By Lee Cary ——Bio and Archives--June 27, 2023
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This book written by Former Deputy Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Andrew G. McCabe is entitled “The Threat: How The FBI Protects America In The Age Of Terror And Trump” ©2019. It is a 274-page narrative with a two-edged motive.
Most of the first 2/3’s of the book touts the righteousness and competency of the FBI where McCabe worked for over twenty years reaching the temporary level of Acting Director. He remained there until Christopher Wray was appointed, by Trump, as the new director in 2018. Thereafter McCabe returned to his former position as Assistant Director. On January 29 2018 he resigned and took paid leave until his scheduled retirement date of March 18, 2018.
In the first two lines of his Prologue, McCabe describes the character of the FBI:
“The Bureau cherishes its procedures and lives by them.” He holds to that claim throughout the book.
For most of the first 200 pages, McCabe describes multiple instances of FBI criminal investigations in a variety of circumstances and places. Those included the role of foreign influence in U.S. elections.
On pages 20-21 he states the importance of those stories because: “It is a point of urgency for Americans to understand what the FBI really does, and why it matters, so that the citizens of this country can join together for the common good, to protect our common interests and our common concerns against the very real and rising threats by those in foreign governments, and in our own, who intend to unravel the rule of law in the United States.”
On that same page (p.20), he states his fundamental thesis referencing the threat to the FBI’s effectiveness.
“Let me state the proposition openly: “The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president.” Namely, President Donald J. Trump. [More on McCabe’s sentiments toward Trump ahead.]
McCabe describes numerous, serious internal and external threats to America in pages 23-173 (BTW, with no mention of the Ruby Ridge incident).
A topical shift comes (pp.173-178) when describing McCabe’s oversight of the Clinton Email Investigation (AKA: Midyear Exam). Quotes from those four pages follow:
A. “Clinton’s staff downloaded her emails – some sixty thousand of them – onto a couple of laptops.” [p.174]
B. “Two batches were roughly equal in size, about thirty thousand each. Personal emails were kept back. Work emails were sent to State [U.S. Department of State] to send on to the committee. Then the thirty thousand emails Clinton’s staff deemed personal were deleted – destroyed.” [p.175]
C. “From the week the missing emails became publicly known, those fantasies dominated all other news about Hillary Clinton. They still do.” [Since the missing emails were not seen by the FBI, how could McCabe accurately label their content as “fantasies? p.175]
D. “The legal standard for a criminal charge involving the compromise of highly sensitive classified information is intent. If there is no criminal intent, there is no crime.” [p.175, If HRC’s staff deleted 30,000, how could McCabe adjudicate the intent behind those emails?]
The debate over HRC’s emails involved her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, who’d supervised the email screening along with her attorney. An interagency bruhaha ended when Mills and her attorney left the meeting, and only her attorney returned, to do some yelling. (pp.180-181).
The email saga continues, but I’ll stop here. As the Midyear Exam unfolded, Director James Comey made his now famous July 5, 2016 statement on HRC’s emails. No one walked away from that event clean.
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Reflecting on the public response to Comey’s statement, McCabe wrote:
“We believed in our good intentions. We believed that the American people believed in us. The FBI is not political. The FBI did not pursue this investigation with any sort of political intention in mind. Our confidence in Comey’s ability to convince people that we had done the right thing turned out to be excessive. No question about that.” [p.189, That was an epiphany moment for McCabe. No question about that, either.]
McCabe’s summary to Part I reads: “For an FBI agent, watching the president [Trump] seek to interfere with the ordinary process of justice is especially galling – an affront to our constitutional system. The work of every agent at every waking moment is governed by intricate procedures whose aim is to ensure that every step taken is by the book. The process has to be fair and rigorous from start to finish – for the sake of the subjects and for the sake of justice. It is a high-minded regime. The Bureau lapses, of course as any institution does, but the standards are taken very seriously.”
Also, “The president [Trump] exposes himself as a deliberate liar, someone who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wishes. If he were on the box at Quantico, he would break the machine.” [p.217, “box” is a lie detector]
And there’s this claim from McCabe:
“The president is trying to destroy what Americans have long assumed about who we are and how the justice system works. He is doing two kinds of damage. There’s the head-in-collision damage: the ‘phony Witch Hunt’; in-your-face; “FBI corruption” insult damage.” [p.218]
The following quotations that relate to Andrew McCabe and Crossfire Hurricane are from the Durham Report.
1.) “As set forth in greater detail in Section IV, the record in this matter reflects that upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence information from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately.”
2) “For example, Peter Strzok and Lisa were directly involved in matters relating to the opening of Crossfire Hurricane. Strzok was the Agent who both wrote and approved the electronic communication opening the matter from the very start as a full investigation rather than an assessment or preliminary investigation. At the time, Page was serving as Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's Special Assistant, and, according to Strzok, it was McCabe who directed that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation be opened immediately after information described more fully below was received from Australian authorities in late July 2O16.
3.) “On Sunday, July 31, 2016, Strzok, as he has written he was directed to do by McCabe, immediately opened Crossfire Hurricane. He both drafted and approved with the authorization of Assistant Director Priestap the Crossfire Hurricane opening communication.”
Conclusion: Andrew McCabe pulled the trigger on a false investigation in order to ruin a politician he hated.
Chapter 2 of McCabe’s book is entitled “Answering the Call”. It ends with this paragraph:
“One of our worst fears was that the top tier of the vory v zakone [Meaning: Russian organized crime mob] would use money to undermine Western institutions in which many millions of Americans have reflexive faith. That fear had now been realized, and we asked what institutions might be next, and we asked whether any American public official might be susceptible to a two-hundred-million-dollar bribe, and we asked whether democracy itself might become a target.” [p.51]
McCabe’s question was: Can a president, meaning Trump, possibly be bought by a rich Russian oligarch?
The question now is: Has President Biden already been bought by big money in China, Ukraine, and Russia, benefiting his extended family, minus the illegitimate child of his son?
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