You know we're living in a topsy-turvy world when a die-hard liberal like me is hailing a Republican journalist and a top federal law enforcement official in the government as heroes, but holy moly, Nicolle Wallace and Andrew McCabe have delivered some masterful work in their respective fields. Nicolle Wallace in her interview of McCabe today, and McCabe in the last two-plus years in the FBI.
Wallace played a clip of Trump doing what he always does — belittling and lying about anyone with enough integrity to resist his corruption (like, for example, a kindergarten student.) In this particular Trump clip/10-second exercise of one's gag reflex, we see him take aim at McCabe, whose book recently came out. McCabe admitted to Wallace he was still rattled at the name-calling, yet steely in his resolve that he'd been wrongly fired, with receipts to back him up. He went further, sharing some that had never before been revealed.
In particular, Trump had written a letter, (which McCabe had seen,) in which he said one of the reasons he was firing Jim Comey was that Comey had not fired McCabe. This letter was a hot topic of discussion at the lawyers' meeting on May 8th — the evening before Comey was fired. This little nugget had not seen the light of day before now. It's pretty astonishing, given the fact that it was well before the IG report about McCabe came out. In fact, it was before the IG had even interviewed McCabe.
Yes, Mango Mussolini truly does, and has always had the will, desire, deep instinctive pull towards fascist dictatorial rule, and this blatant (and clueless) attempt to justify firing Comey because McCabe was still employed is as direct evidence of that as you will get. God, to be a fly on the wall and to have seen the lawyers' faces when they saw that letter, and tried to tell him..."Um, Mr. President, we think maybe we should go a different way with this announcement..."
Transcript below:
(video of)TRUMP: I think Andrew McCabe has made a fool out of himself over the last couple of days and he really looks to me like sort of a poor man's J. Edgar Hoover. I think he's a disaster. What he was trying to do was terrible and he was caught. I'm very proud to say we caught him. So we will see what happens. (end video)
WALLACE: A fool. Your response?
McCABE: Wow, you know, you think someday you'll get used to this and on some level you never do. I have been listening to the president lie about me since October 2016 and he somehow finds new ways to do it. Two days ago he tweeted he had never said anything bad about my wife, which is remarkable. He's been calling her a criminal and corrupt for two years now. It's horrendous. But this one was really interesting to me. The president, he goes to his tried and true, you're a disgrace, you're a disaster, those things he but in this one he actually starts talking about the IG investigation, he seems to make some effort to distance himself in a way from my firing, in a way I find to be just patently ridiculous.
WALLACE: You think there's a direct line between his statements and the tone he set about you and around the IG report into you that affected the outcome?
McCABE: Here's what I'll say, Nicolle, it was curious and certainly concerning to me when the president brought me up to Jim Comey on three separate occasions in those private meetings, and say things to Jim like, "What's the story with that deputy director of yours? Does he have a problem with me?" From the very beginning I got the sense that the president wanted me out of there. And so for him to say today that, "Oh, it was somebody else fired him as a result of this IG investigation," it directly contradicts my own experience and I would add, something I haven't discussed before, and I'm ver careful, I have to be careful in the way I talk about this, but I have seen the letter that the president wrote purportedly himself justifying the firing of Jim Comey.
WALLACE: What does it say?
McCABE: In a rambling four-plus pages, it goes through all of the different reasons why he's firing the director of the FBI. I am not going to go through all of those with you, but I will tell you one of them is he claims to want to fire the director of the FBI because of his failure to fire me. That was a letter written long before the IG had concluded their investigation and drawn their, I believe, false conclusions in that report that i'm still -- still having to deal with. So for the president to say today oh, we caught him and it's the result of the IG investigation, is just simply contradicting the facts.
WALLACE: Let me make sure I'm catching all of this. You have seen the letter that instead of this three-page memo from Rosenstein, the president wanted to accompany the news of Jim Comey's firing?
McCABE: That's right. The president wrote his own letter that he, I guess, was thinking of delivering to the director firing him, and it was that letter that the group gathered to discuss on May 8th, the day before Jim was fired.
WALLACE: And in it it includes his desire to fire him in part because he employed you as his deputy?
McCABE: That's correct. Jim's failure to fire me is cited as a reason why the president was firing Jim.
WALLACE: And that letter was written by the president before you were ever interviewed by the Inspector General, correct?
McCABE: That is correct.
