Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe seemed to try to warn President Trump off from declassifying further information related to the Trump-Russia investigation, saying that there was still secretive classified intelligence that could “risk casting the president in a very negative light.”
McCabe signed off on the fourth and final Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting Trump campaign associate Carter Page after former FBI Director James Comey was fired in 2017, but he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he wouldn’t have done so if he knew then what he knows now about the flaws with the bureau’s FISA applications.
Trump has been pushing for further public releases related to the Trump-Russia investigation in 2020 following Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA abuse report that criticized the FBI for a host of mistakes and its reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier, but McCabe told Cuomo he thought more declassifications would be a bad idea.
“There is some very, very serious, very specific, undeniable intelligence that has not come out that if it were released would risk compromising our access to that sort of information in the future. I think that it would also risk casting the president in a very negative light,” McCabe told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday without providing any specific evidence. “Would he have a motivation to release those things? It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out. I don’t see how he spins it to his advantage, because quite frankly, I don’t believe it’s flattering.”
Cuomo followed up by asking if “there’s more bad stuff about him that we don’t know.”
McCabe replied, “There’s always more intelligence. There was a lot more in the Intelligence Community assessment than what was ever released for public consumption. I mean, the original version of that report was classified at the absolute highest level I have ever seen. We’re talking about top secret, compartmentalized, code word stuff, and it would be tragic to American intelligence collection for those sources to be put at risk.”
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe sent the Intelligence Community’s inspector general an investigative referral in October related to a 2018 Republican-led House Intelligence Committee report that critiqued some of the tradecraft in the Obama-era Intelligence Community Assessment of 2017 on Russian interference in 2016. The nation’s spy chief said he had begun the declassification process for the secretive intelligence underlying the referral from then-Chairman Devin Nunes.
The January 2017 assessment from the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI concluded with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA diverged from Comey and CIA Director John Brennan on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances by “discrediting” Clinton “and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
The report from the House Intelligence Committee in 2018 concluded that “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not … employ proper analytic tradecraft.” The report said GOP investigators “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.”
Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Page. Horowitz said that FBI interviews with Steele’s main source, revealed to be U.S.-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting” and cast doubt on some of its biggest and most salacious claims. Declassified footnotes showed that the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
McCabe told the Senate that he was “shocked and disappointed at the errors and mistakes.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s committee had already received testimony from former deputy attorneys general Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates this year, both of whom also said they would not have signed off on the FISA warrants against Page if they knew then what they know now. Comey testified in September that he would not have signed off on the FISA applications without a “much fuller” discussion.
Robert Mueller’s special counsel report concluded in 2019 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
To begin the line of questioning in the Friday interview with McCabe, Cuomo said, “Let’s assume that this president doesn’t have coup ambitions” — a theory for which there is no evidence — “and that the next leading theory, other than just payback, is he wants a lot of stuff from the Russia investigation declassified, because he’s been told by Nunes and others that ‘the more that comes out, the more it will look like you were framed.’ What’s the risk there if a lot of stuff comes out?”
Horowitz released a separate report in 2018 detailing multiple instances in which McCabe “lacked candor” with 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. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe in March 2018.
The DOJ declined to press charges against McCabe in February, and a federal judge ruled in September that McCabe’s wrongful termination lawsuit could move toward discovery.
