Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe—sacked on the eve of his retirement after allegedly leaking information to a reporter and then misleading investigators about it—has acquired a pair of wildly divergent reputations. In Trumpworld, McCabe is a hack whose partisan actions during the Clinton email and Trump/Russia investigations caught up to him just in time. To the #Resistance left, however, McCabe is a martyr, a longtime public servant shivved by an out-of-control president enraged that he wouldn’t bend the knee.
Unsurprisingly, it’s this latter reputation that McCabe himself is pushing. In a weekend statement, he insisted his firing was the result of a coordinated smear campaign by the president and his allies.
“Here is the reality: I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey,” McCabe wrote. “The [Office of the Inspector General]’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the administration, driven by the president himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn.”
The reality is, of course, much more complicated: the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility recommended McCabe’s firing based on his “lack of candor” to investigators, stating that “all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.” The head of the OPR, Candice Will, has worked in that office since she was appointed by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2004; there’s little reason to doubt the professionalism and fairness of her recommendation.* Until and unless that report is released to the public, we’ll be unable to know for sure, but McCabe’s complaint that political pressure “accelerated” its completion hardly amounts to a denial of its conclusions.
And yet the casual observer would be forgiven for sympathizing with McCabe, given the unseemly bullying campaign President Trump subjected him to over the course of the last year. Throughout 2017, Trump frequently referenced McCabe as a symbol of alleged FBI resistance to his presidency. When it was reported that McCabe planned to retire once he became eligible for his pension, Trump needled him about it on Twitter, saying he was “racing the clock” with “90 days to go?!!!” After Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled the trigger Friday, Trump positively gloated: “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!”
Absent this spectacle, McCabe would make an odd tragic hero: “FBI official resigns amid internal investigation of misconduct, but hopes to remain technically employed long enough to cash in his plush federal pension” doesn’t exactly scream “instant best-seller.” There’s a lesson for the president here: It’s always OK to quit while you’re ahead.
But there’s also a lesson for the rest of us, one which is shaping up to be one of the most important of the Trump era: The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. All critics of the president can cringe at the way Trump treated Andrew McCabe. But Trump isn’t the only federal employee who should be subject to our scrutiny.
*Correction, March 19: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly identified Robin Ashton as the head of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility. Ashton runs the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
