Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lost his job for lying about authorizing disclosures to the press, including allegedly misleading former FBI Director James Comey. But although McCabe strenuously denies Comey’s version of events, he says he doesn’t doubt his credibility.
McCabe “does not hold a negative view of Mr. Comey’s credibility,” his spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz told the Washington Examiner. Schwartz said she has firsthand knowledge of McCabe’s opinion of Comey and is not assuming his views.
“There is no claim that Director Comey defamed Mr. McCabe,” Schwartz said. “People’s recollections can honestly differ.”
The clashing memories of the men — heroic figures among opponents of President Trump, with Comey releasing a tell-all book Tuesday and McCabe raising nearly $600,000 in a recent fundraiser — played a central role in last week’s Justice Department inspector general report describing a probe leading to McCabe’s firing last month hours before his planned retirement.
There are four instances of “lack of candor” alleged against McCabe by the Justice Department inspector general’s office, which is led by Michael Horowitz, a nominee of President Barack Obama. The alleged lies led to a recommendation from the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility that McCabe be fired. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him on March 16.
In the first instance of alleged dishonesty, McCabe allegedly deceived Comey about authorizing two FBI employees to speak with a Wall Street Journal reporter for an Oct. 30, 2016, article that confirmed a probe of the Clinton Foundation while denying bias claims against McCabe.
McCabe authorized the disclosure after the WSJ reported McCabe’s wife received nearly $675,000 for a failed state senate campaign from a group run by Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, then Virginia’s Democratic governor.
As a deputy director, McCabe was able to authorize bureau employees to speak with the media, but Comey said he did not admit doing so during a meeting the next day. Comey said he feared the article would harm relations with the Justice Department, and that McCabe misled him.
“[I]n a conversation with then-Director Comey shortly after the WSJ article was published, McCabe lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did,” the report said.
“Comey and McCabe gave starkly conflicting accounts of this conversation. Comey said that McCabe ‘definitely’ did not tell Comey that he had authorized the disclosure about [a particular phone call],” the inspector general report said.
“McCabe asserted that he explicitly told Comey during that conversation that he authorized the disclosure and that Comey agreed it was a ‘good’ idea. While the only direct evidence regarding this McCabe-Comey conversation were the recollections of the two participants, there is considerable circumstantial evidence and we concluded that the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation. Indeed, none of the circumstantial evidence provided support for McCabe’s account of the discussion; rather, we found that much of the available evidence undercut McCabe’s claim,” the report said.
In declaring Comey the likely truth-teller, the Justice Department inspector general’s office also ruled against an allegation made repeatedly by President Trump that Comey lied to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Days before Comey himself was fired by Trump in May 2017 for alleged misconduct relating to public statements on the Clinton email probe, Comey told Grassley “no” in response to whether “you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.”
Trump tweeted Monday that Comey “lied in Congress to Senator G” and that “[d]isgruntled, he, McCabe, and the others, committed many crimes!” On Sunday, Trump tweeted: “The big questions in Comey’s badly reviewed book aren’t answered like, how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail), why did the DNC refuse to give Server to the FBI (why didn’t they TAKE it), why the phony memos, McCabe’s $700,000 & more?”
Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor who says he represents Comey, declined to comment on Comey’s apparent vindication of allegedly lying to Grassley, or on legal issues raised by memos that Comey gave him to leak to the press after he was fired.
Comey, who had taken notes on conversations with Trump, said he wanted to force the appointment of a special counsel to look into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Republicans in Congress are pushing for disclosure of the memos, to analyze the sensitivity of their content.
“I represent Mr. Comey and will let you know if he has a comment. I’m confident he won’t have one,” Richman said in an email, regarding Comey’s apparent vindication of lying to Grassley, and relating to the memos he wrote.
Although Comey and McCabe are not jousting in public, the inspector general’s report offers a more contentious picture of events before officials declared one man’s story likely true and the other’s a likely lie.
Investigators wrote: “In a letter submitted by McCabe’s counsel after reviewing a draft of this report, McCabe argues that ‘the OIG should credit Mr. McCabe’s account over Director Comey’s’ and complains that the report ‘paints Director Comey as a white knight carefully guarding FBI information, while overlooking that Mr. McCabe’s account is more credible for at least three key reasons,’” including that McCabe had a “concrete recollection” of the conversation.
“It is noteworthy that McCabe did not articulate such a ‘concrete recollection’ during any of four prior interviews,” the report said. “It was not until his November 29 OIG interview – McCabe’s fifth contact with [the FBI’s Inspection Division] and the OIG about the WSJ article – that he first provided this ‘concrete recollection’ of his conversation with Comey, which if true would have been critical for INSD and the OIG to know as soon as possible and in McCabe’s interest to share as soon as possible. As we note in the report, none of the circumstantial evidence supports McCabe’s claim, while the overwhelming weight of the circumstantial evidence support’s Comey’s recollection.”
