Friday, April 20, 2018

Andrew McCabe’s criminal referral, explained

A Justice Department watchdog says McCabe lacked candor about his role in leaks about a Clinton investigation.


By Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com  Apr 19, 2018, 4:50pm EDT

The Justice Department’s inspector general has submitted a criminal referral for former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to CNN’s Pamela Brown. Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who submitted a harsh report asserting that McCabe misled Justice Department investigators last week, has referred the matter to the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, for potential prosecution.

Yet though McCabe has been harshly criticized by President Donald Trump and his allies for months for supposed anti-Trump bias, he’s been investigated for and may be charged about a different topic entirely — that is, his purported attempts to mislead about his role in a leak at Hillary Clinton’s expense.

The gist is that McCabe orchestrated a leak to a Wall Street Journal reporter shortly before the 2016 election, describing private deliberations he’d had with Obama Justice Department officials about an investigation of the Clinton Foundation. McCabe leaked that he had tried to keep this investigation moving forward, over an unnamed Justice Department official’s resistance. His motivation for leaking about this pending investigation, it appeared, was to rebut an earlier Journal article raising questions about his impartiality in the Clinton email probe.

However, once the FBI began looking into how the Clinton Foundation leak happened, Horowitz claims that McCabe repeatedly misled officials about his involvement. The IG report says McCabe displayed a “lack of candor” on the topic on at least four separate occasions — falsely claiming several times that he didn’t know where the leak had come from, when in fact he had authorized it.

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