(Headline USA) With the 2020 election now in dispute amid evidence of mass vote fraud, Senate Republicans pressed forward with their probe of the Russia hoax that confronted President Donald Trump four years ago during his surprise 2016 campaign victory against Hillary Clinton.
One of the ringleaders of that conspiracy, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee where he proceeded to feign astonishment at the mishandling of the probe, which he directly oversaw and was responsible for signing off on.
Whether McCabe was able in his testimony to weather potential perjury landmines remains to be seen. But with the possibility that Democrat candidate Joe Biden may take over the White House in January, time is running increasingly short for those investigating the scandal to wrap up their work—in particular the criminal probe being conducted by DOJ prosecutor John Durham.
Assuming Republicans hold the Senate majority, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, the committee chairman, likely will be free to continue his work. Without the backing of a Republican attorney general, though, it will have little significance.
Despite an increasing bulk of declassified evidence that has exposed the plot—first concocted by Clinton’s campaign to deflect from her own politically damaging email scandal and later propelled by partisan operatives within the Obama intelligence community—only one individual thus far has faced any modicum of accountability.
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty after he was revealed by the Justice Department inspector general to have intentionally altered email evidence that would have exonerated Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and likely blocked the agency from conducting its authorized spying on the Trump campaign.
The hearing on Tuesday made clear that the ongoing turmoil of the 2020 election has not cooled the Republican determination to continue congressional investigations.
Trump, likewise, hasn’t lost sight of the more than two-year-long sustained assault on his legitimacy. It undermined his agenda and likely cost his party in the 2018 midterm election, paving the way last year for House Democrats to impeach him over yet another, unrelated deep-state hoax.
The distraction of the impeachment may, in turn, have cost critical weeks in response time as the coronavirus reached US shores in January of this year. It further added to the toxicity and political gridlock that hobbled Trump’s coordinated national response to the pandemic as Democrats proceeded to second-guess his every move.
Minutes after the hearing began, Trump channeled the collective outrage of those injustices into a Twitter attack on McCabe, whom he fired in March 2018.
Republicans, don’t let Andrew McCabe continue to get away with totally criminal activity. What he did should never be allowed to happen to our Country again. FIGHT FOR JUSTICE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2020
Led by Graham, who was fresh off his own reelection victory, Republicans on the committee revisited many of the familiar attacks on the investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Those include pejorative text messages about Trump sent by former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both of whom worked closely with McCabe.
Graham also sought McCabe’s on-the-record explanations for mistakes and omissions in the FBI FISA applications to wiretap the Trump campaign, and about the FBI questioning of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The mistakes in the Russia investigation were “the biggest scandal in the history of the FBI,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
“We’re looking at the use of the FBI to interfere in a presidential election,” he said.
Most of the criticism of the Russia investigation has centered on the FISA warrant applications, which Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded had contained 17 “serious performance failures” in a report released last year.
McCabe on Tuesday conceded errors, including in the surveillance applications targeting Trump’s campaign.
The FBI claims that it has since taken steps to improve the accuracy of its applications to the FISA Court, and McCabe, like other former FBI and Justice Department officials, said Tuesday that he would not have signed off on the Page warrant had he known of the problems.
However, Horowitz noted that one of the biggest problems with the process was the apparent disinterest or intentional separation that top FBI officials, according to their own accounts, showed toward the hugely impactful and divisive probe of the president.
The allegations upon which the probe was predicated were later proven to have been false innuendo, likely themselves the product of a Russian disinformation campaign.
And declassified documents have indicated the FBI knew—or should have known—that the sources relied upon in the controversial and since-debunked Steele Dossier, which they used to bolster the FISA warrants, were entirely unreliable.
Nonetheless, even after the agency had severed its own relationship with ex-British spy Christopher Steele, due to his efforts to peddle the dossier to far-left magazine Mother Jones, McCabe maintained an indirect pipeline.
The Hillary Clinton campaign commissioned the firm Fusion GPS to continue Steele’s so-called research, and it then hired Russia analyst Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce Ohr, was an assistant deputy director of the DOJ narcotics division.
The Ohrs then personally delivered the Steele Dossier reports to McCabe via thumb drive.
McCabe, meanwhile, had his own vested interest in doing a favor for the Clinton campaign. His wife, Jill, had accepted nearly half a million dollars from then Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton surrogate, in her failed bid to win a seat in the Virginia General Assembly.
McCabe was subsequently rebuked in one of Horowitz’s numerous investigations for his failure to recuse himself from matters related to Clinton given his clear conflict of interest and personal biases.
But he defended the decision to open the Russia investigation, which insisted was based on information that a Trump campaign adviser may have had inside information that Russia had dirt on Clinton in the form of stolen emails.
That official account is disputed by the adviser, George Papadopoulos, who maintains that London-based intelligence operatives themselves had relentlessly attempted to plant the idea using a series of foreign assets to turn him into a patsy.
The investigation was not opened because the FBI opposed a particular candidate or “because we intended to stage a coup or overthrow the government,” McCabe claimed.
Instead, he added, “We opened a case to find out how the Russians might be undermining our elections. We opened a case because it was our obligation—our duty—to do so. We did our job.”
McCabe was the fourth former law enforcement official to appear before the committee. The others were former FBI Director James Comey and Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, who both served as deputy attorney general.
McCabe became acting director after the firing of Comey in May 2017.
He was later fired from the bureau after the inspector general revealed that he had misled investigators about his role in an October 2016 disclosure to the news media.
McCabe on Tuesday called the watchdog investigation “deeply flawed” and unfair. The Justice Department ultimately did not bring charges in that probe, which was narrowly focused on the FBI’s internal handling of the case and not on possible criminal conspiracy.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
