The Justice Department has agreed to release at least some of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s text messages following a yearslong Freedom of Information Act lawsuit pursued by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.
The Justice Department told a D.C. federal court last week that it had found dozens of potentially relevant texts from the FBI official who played a key role in the Trump-Russia investigation and the Clinton emails investigation. McCabe was fired after the DOJ inspector general concluded that he misled investigators about his role in leaks to the media, although he denies any wrongdoing. DOJ lawyers told the court and Judicial Watch that they would need until the end of August to review the records before agreeing to a production schedule.
“With respect to Mr. McCabe’s emails and texts … the FBI has completed supplemental searches for emails and texts potentially responsive to Plaintiff’s request but now the records must be scoped to identify specific records responsive to the request as the results from the search used broad terms that may have identified records outside the scope of Plaintiff’s request,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. “The text message search yielded approximately 150 ‘hits,’ but the FBI has not determined how many of those results, if any, are responsive to Plaintiff’s request. The FBI anticipates that the scoping of the records will be completed by August 28, 2020, and shortly after that time the FBI will be able to identify a page count and production schedule.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in 2018 detailing multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with FBI Director James Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators about his authorization to leak sensitive information to the Wall Street Journal that revealed the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe was fired and is suing the Justice Department for wrongful termination, seeking to regain his job and back pay and claiming that President Trump was behind the firing.
Comey said he did not permit McCabe to tell the media, and Horowitz wrote that McCabe’s actions were “designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and “violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.” The Justice Department announced in February that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against McCabe.
Judicial Watch first filed its FOIA lawsuit for these McCabe text messages back in 2017 on behalf of retired FBI supervisory special agent Jeffrey Danik. The group’s FOIA request is for records related to McCabe’s alleged conflicts of interest related to his wife Dr. Jill McCabe’s failed political campaign in 2015 and its potential connections to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom McCabe helped investigate the following year. Then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton family ally, gave almost $500,000 to Jill McCabe’s state Senate campaign through his political action committee, and the Virginia Democratic Party donated just over $200,000 to the failed campaign. Clinton was also the featured speaker at a fundraiser hosted by the Virginia Democratic Party and attended by McAuliffe.
Horowitz concluded in his 2018 on the FBI’s Clinton investigation that “on this issue, we believe McCabe did what he was supposed to do by notifying those responsible in the FBI for ethics issues and seeking their guidance.” McCabe only officially recused himself from the Clinton investigation on Nov. 1, 2016, after a late October Wall Street Journal article outlining all the donations, but Horowitz said that “we also found that McCabe did not fully comply with this recusal in a few instances related to the Clinton Foundation investigation.”
Judicial Watch’s lawsuit asked DOJ to search for McCabe texts and emails containing terms such as “Dr. Jill McCabe,” “Terry McAuliffe,” “Clinton,” “Virginia Democratic Party,” “Democrat,” “Senate,” “Virginia Senate,” “Campaign,” “Run,” “Political,” “Wife,” “Donation,” and more.
The conservative watchdog told the federal court last week that the DOJ said it had found 5,696 emails that were potentially relevant to Judicial Watch’s request for McCabe records, and the watchdog told the court that it “understands that Defendant must now review these records to ensure they are responsive to his request” but that the Justice Department currently “refuses” to say how many emails it has reviewed in the past month.
“The FBI has outrageously stonewalled for years the release of these McCabe text messages about Clinton,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a Wednesday press release. “You can be sure the text messages are something the corrupted FBI doesn’t want the American people to see.”
McCabe and Comey fought to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s deeply flawed Trump-Russia dossier in the intelligence community’s 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling, and U.S. Attorney John Durham is likely scrutinizing McCabe’s actions as part of his inquiry into the Russia investigation.
