When Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, was fired in disgrace in 2018, it was commonly assumed it was because of the “Russiagate” investigation.
After all, he essentially ran that fiasco, which Special Counsel John Durham definitively noted this week was a baseless farce.
But no. McCabe was fired because he serially lied to investigators that he wasn’t leaking investigative information to the media.
More telling was what he was lying about: an FBI investigation of foreign efforts to influence a presidential campaign.
Not Donald Trump’s campaign. Hillary Clinton’s.
It’s just part of the many ways the FBI went easy on Clinton, as Durham reveals the agency dropped at least four criminal investigations related to her.
The Clinton Foundation was understandably suspected by FBI agents in three different field offices — Little Rock, Washington, and New York — as a dodgy vehicle enabling donors, very much including foreign regimes and their operatives, to give goo-gobs of money to Hillary and Bill Clinton without appearing to violate the campaign finance laws.
But McCabe was infuriated, during the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, when the Wall Street Journal reported that he had tied the hands of investigators on the Clinton Foundation case.
Because McCabe’s wife, in her run for state office in Virginia, had received a hefty contribution from a fund tied to Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe, there was a strong suggestion of partisanship on McCabe’s part.
To push back against that, McCabe had his subordinates leak that the Obama Justice Department had pressured him to shutter the Clinton Foundation probe.
This was true. In fact, it is substantiated by Durham. He found that the bureau had meetings with top Obama DOJ officials who were hostile to the investigation.
One of them played down as “de minimis” evidence the FBI’s New York office’ obtained from an informant about the amounts of money involved.
Without making any finding of criminality, Durham found that the transactions in question actually “totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The Obama DOJ, including its appointed U.S. attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn, made clear to the FBI that they had no interest in a Clinton Foundation case.
McCabe may not have been especially interested either, but it was a lot easier for him to direct his subordinates to stand down when he knew the prosecutors wouldn’t touch it.
This was a pattern. As Durham found, even when there may have been evidence that foreign powers were trying to cultivate Clinton and possibly try to bring her under their influence, the same FBI that couldn’t open a case on Trump fast enough became paralyzed.
Durham noted that in 2014 — i.e., before Clinton even formally announced her candidacy — the bureau got information about a foreign government’s effort to have one of its operatives contribute to Clinton’s campaign.
But when agents in one of field office sought to conduct FISA counterintelligence surveillance, their request sat at FBI headquarters for months with no action taken.
One unidentified agent told Durham that the bureau was “super more careful” and “scared with the big name [Clinton] involved.”
FBI officials, a supervisor recalled, “were pretty tippy-toeing around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next president.”
They wanted to avoid any possibility that Clinton could be caught on tape — after all, she was a presidential candidate!
The bureau’s priority with Clinton was to protect her from malign foreign powers.
After 11 months of bureau handwringing, her aides were given a “defensive briefing” about the foreign approach, and the matter was quietly closed. Unlike in Russiagate, the FBI was unconcerned that by bringing the Clinton campaign into the loop, their investigation would be compromised.
In a second case of a foreign government seeking to donate to Clinton, the FBI warned one of its informants, who had made an illegal contribution, to cease and desist attending Clinton-related events.
The informant’s handling agent did even not document the illegal contribution in the bureau’s files.
In late July 2016, the FBI’s then-director, James Comey, was briefed that U.S. spy agencies had intercepted a Russian intelligence analysis that Clinton had approved a plan by her campaign to smear Trump as an asset of the Kremlin.
Durham provides no reason to believe the FBI investigated the Russian analysis; indeed, he finds that the bureau essentially ignored it.
Of course, regardless of whether the Russian analysis was authentic, we now know the Clinton campaign had exactly such a strategy, and that the campaign managed to get the FBI to do its bidding in framing Trump as Putin’s puppet.
Just days after being briefed on the Russian intelligence, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane — on the basis of a sketchy hearsay “kind of suggestion” made in a London bar to Australian diplomats by young, unpaid Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, to the effect that Russia might have unflattering information on the Clintons that it could disclose to harm her campaign.
The Aussies thought little of the statement or of Papadopoulos, but the FBI rushed to open a full-field investigation of Trump’s campaign without taking any of the usual preliminary steps and without interviewing a single witness.
Quite a contrast.
Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.”
