The co-author of a new book about President Trump said he made a “terrifying” last-minute edit after learning the Justice Department was considering criminal charges against fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of Lawfare, described on Tuesday how uncomfortable it was to come to the realization that the agency, led by Attorney General William Barr, might go after Trump’s political rivals, forcing a rewrite of a small passage in Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office.
“There is, whenever you are writing a book like this that is sort of happening in real time, there’s always this tension of kind of trying to keep the book open until the end. So, we kept going back and rereading things that we’d written to make very small updates, and the updates get smaller and smaller,” Hennessey said during a discussion in D.C. alongside Unmaking the Presidency co-author and Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes.
“One of the last, I think, for me, sort of most terrifying edits that we made in the book was at the end of the chapter on the Justice Department and law enforcement independence,” Hennessey continued.
Initially, the pair wrote that they had not seen the Justice Department actually prosecute the president’s political opponents, with Hennessey noting that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions “kind of” ignored Trump’s push for his top law enforcement official to conduct yet another investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 presidential rival.
She said that changed when it became known late last year that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. was weighing criminal charges against McCabe, who was accused of lying to federal agents.
“We had to edit that sentence, because the Justice Department appears to have attempted to secure prosecution against the former deputy director of the FBI in circumstances in which, certainly, the public facts wouldn’t have supported that, and it appears as though a grand jury actually declined to indict, although we don’t actually know what happened,” Hennessey said.
“And so, we had to add in like a little caveat of ‘mostly’ or ‘by and large hasn’t.’ The idea that a statement like that, something that should just be a sort of gospel truth in a democratic society, that the Justice Department is not going after the president’s political opponents for political purposes, that we had to start to caveat that, you know, I do think is a sort of dramatic illustration of how even people who were really skeptical of this president sort of didn’t imagine the extent to which we would get into what feels like really perilous waters,” she added.
Sessions fired McCabe in March 2018, less than two days before he was set to retire, prompted by a DOJ inspector general report that found he misled then-FBI Director James Comey and investigators about leaks to the media regarding the Hillary Clinton emails investigation and an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation that had not yet been made public.
More than a year and a half after Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent a criminal referral to federal prosecutors in Washington, the Justice Department denied McCabe’s appeal to avoid criminal charges. But it does not appear a grand jury has returned an indictment, and the case looks to be in limbo despite a judge’s protestation.
McCabe sued the Justice Department for wrongful termination in August, alleging that Trump himself pressed for his ouster by promoting the “false and unreasonable view” that working on the Trump-Russia investigation was evidence of his “affiliation with Trump’s partisan opponents in the Democratic Party” and by “singling him out for his alleged but nonexistent association with Trump’s political opponents” related to McCabe’s wife’s political activity.
McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, took approximately $675,000 in campaign funding from the Virginia Democratic Party for her 2015 state Senate campaign, which she lost.
“How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?” Trump tweeted in 2017.
Wittes also chimed in about how, in his view, the Justice Department leadership has faltered under Trump.
Wittes, a “good friend” of Comey, said Barr “announcing a conspiracy theory that comports with the president’s political preferences” is the “most florid example” of troubling DOJ conduct.
