze McCabe firing on two levels : the substance and the timing. We don’t know enough about the substance yet. The timing appears cruel and a cave that compromised DOJ independence to please an increasingly erratic President who should’ve played no role here. This is dangerous." Obama's CIA director John Brennan tweeted : “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.” But, as CIA director, did Brennan see "destroying America" as his job, not Trump's??? Obama's UN Ambassador Samantha Power got in her two cents worth of nonsense : "Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan." Is Power intimating that Brennan might call in the Moslem Brotherhood to save McCabe?? And -- following the usual ProgDem route of threatening any Trump administration effort to end the Mueller witch hunt originated by Obama FBI and DOJ senior officials with the help of ProgDems in the congressional Swamp and media -- Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer warned of "severe consequences" if the investigation was shut down : "The President, the administration, and his legal team must not take any steps to curtail, interfere with, or end the special counsel's investigation or there will be severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans," according to Schumer. • One thing these tweets have in common, besides their hatred of President Trump, is that they all came from Obama cronies whom he placed in high-level official positions. But, squeal as they may, the Obama clique canonot deny that McCabe's firing re-raises conservative assertions that McCabe’s firing, to quote InfoWars, "validates the notion that collusion within the Obama-era DoJ and FBI with the Clinton campaign took place to take down Trump, but the corporate media will never admit that. Fortunately, Trump is forcing the issue into the light, which is a nightmare for the Deep State, who prefer to keep its activities in the shadows." President Trump added his own tweet : “The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!” And, the Trump tweet brought out James Comey, the FBI director who was also disgraced and fired. Comey tweeted : "Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not." Jim Comey seems utterly incapable of self-protection -- wasn't it he who accepted AG Loretta Lynch's order to call the Hillary investigation "a matter," and later illegally leaked his classified "notes" on his meetings with President Trump to a Columbia law professor friend with the instruction to leak them to the New York Times, telling Congress he hoped that the leak would result in the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump??? So, when Comey uses the word "honorable," check to be sure your wallet is still in your pocket. • • • McCABE THREATENED NOT ONLY PROGDEMS BUT ALSO TRUMP. TheHill's Alicia Cohn reported on Saturday that : "Andrew McCabe, the former No. 2 official at the FBI, made a series of comments to the press following his ouster on Friday night, commenting on claims made about his performance and duties at the FBI." Here are the five McCabe claims that Alicia Cohn called "remarkable." (1) McCabe says his firing is an attempt to undermine the Mueller probe -- McCabe said that as acting director at the FBI, after President Trump fired James Comey, he pushed for Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel to take over the investigation into Russia's election interference; “I didn’t want anyone to be able to just walk away from the work that we had done,” he told Politico. McCabe says that Mueller’s ongoing investigation is being targeted by President Trump and that his own firing is further evidence that the administration is seeking to undermine it. “This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness,” McCabe told the New York Times. McCabe told ABC News he “witnessed significant events” during his time at the FBI “so a concentrated effort to consistently undermine my credibility and my reputation makes perfect sense if you are trying to undermine the efforts of the special counsel and discredit the entire FBI.” Apparently, McCabe, while alleged to have used FBI FISA surveillance as an "insurance policy" if Trump were elected, had no "insurance policy" for himself. (2) McCabe denies leaking to the media. The FBI document calling for him to be fired, said that McCabe “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media,” according to Attorney General Sessions, who quoted the internal FBI investigation document when firing McCabe on Friday. McCabe said in a statement that he had the authority to share information with the media : “It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. It was the type of exchange with the media that the deputy director oversees several times per week. In fact, it was the same type of work that I continued to do under Director Wray, at his request.” The inspector general report, which has not yet been released, reportedly found that, in 2016, McCabe allowed FBI officials to speak with the Wall Street Journal about how the agency handled the probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while Secretary of State. McCabe told ABC that he made the decision to supply information to reporters in order to counter a narrative that the FBI was not pursuing the Clinton investigation aggressively. In order to get the reporter "off [the] narrative," McCabe authorized the release of “the content of a conversation that I had had with [a senior official] from the Department of Justice” about the investigation. Neither Comey nor current FBI Director Christopher Wray has commented on these claims. (3) McCabe accuses Republicans of misquoting his testimony. What McCabe did or did not say during a closed-door congressional hearing has been a key source of controversy between Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee -- and now McCabe is giving his explanation, siding with the Democrat version of his testimony, which was recounted in a memo that House Intelligence Democrats released in February. Republicans insisted that McCabe testified to the committee that unverified material supplied by the so-called Steele Dossier was integral to the FBI securing a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, arguing that helped prompt the ongoing federal probe into Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 election. Democrats said McCabe did not claim the FISA application depended on the Dossier, which McCabe now seems to agree with : "We started the investigations without the Dossier. We were proceeding with the investigations before we ever received that information," McCabe told CNN. "Was the Dossier material important to the package? Of course, it was. As was every fact included in that package. Was it the majority of what was in the package? Absolutely not." McCabe obviously forgot about the testimony of Christopher Steele, the Dossier author who said that the Dossier was all the FBI had on Carter Page. (4) McCabe says Trump asked whom he voted for, and called his wife a ‘loser. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received political donations from then-Virginia governor and Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe during her bid for state office in 2015, which has been a source of conflict between McCabe, the GOP, and Trump. The White House denied as “pure fiction” the 'loser' comment by McCabe. Trump also denied asking McCabe whom he had voted for, although he also said he didn’t consider such a question “a big deal.” (5) AND, to be sure, like the good ProgDem Deep Stater that he is, McCabe argues that Trump is to blame. McCabe went after Trump explicitly in the statement he released following his firing : "The [Office of the Inspector General's] focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Articles too numerous to count have leveled every sort of false, defamatory and degrading allegation against us. The President's tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all.” Re-read Trey Gowdy's comments above. • The DOJ inspector general's report has not yet been relaesed to the public. But, McCabe’s decision to step down in January, and his subsequent firing Friday, just two days before he was set to officially retire, were apparently prompted by findings in the report, which is the result of a year-long investigation and expected to be released later this spring. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday said the decision whether or not to fire McCabe would be made by Sessions...” Another California congressman, Ted Lieu, says : “McCabe will win his appeal.” • So far, the only Swampy Republican who is on the McCabe bandwagon is Senator Marco Rubio, who on Sunday said he disagreed with how former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was terminated late Friday : "McCabe should have been allowed to finish through the weekend...He should have been allowed to retire." The Swamp runs still and deep, doesn't it??? • • • WHAT WILL BE IN THE IG REPORT? Zero Hedge reported on Saturday that former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said the highly anticipated report from the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz will contain “some pure TNT.” Horowitz has been investigating the conduct of the FBI’s top leaders surrounding the 2016 election for over a year. He uncovered over 50,000 text messages between two anti-Trump/pro-Clinton FBI employees directly involved in the exoneration of Clinton and the counter-intelligence operation launched against the Trump campaign. Swecker said : “The behavior if it’s manifested in the action with your thumb on the scale of a particular investigation, one way or the other, that’s borderline criminal behavior -- manipulating an investigation. I think this IG report is going to be particularly impactful, more so than any of these useless congressional investigations. I think you’re going to see some pure TNT come out in this IG report.” • The Inspector General’s report is rumored to include evidence of Deputy FBI Director McCabe ordering agents to alter “302” forms -- the paperwork an agent files after interviewing someone. IG Horowitz is also reportedly focusing on McCabe’s handling of the Anthony Weiner laptop after reports emerged that he wanted to avoid taking action on the FBI’s findings until after the 2016 election. Horowitz, reportedly has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on Weiner's laptop until late October -- about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue. A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the November 8 election. It's unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point -- that was the Washington Post report in Jnauary. Also in January, Fox’s Sean Hannity sat down with journalist Sara Carter, who said the new FBI Director Christopher Wray was “shocked to his core” after reading the GOP-authored “FISA” memo describing FBI malfeasance surrounding the 2016 US election. Here is the Carter interview with Hannity -- "Carter : What we know tonight is that FBI Director Christopher Wray went Sunday and reviewed the four-page FISA memo. The very next day, Andrew McCabe was asked to resign. Remember Sean, he was planning on resigning in March -- that already came out in December. This time they asked him to go right away. You’re not coming into the office. I’ve heard rep[orts he didn’t even come in for the morning meeting -- that he didn’t show up. Hannity: A source of mine told me tonight that when Wray read this, it shocked him to his core. Sara Carter: Shocked him to his core, and not only that, the Inspector General’s report -- I have been told tonight by a number of sources, there’s indicators right now that McCabe may have asked FBI agents to actually change their 302’s -- those are their interviews with witnesses. So, basically every time an FBI agent interviews a witness, they have to go back and file a report. Hannity: Changes? So that would be obstruction of justice? Carter: Exactly. This is something the Inspector General is investigating. If this is true and not alleged, McCabe will be fired. I heard they are considering firing him within the next few days if this turns out to be true." • Meanwhile, as we discussed in a blog last week, four Republican Senators are asking the DOJ to order a special counsel to probe the FBI’s conduct during its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election -- including the use of the “Steele Dossier” in seeking a FISA warrant against former Trump Campaign advisor Carter Page. This is the second formal request by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The letter noted that DOJ Inspector General Horowitz, who they have the “utmost confidence” in, “does not have the tools that a prosecutor would to gather all the facts, such as the ability to obtain testimony from essential witnesses who are not current DOJ employees.” And, as Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller pointed out, the letter also “broke a bit of news” : "It reveals that Bruce Ohr, the former deputy assistant attorney general, was interviewed 12 separate times by the FBI in 2016 and 2017. Ohr was in contact with Steele prior to the 2016 election. And shortly after the election, Ohr was in contact with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele to investigate Trump. Ohr’s wife, a Russia expert named Nellie Ohr, also happened to be working as a contractor for Fusion GPS for its Trump investigation. Senate Judiciary Republicans want to know whether the FBI and DOJ were aware of that relationship. The committee letter lists all Ohr’s FBI interviews, which were summarized on what’s known as a FD-302 document. The first interview with Ohr was conducted on November, 22, 2016. The most recent occurred on May 15, 2017." • The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General announced in January that it was opening a probe of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the IG to explore whether FBI officials abused their authority when they used an unverified and salacious dossier from Fusion GPS to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. But, so far, Sessions has resisted repeated calls for a second Special Counsel. • The various investigations into McCabe’s actions and statements that have been ongoing for months finally concluded that he lied. That was why he was fired. Major events led to his departure -- the Nunes Memo that asserted that McCabe “testified before the [House Intelligence] Committee...that no surveillance warrant for Trump advisor Carter Page would have been sought from the FISA court without the Steele Dossier, but McCabe knew the Steele Dossier was full of lies and used it anyway as justification to spy on one of Trump’s campaign people; the apparent conflict of interest in his wife's running for office in Virginia in a campaign partly and substantially being funded by a friend of Hillary Clinton; and; finally, DOJ IG Horowitz reportedly stating that McCabe deliberately misled investigators about his role in allowing FBI officials to speak to reporters at the Wall Street Journal about an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play schemes. • • • DEAR READERS, now we learn from the Associated Press that special counsel Robert Mueller has the memos McCabe kept on Trump dealings. McCabe, like Comey, kept personal memos detailing interactions with the President that have been provided to the special counsel’s office and are similar to the notes compiled by Comey, according to the AP. The McCabe notes reportedly not only include details of his own interactions with the President but also recount different conversations he had with Comey, who kept notes on meetings with Trump. McCabe’s notes almost certainly contain, as Comey’s memos did, previously undisclosed alleged details about encounters between the Trump administration and FBI that could be of interest to Mueller. • CNN reported on Sunday that Mueller's team interviewed McCabe, asking about Comey's firing. The CNN source would not say when the interview, first reported by Axios, occurred. CNN's source also said that Mueller has memos written by McCabe not only documenting his conversations with President Trump but also memorializing what Comey told McCabe about his own interactions with Trump while he was FBI director. CNN sees the McCabe notes as "a way to corroborate Comey's account in Mueller's probe on Russian interference in the 2016 election." This is not likely, since the notes and the memorialization of Comey' accounts are self-serving to exonerate both McCabe and Comey, and thus would be found to be unusable. CNN's source also told CNN that McCabe did not keep a copy of his memos after turning them over to Mueller. A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined comment. President Trump responded to the news that McCabe kept memos by tweeting : "Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don't believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?" • Comey said his memos detailed conversations with Trump that Comey leaked, hoping they would lead to the appointment of a special counsel on Russia. During his testimony on Capitol Hill last June, Comey acknowledged orchestrating the leak of his memos to the media a few days after he was fired in hopes that the Justice Department would appoint a special counsel. Comey's memos have also been handed over to the special counsel. • But, consider the NewsBusters report of Saturday that said : "George Neumayr at The American Spectator made hay with the new House Intelligence Committee report that accuses former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper of leaking to CNN in January as CNN's Jake Tapper broke the story that senior intelligence officials briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump on the Christopher Steele 'Dossier.' That would make sense...considering CNN is now paying Clapper to be a yapper to Tapper on TV. Neumayr began : 'The late pundit Robert Novak used to say that government officials can choose to be either 'a source or a target.' In other words, leak information to reporters and you can count on flattering coverage and protection from them. An added bonus to leaking, as former Intelligence Director Jim Clapper discovered, is that the network to which you are leaking will turn you into a paid contributor. According to Congressman Jim Jordan, speaking to Fox News, 'Clapper was actually the guy leaking information' to CNN about the presidential briefing on the Steele dossier that served as the pretext for the media feeding frenzy over possible Russian blackmail of Trump." NewsBusters says : "One can only laugh at the utter fraudulence of CNN : it pads its panels with government officials who leak to it, then presents them to its audience as 'nonpartisan' experts commenting on the aftershocks of the very stories they leaked. Trump’s intuition about a politicized intelligence community is confirmed daily by the rantings of its former members who treat the studios of television news like a retirement center. Eager to get in on this act, NBC recently hired former CIA director John Brennan, who also ingratiated himself to reporters through leaks. On his Twitter account, he describes himself as 'nonpartisan' and NBC supports that con by letting him comment on the investigation his partisan manipulation of intelligence instigated. Sara Carter made the point that Clapper denounced his own leak in a press release on January 11: 'I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press, and we both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.' " NewsBusters quotes the CNN Anderson Cooper-James Clapper interview : "ANDERSON COOPER: I mean, do you think we can trust anything in the report? CLAPPER: Well, unfortunately, and this is sad for me is that the credibility of the committee is basically about zero because they are so partisan. I have been around, Anderson, since those two committees were stood up. Let's say in 1976 and the Senate intelligence committee a year later. So I've watched them over the years. And the only time the committees are effective is when they are bipartisan. And the House Intelligence Committee is paralyzed because of the partnership that is emerged over this and the politicization of intelligence which they are supposed to safeguard against. COOPER: Director Clapper, I so gained some access to some raw intelligence tonight and I just want to wish you a very Happy Birthday today." • If Clapper leaked information to CNN while serving as Obama's naotional security advisor, and later became a "paid contributor" for CNN -- this is what the House Intelligence Committee's Jim Jordan says -- then what we need to do is watch as new "contributors" arrive at CNN or NBC or MSNBC. That will tell us who was doing the leaking and alert us to the fact that anything they say as "contributors" is strictly self-serving Fake News -- paid for and provided by the anti-Trump Swamp cabal hoping to put an "I heard it on TV" stamp of approval on their "expert" analysis. But now, we are warned and ready to treat it as what it is -- lies and illegal leaks being reheated on the mainstream media's propagandist TV political farces.