Finding the Middle Ground on Andrew McCabe

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.