Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a longtime foe of President Donald Trump, is in serious legal jeopardy.
He faces jailtime after lying to internal investigators about his anti-Trump leaks while serving under the president. It’s the latest revelation in a seemingly never-ending storm of Deep State corruption.
And it’s finally coming to an end — McCabe is running out of answers and running out of stories. Government attorneys are recommending he be formally charged.
Two people familiar with the matter said Thursday that Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen declined an appeal from McCabe’s lawyers aimed at dismissing charges
It wasn’t immediately clear when the United States Attorney’s Office in Washington, leading the investigation, might announce charges — but they’re expected soon.
Any indictment would put the spotlight not only on McCabe’s actions, but also those of the Obama-led Justice Department.
The indictment would also highlight the personal animosity between Trump and McCabe. Trump criticized McCabe even before he took office and McCabe often described the president as a “deliberate liar.”
McCabe’s attorneys have argued that he should not face charges on accusations that he lied to internal investigators about leaks of secret information related to an investigation of the Clinton Foundation in the fall of 2016.
He and his lawyers have said that any false statements made to investigators were the result of a faulty memory rather than an attempt to deceive.
They said McCabe was too preoccupied by his leadership duties at the FBI to remember if he’d leaked secret information.
McCabe’s legal team presented its case during a meeting last month with Rosen and Jessie Liu, the U.S. attorney in Washington.
McCabe became acting director of the FBI after Trump fired former Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.
McCabe has said his 2018 firing — for what the Justice Department called “lack of candor” — was politically motivated. He sued the Justice Department in August, saying officials had used the inspector general’s conclusions as a pretext to rid the FBI of leaders perceived as biased against Trump and Republicans.
The investigation followed an October 2016 story in The Wall Street Journal that described internal debates roiling the FBI and the Justice Department weeks before the presidential election about how aggressively the Clinton Foundation should be investigated.
The article recounted a particularly tense phone call between McCabe and a senior Justice Department official about the investigation.
The inspector general’s report said McCabe told internal investigators that he had not authorized anyone at the FBI to speak with the reporter, and he did not know who did.
The report said McCabe ultimately corrected that account, and confirmed that he had encouraged the conversation with the reporter to counter a narrative that he thought was false — namely, that he had been trying to stymie investigations into Clinton and the foundation.
McCabe has been a target of Trump’s attacks since news emerged in the fall of 2016 that McCabe’s wife had accepted campaign contributions from a political action committee associated with former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally, during an unsuccessful run for the state Senate.
Now, he could finally be facing criminal charges.
The Associated Press contributed to this article