‘We don’t open investigations because we like someone or don’t like them…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Tuesday, the obscenely partisan host began with a blatant falsehood about his guest, disgraced FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—and from their it only got worse.
Colbert introduced McCabe by saying he “was fired after launching investigations into President Trump’s ties to Russia.”
Not only was McCabe fired, following Congressional probes into his actions, for lying about inappropriately leaking information to the media, but the statement that he sought to launch an FBI investigation into Trump—which the media hyped earlier this year—downplays the fact that it turned up “no evidence” against the president.
Despite previously claiming to be a lifelong Republican, McCabe had every incentive to lie about his own conflicts of interest. His wife had accepted nearly half a million dollars in kickbacks from then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton stooge, to fund her run as a Democrat in the Virginia legislature.
It has since been well established, including by the Department of Justice’s own inspector general, that McCabe and other top officials in the agency he briefly oversaw were eyeball-deep in unseemly, biased behavior to favor Hillary Clinton over Trump.
Nonetheless, with the release of his new tell-all book, “The Threat,” the career swamp-dweller was given a kid-glove treatment laced with omissions and innuendo in a recent “60 Minutes” segment, and he continued his string of softball interviews on “Colbert.”
McCabe falsely claimed to Colbert that the FBI opened its investigation based on credible intelligence that Russia had compromised Trump.
“We don’t open investigations because we like someone or don’t like them, or because they’re a Republican or Democrat,” McCabe said. “We open investigations when we have the information that would predicate an investigation. We had that, in this instance, undeniable.”
However, he forgot to mention that the so-called ‘undeniable’ information was, in fact, the infamous Steele dossier, a since discredited report of salacious gossip from a British intelligence source that began as opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign.
It was only after Clinton lost the election that the FBI began paying the political-research group Fusion GPS for the information, although a top Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion, had likely been acting as a go-between during the bureau’s pre-election efforts to get dirt on Trump.
After Trump appropriately exercised his authority to fire FBI Director James Comey—whose botched partisan interference in the election, by many accounts, had done far more damage than anything Russia attempted—McCabe conspired with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to retaliate.
McCabe described to Colbert the harrowing period after Trump advised him that he would be next in line for house-cleaning, as he scrambled to kick his offensive counter-attack against Trump into high gear.
“It was a very serious time,” he said. “I felt that my time as acting director would likely be very short—I knew that because the president told me. … And I knew there was work we needed to do to make sure the investigation was on rock-solid ground.”
The two powerful investigative officials discussed having Rosenstein wear a wire, and even humored the possibility that the duly elected chief executive could be declared unfit for office based on the 25th Amendment, which was enacted to address the possibility of a president being physically incapacitated.
“Rod was really just kind of spinning through a number of different topics,” McCabe told Colbert. “That’s one thing he mentioned in the course of that chaotic conversation.”
Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2019
Those revelations led Trump on Monday to decry the pair’s “treasonous” efforts, and they prompted Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to promise an investigation into the attempted “coup.”
….There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who had just elected a president who they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more. This was the illegal and treasonous “insurance policy” in full action!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2019
Colbert continuously allowed McCabe to offer glib non-responses as to what credible information the FBI’s Trump inquiries had yielded, first cutting to commercial break and later interrupting him before the answer came and changing the subject.
Colbert likewise allowed McCabe to gloss over his own history of media leaks and lying, while attacking former Trump associates who had been ensnared in the Mueller investigation‘s perjury trap of using unrelated “process crimes” as leverage to secure witness cooperation.
“I don’t think any federal investigator would say that lying to a federal investigator in the course of an investigation is a process crime,” McCabe said. “We take that pretty seriously.”
McCabe praised the efforts of the media outlets with whom he frequently had colluded to propel his attack on Trump through selective leaking—then using their unsubstantiated, hearsay reports to justify warrants for eavesdropping on Trump through the secretive FISA court.
“I’ve never seen the level of resources dedicated to this sort of work that you currently have under this administration—the number and scope of really talented reporters that are working on this topic day-in, day out,” he said.
But while making rounds on the leftist talk-show circuit, McCabe seemed to tip his hand with a selective confession about his true motives for going public: “[Journalists] are going to continue to peel back the onion on the facts that they have access to—sometimes not to the benefit of the investigation,” he said, “so as an investigator it’s something that concerns you very much, to be able to ensure that information does not make it.”