A few days ago, I wrote a reaction to the trailers I was seeing of CBS's 60 Minutes interview with Andrew McCabe. I stated then that I wanted to see the full program, which aired Sunday before making a final judgment. After seeing the interview Sunday, there isn't much of anything to change my initial reaction. There is a bit to add, however.
First of all, Scott Pelley, the interviewer, hardly challenged McCabe on anything. It was, as might be predicted, a sympathetic interview. The only "hardball" question Pelley threw out was in asking
McCabe to explain his firing by the FBI for lying to investigators about a news leak he made. McCabe's answer was somewhat lame. He basically said he was stressed at the time and may have misstated something, but there was no incentive for him to lie about it since the "leak" was made through the FBI's public affairs office. C'mon, Andrew. You were a senior FBI agent. You were being questioned about something that you were intimately involved in. You also were in the habit of keeping notes, which you have turned over to Robert Mueller.
So McCabe, who "hit it out of the ballpark" as they say in politics, came across as a man honestly driven to protect the Republic from this dangerous madman in the White House (aided by info-bits from CBS, which buttressed his story).
Except:
Pelley never asked McCabe how he ever got the idea that he and Rod Rosenstein and others in the FBI ever thought they could launch the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Pelley could have pointed out to McCabe for the benefit of the viewers that the 25th Amendment was reserved for the vice president and the cabinet-not the FBI, DOJ, or anybody else in federal law enforcement. Pelley also could have pointed out that Trump had every legal right to fire Director James Comey, a man who admitted leaking his own notes of a meeting with Trump to a professor friend who passed them on to the media. Purpose? Per Comey's own admission, to have a special prosecutor named to investigate Trump. Mission accomplished.
And how is it that McCabe and Rosenstein were talking about removing Trump from office for obstruction of justice (for firing Comey) when Rosenstein himself wrote the memo recommending that Comey be fired? Rosenstein makes Machiavelli look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
McCabe said he and his cohorts launched an obstruction of justice investigation into Trump after the Comey firing allegedly to cover up the Russian probe which the FBI began around the same time they were whitewashing the Hillary Clinton email investigation, run by the same circle of people, McCabe, Peter Strzok, et al. That was the investigation in which the FBI used that bogus Steele Dossier as a basis to obtain a FISA wiretap on Carter Page, then a Trump campaign operative.
If McCabe can be believed, and I'm not saying he can, Rod Rosenstein came out of the interview looking very bad. According to McCabe, Rosenstein was not only four square into looking into the 25th Amendment angle, but was deadly serious when he broached the subject of wearing a wire to the Oval Office.
Pelley then introduced the DOJ rebuttal to McCabe's allegations about Rosenstein. Pelley pointed out that the letter was carefully-worded. I agree. Here's what it said:
“The Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect. The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references… There is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment. Finally, the Deputy Attorney General never spoke to Mr. Comey about appointing a Special Counsel. The Deputy Attorney General in fact appointed Special Counsel Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation.”
Of course he never authorized any recording. That was not the charge. The allegation is that he seriously brought up the idea. As to the 25th Amendment, of course the Deputy Attorney General was not in a position to invoke the amendment-as pointed out above. He should not have even been discussing it.
Here's what we had hoped the statement would say.
It could have said that Rosenstein never discussed wearing a wire and never discussed the possibility of invoking (or getting anyone else to invoke) the 25th amendment.
It should be pretty clear at this point that there was a discussion among higher-ups at the FBI and DOJ to remove a democratically-elected president from office (a silent coup). The relevant questions now are: Was there an agreement to proceed? Secondly, subsequent to the agreement, did any of these conspirators commit an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy? Said overt act need not be a crime in and of itself; it could be any action in furtherance of an unlawful conspiracy.
If the answer to both questions is yes, that is a violation of the federal conspiracy law. 18 USC 371.
No comments:
Post a Comment