Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of FBI, Will Retire in March. He Is Sorry He Failed to Warn Us About Trump in Time.

Multiple news agencies have reported that Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, will retire in March after twenty years with the agency, and is going on leave immediately.  The Washington Post first reported last week that Don the Con, our 45th President, had asked Mr. McCabe last summer how he had voted in the presidential election, during a conversation in which he claimed to be considering McCabe as Acting Director shortly after abruptly firing Director James Comey.

Mr. McCabe’s wife had run for the Virginia State Senate as a Democrat in 2015, and had received $200,000 from the Democratic National Committee plus half a million dollars from the PAC run by Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary Clinton (a political campaign in which Mr. McCabe played no role whatsoever)– so there was in reality no chance of Don’s allowing Mr. McCabe any real authority.  Mr. McCabe was able to finesse Don’s question by telling him he didn’t vote, and was able to warn the Don not to make an appearance at FBI Headquarters “to boost morale” after firing its popular Director (because it would not go over well with the rank and file.)

Axios had just reported on January 23 that FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign rather than fire Mr. McCabe under pressure from Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.  Axios also quoted a statement from the White House Press Principal Deputy Secretary that described former FBI Director Comey as “politically motivated” (in what way a registered Republican could be “politically motivated” rather than just apolitically disgusted by a corrupt President was not explained by the Principal Deputy.)

Mr. McCabe’s neutrality, much less integrity, is suspect in Don’s eyes even though he was appointed by President GW Bush and worked under two registered Republicans, James Comey and Robert Mueller.  There is a clear element of paranoia in Don the Con’s thinking here, not just defensiveness.  Don is a fan of conspiracy theories, and he has probably already signed on to the one about a “secret society” within the FBI dedicated to taking him down because they are jealous of his charisma.

If Don is not already aware of the extent to which his campaign shared data with the Russian government (the actual assistance the Russians gave to Cambridge Analytica was hacked emails and access to Russia’s army of bots for targeted ads and content) then Mueller’s investigation will soon clarify it for him.  There was a dedicated computer link between Trump Tower and the Kremlin and a secret operation that linked swing voters and supplied content meant to increase their insecurity.

White voters were found to pick Trump over Clinton if they were insecure and suspicious of established politics and the democratic system.  Black voters could not be induced to support Trump by any feasible means.  People who had suffered at the hands of the system, such as laid-off factory workers and people who had lost their houses to foreclosure, had become vulnerable to propaganda that linked their insecurity to immigration or “politics as usual.”  Targeting insecure voters with propaganda that increased their anxiety only made them more likely to vote for an anti-establishment candidate, which is precisely what Trump pretended to be.

In reality, Don the Con is the ultimate establishment figure, having a vested interest in keeping the status quo intact, including racial and sexual discrimination, oil consumption, pharmaceutical company profits, and the rich getting richer.

Don’s reputation at the FBI is “in tatters” but there may be a hard core of Trump supporters in the depths of certain FBI offices, such as that in New York.  In fact, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, who hired the notorious spy and Russia expert Christopher Steele, stated before Congress that Steele feared the FBI had been “co-opted” by Trump supporters– and cut off all contact with them– after FBI agents were cited in the New York Times on October 31, 20016 claiming that they had investigated Trump and found “little” connection to Russia.

In fact, there were already strong grounds for suspicion and the NSA and CIA had become involved in the widening investigation.  On October 12, 2016, the NYT reported: “Hillary Clinton’s top adviser said the FBI is investigating Russia’s possible role in hacking thousands of his personal emails, an intrusion he said Donald Trump’s campaign may have been aware of in advance.”

It was only after the first Tuesday in November that the combined intelligence agencies put together and presented to both Obama and Trump a document which described Russia’s role in hacking the election.  It appears to many that our intelligence community, including the FBI (and ultimately President Obama) failed to warn us that Russia was hacking our election when there was still time for the American people to do something about it (like not voting for Don the Con.)  The claims in the NYT on October 31, 2016 about FBI agents not finding any Trump-Russia connections seems especially inappropriate, particularly when combined with their announcement about the re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation.