Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is looking into suing the Trump administration for defamation and wrongful termination his attorney said last week. A timeframe for any potential lawsuit hasn’t yet been worked out. His legal team “want [the lawsuits] to be solid… We’ll file when we’re ready,” his attorney Michael Bromwich said.
McCabe was fired last month two days before his retirement and two days before his pension fully vested. He had been with the FBI for twenty-one years. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe over untruths he allegedly told about authorization he gave two FBI officials to talk to a journalist from The Wall Street Journal.
The reporter was writing a story that quoted some FBI agents as saying that McCabe had issued a “stand down” order and made it clear he wanted an investigation into the Clinton Family Foundation brought to an end in the fall of 2016. The agents said McCabe was bowing to pressure from Barack Obama’s Justice Department at the time.
McCabe authorized two FBI officials to speak with the reporter, Devlin Barret, to refute those claims. That authorization led to the public affirmation of the Clinton Foundation investigation, something then-FBI-Director James Comey had refused to confirm.
The Department of Justice’s inspector general then found that McCabe lied to internal investigators on three separate occasions when he denied having knowledge of who the officials were that spoke to Barret and who authorized them to do so. McCabe has maintained the miscommunications were inadvertent.
Bromwich is accusing McCabe’s critics of “continuing slander.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this before. It does damage not only to Andy McCabe individually but also to the FBI as an institution,” Bromwich added.
President Trump has railed against McCabe and praised the move by Sessions last month to fire him. “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!” the President wrote on Twitter at the time.
Bromwich also announced the formation of the Andrew McCabe Legal Defense Fund. Its heads are looking at transferring some $550,000 that was raised in a GoFundMe campaign over to a more formal legal fund to cover future legal expenses.
Photo by United States Attorneys via Flickr