Wisconsin Congressmen on House Judiciary Committee Expect Some Startling Revelations from Durham Testimony Next Week

The House Judiciary Committee next week will hear testimony from Special Counsel John Durham on his report into the Russia-Trump collusion hoax, and two Wisconsin congressional members on the committee say they expect some startling revelations to come out.

Released last month, Durham’s scathing report found the Department of Justice and FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity of the law” when they launched an investigation against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

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Senators Want to Know Why Former FBI Officials Refused to Cooperate With Durham Investigation

U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) want Special Counsel John Durham to explain why former high-level government officials refused to cooperate with his investigation exposing the FBI for its many failures in the bogus Trump-Russia collusion probe. 

Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and Johnson, ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent Durham a letter Tuesday asking why former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division Peter Strzok declined to fully cooperate.

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Commentary: Abandon the Swamp and Let it Rot

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

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Commentary: It’s Time to Dismantle the Dysfunctional, Self-Serving, Gluttonous Company Town That Is D.C.

Gertrude Stein famously warned that it was important to know how far to go when going too far.

It pains me to admit that Democrats seem to have a far better sense of all that than do Republicans. Perhaps it’s because Democrats have a visceral appreciation of William Hazlitt’s observation that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” The Democrats, that is to say, long ago became expert at the game of holding their opponents to standards that they themselves violate not just with impunity but with ostentatious glee.

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Poll: Most Republicans Distrust the FBI

For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation enjoyed strong support from Republican political leaders and voters. But the agency’s reputation has crashed among its most dependable constituency amid scandal, corruption, and flagrant politicking on behalf of the Democratic Party.

A Rasmussen poll released today shows that 57 percent of Republicans hold an unfavorable view of the FBI; 47 percent of all likely voters surveyed at the end of December view the FBI unfavorably.

As if to prove the bureau has become the jackboots of the national Democratic Party rather than a nonpartisan law enforcement agency, a whopping 63 percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of the FBI.

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Ex-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s Pension Restored in DOJ Settlement

Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former Deputy Director of the FBI, has reached a legal settlement with the Justice Department that allows him to receive his pension, as well as reimbursement for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, CNN reports.

McCabe was one of the leading figures in the anti-Trump efforts from within the federal government, which ultimately led to the infamous “Russian collusion” hoax and subsequent federal investigation by Robert Mueller. Despite no evidence whatsoever of any such plot, McCabe continued to defend these efforts during his time as Deputy Director. In March of 2018, he was fired by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on orders from President Trump, just two days before McCabe’s retirement date; this ultimately prevented him from being eligible for his pension and other retirement benefits.

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Lindsey Graham Says He Will Be ‘Shocked’ if Durham Probe Doesn’t Lead to More Indictments

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday he will be “shocked” if a Justice Department probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation does not lead to more indictments.

In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Graham also said that John Durham, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation, will release a report on his findings after the election.

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Commentary: The Fright of James Comey

by Victor Davis Hanson   In a recent op-ed, fired FBI Director James Comey was back again preaching to the nation about the dangers of Donald Trump and his capacity to corrupt any top-ranking federal official of lower character than Comey’s own. Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his thick Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.” What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran. One can say a number of things about the timing of Comey’s latest sermon and his characteristic projection of his own sins on to others. First, Comey’s unprofessionalism was home-grown and certainly did not need any help from President Trump. His schizophrenic behavior both as a prosecutor and investigator in the Hillary Clinton email matter was marked by exempting Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin from indictment, despite their lying to his own federal officials about their knowledge of a private Clinton email server. Comey wrote his summation of the Clinton email investigation before he had even interviewed the former…

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Commentary: Pursue Those Indictments!

by Roger Kimball   Last month, Chris Buskirk wrote a column for the Spectator USA describing Representative Devin Nunes as “a hero of the Republic.” It was well-deserved praise. Nunes, a Republican Congressman from a rural district in California was, until January, chairman of the House Permanent Special Committee on Intelligence (he is now the ranking member). Nunes has worked tirelessly for more than two years to expose what our masters in deep-state Washington would bury from the glare of public scrutiny: the evidence that the entire Trump-Russian collusion narrative was a partisan effort, first, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and, when that failed, to cover up the effort while still working assiduously to destroy the Trump presidency. As Buskirk points out, without Nunes’s terrier-like efforts—conducted, it has to be pointed out, against the background of scurrilous and unremitting calumnies from the Democrats and their bought-and-paid-for megaphones in the media—the public would likely be totally in the dark about what really happened over the course of 2016 as the Obama Administration and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endeavored to “dirty up” Trump and his colleagues, calmly at first, and then with growing hysteria as Trump, against all the odds, emerged as a serious…

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Commentary: The Tables Turn in Russian Collusion Hunt

by Victor Davis Hanson   The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes. Now that Robert Mueller’s 674-day, $30 million investigation is over and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate—evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to sway the 2016 election—and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation’s trust and its laws. Take Lying  Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal…

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Commentary: Eighteen Real Attacks on the ‘Rule of Law’

by Adam Mill   Donald Trump, we are told over and over and over again, threatens the “rule of law.” To pick a piece at random, I note that Joel Mathis of The Week recently wrote, “When we talk about Trump and the rule of law, mostly we talk about how he’s flouting and evading the constraint of laws he doesn’t like: His newly declared state of emergency to circumvent Congress’ refusal to appropriate funds for a Mexican border wall is just the best recent example.” You don’t have to take my word for the absurdity of this claim that the emergency declaration flouts the rule of law; read the New York Times: Trump has, at a minimum, a colorable legal claim for this emergency declaration. In the Mathis example, as in most of these cases, the “violation” generally amounts to a policy difference or the departure from a “norm” like the one used to buck presidential oversight of powerful federal agencies. The suffocating sanctimoniousness of the “Trump-is-threatening-the-rule-of-law” crowd is exceeded only by their hypocrisy. Don’t believe me? Here is a list of 18 actual violations of the law and Constitution done in service of removing Trump from office. I’ll bet you can’t find a single objection from any of these “rule-of-law” hand wringers to these flagrant and unpunished transgressions…

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Commentary: A Tight and Tangled ‘Collusion’ Web

by Roger Kimball   Most people reading this will know Sir Walter Scott’s famous couplet (from the narrative poem Marmion): Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive! Less well known, but undeservedly so, is the excellent completing couplet by J. R. Pope, published under the sly title “A Word of Encouragement”: But when we’ve practiced for a while, How vastly we improve our style! Indeed. You really have to give it to the suits in Barack Obama’s intelligence services and Department of Justice (many of whom, of course, are still strutting about in Donald Trump’s administration). It was quite a web they wove, and tangled with complexity. Yet their prodigious practice also made it nearly impenetrable to anyone not inside their charmed circle. That adamantine carapace of impenetrability is a sign of their high style, their assiduity, the reason that a “word of encouragement” did not come amiss. Put your hand on your heart. Can you really tell me what happened and who all the major players are in the Get Trump farce that has been occupying the nation for more than two years now? There have been various worthy efforts to unpack the drama—I’ve made a…

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Andrew McCabe Defends FBI’s Use Of Steele Dossier, Confidential Informant In Trump-Russia Probe

by Chuck Ross   Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is defending the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier as well as the bureau’s use of a confidential informant to make contact with the Trump campaign as part of an investigation into possible collusion with Russia. In an interview as part of a recent book tour, McCabe disputed Republicans’ claims that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court about aspects of the dossier in applications warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. And in his book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, McCabe defended the use of an informant who appears to be Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI and CIA informant who cozied up to Page and two other Trump advisers, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos, during the 2016 campaign. “I do believe that we adequately notified the FISA Court of the information we were using, and what we thought of the information,” McCabe told New York Times reporter Adam Goldman in an interview that aired on C-SPAN on Saturday. McCabe, who was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, said that the bureau’s applications for FISA warrants…

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Disgraced FBI Officials Claimed ‘Insurance Policy’ Text Was About Whether to ‘Burn Longstanding Sources’

by Chuck Ross   Former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page claimed in congressional testimony last year that their infamous “insurance policy” text message was a reference to an internal FBI discussion about whether to potentially expose a longtime bureau source by mounting an aggressive investigation against the Trump campaign. “As I sort of explained, if he is not going to be President, then we don’t need to burn longstanding sources and risk sort of the loss of future investigative outlets, not in this case, but in other Russia-related matters,” Lisa Page told lawmakers on July 13, 2018, according to portions of a transcript confirmed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. In testimony on June 27, 2018, Strzok claimed that his text message discussion with Page concerned whether to open up a “very sensitive source” to exposure in the investigation. The text message that Strzok and Page sought to explain was sent on Aug. 15, 2016, around two weeks after the FBI opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we…

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EXCLUSIVE Joe diGenova Commentary: As McCabe Seeks the Spotlight, We Can Never Forget What He Actually Did

by Joseph diGenova   Disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his co-conspirators have seriously tarnished the credibility of their once-venerable institution. During a 60 Minutes interview Sunday, McCabe once again admitted that he a met with a group of high ranking, unelected, unaccountable Department of Justice personnel in May 2017 to plot President Trump’s removal from office. He wasn’t trying to admit guilt — although that’s exactly what he did — he was bragging about his role in a treasonous plot to overthrow a president duly elected by the American people. Make no mistake — this plot was an attempted political assassination, a decapitation effort, and it was undertaken by the very people responsible for upholding the rule of law in this country. McCabe’s resistance ally, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, was the one who repeatedly pitched the idea of wearing a wire into the Oval Office to secretly record sensitive conversations with the President. Highlighting the agency’s problems, Rosenstein responded to McCabe’s book saying his claims are “factually incorrect,” during a statement that was pure spin, in which he never directly denied McCabe’s wiretap claims. This is the current state of affairs within the United States Justice Department…

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Gorka Commentary: How President Trump Broke the Left

by Sebastian Gorka   Whatever happens in the years to come, American politics can never return to what they were before Nov. 8, 2016. Why, you ask? Because a brash TV celebrity businessman from Queens broke the media, broke Washington D.C., and broke the self-appointed “elite” on both coasts. The stake he drove through their hearts will endure no matter who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. First, they laughed at Donald Trump the candidate. At his appearance, at his demeanor, at his outré stump speeches. Then, when he wiped the floor with the 16 establishment Republican candidates they panicked. The criminal cartel that is the Clinton machine hired a former British intelligence officer—who hated Donald Trump the man—to generate a “dossier” of outlandish and false opposition research that was used by Barack Obama’s thoroughly corrupt Justice Department and FBI to gain under bogus pretenses a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance warrant to spy on her opponent’s campaign. But they failed. That is when the coup plot was hatched. I do not use that word lightly. However given that both the liberal judicial authority Alan Dershowitz, and the most preeminent conservative historian and strategist, Victor Davis Hanson, have recently used the word “coup”…

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Dershowitz Compares 25th Amendment Attempts Against Trump to a Coup

by Nick Givas   Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz compared attempts to use the 25th Amendment against President Donald Trump to a coup d’etat and said Thursday the measure is being abused. “If [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s claims are] true, it is clearly an attempted coup d’etat,” Dershowitz said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Dershowitz said the 25th Amendment has nothing to do with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s possible ties to Russia and said critics of the president are conflating the issues in an attempt to remove him from office. “Let’s take the worst case scenario. Let’s assume the president of the United States was in bed with the Russians, committed treason, committed obstruction of justice — the 25th Amendment simply is irrelevant to that. That’s why you have an impeachment provision,” he said. “The 25th Amendment is about [former President] Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It’s not about the most fundamental disagreements. It’s not about impeachable offenses.” Dershowitz accused Justice Department personnel of committing crimes against the Constitution by trying to shape the 25th Amendment to fit their political agenda. “Any…

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Former FBI Chief McCabe Says Law Enforcement Officials Mulled Ousting Trump

Andrew McCabe, a former FBI acting director, says two years ago, top U.S. law enforcement officials considered invoking a constitutional amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office after he fired then-FBI director James Comey. At the time, Comey was heading the agency’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. McCabe, who himself was later fired from the FBI, told CBS News in an interview that aired Thursday morning that the officials in May 2017 discussed whether to invoke provisions of the 25th Amendment, which allows a vice president and a majority of the 15 Cabinet members to declare a president incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, making the vice president the acting president. The officials ultimately did not move to oust Trump. But McCabe, then the No. 2 official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said soon after he discussed Comey’s firing with Trump, he ordered the bureau to begin an obstruction of justice investigation of Trump and a counterintelligence probe involving the president and his ties to Russia. A short time after the McCabe interview, Trump called him “a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country.” Trump also recalled his 2016 election…

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Commentary: We Must Depose the Deep State or a Wall is Meaningless

by Thomas Farnan   Last week in the Russian collusion saga, we learned that the FBI opened an investigation into the president because it disagreed with him on a matter of foreign policy. Yes, the agency first formed to catch people who crossed state lines with white women to have sex—and that now keeps secret files on UFOs—surmised in the aftermath of the 2016 election that Donald Trump might be an agent of the Kremlin because he favored diplomatic rapprochement. Much can be inferred from this, not the least of which is that our chief law enforcement officers are idiots. Maybe not the gumshoe “just the facts ma’am” guys you know from the church picnic, but certainly the ones who ran the place who are now getting big-money book deals as they fend off indictment. Beyond Andrew McCabe’s monumental stupidity (pictured above), though, investigating the president for treason confirms that there is a deep state with an agenda separate from the will of the electorate. It means, at some level, that America is governed by unelected bureaucracies that were originally created to assist the various branches in carrying out their ministerial functions. These have grown, by mission creep, into a…

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FBI Investigated Andrew McCabe for Allegedly Leaking About Michael Flynn

by Chuck Ross   The FBI investigated former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in March 2017 for an alleged unauthorized leak to the media regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and President Donald Trump, according to documents released Monday. The alleged leak, which has not previously been reported, occurred in early February 2017, shortly before Flynn was fired as national security advisor for lying about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. According to the FBI documents, the FBI’s office of public affairs received a complaint “regarding a media leak involving a statement overheard in early February 2017.” “Specifically, the alleged comments were made by DD A. G. McCabe and pertained to General Michael T. Flynn and the POTUS,” reads the FBI document, which the bureau released as part of a trove of documents related to an internal investigation of McCabe. The investigation, which was into the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, appears to have been opened on March 20, 2017. The FBI became aware of the complaint on Feb. 21, 2017, reads the document, which was prepared by the FBI’s internal investigations section. The documents do not reveal the nature of the information that McCabe allegedly leaked or what determination the FBI made. McCabe,…

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Court Memos Shed Light on Michael Bloomberg’s Role in NYC’s Climate Crusade

by Chris White   One of the attorneys attached to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental nonprofit was heavily involved in litigation targeting ExxonMobil, according to a document obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Gavin McCabe, a lawyer connected to Bloomberg Philanthropies, signed an amicus brief in June supporting New York City’s yearlong climate lawsuit against Exxon and Chevron. He’s one of at least eight attorneys hired by attorneys general across the country to work on environmental litigation. Bloomberg founded Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2017 in part to provide attorney general (AG) offices with attorneys to help push green energy policies. McCabe’s involvement suggests Bloomberg’s money is playing a role in the anti-Exxon campaign. He made himself a part of the lawsuit demanding energy companies compensate the city for the alleged damages from man-made global warming. U.S. District Judge John Keenan dismissed the case in July after months of arguments. The city’s lawsuit is the third such claim brought against oil companies Exxon, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Conoco Phillips. Another judge in Northern California struck down identical lawsuits in June brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland. The legal maneuvers are a boon for trial lawyers as…

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Corker Likens Trump Administration to ‘Banana Republic’ For Wanting to Yank Security Clearances of Misbehaving Ex-Officials

Bob Corker

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker likened the Trump Administration to a “banana republic” for wanting to yank security clearances of ex-government hacks who are using their positions to attack the president. The administration’s proposal is “the kind of thing that happens in Venezuela,” Tennessee’s junior senator told MSNBC, as reported by Politico. “I can’t even believe that somebody at the White House thought up something like this. I mean, when you’re going to start taking retribution against people who are your political enemies in this manner, that’s the kind of thing that happens in Venezuela. “So you just don’t do that. I can’t believe they even allowed it to be aired, to be honest,” he said. “I mean, it’s a banana republic kind of thing.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s administration is considered a dictatorship. Corker met with the dictator in May to secure the release of an American prisoner, surprising the Trump Administration and members of Congress. The meeting came one week after Maduro won re-election in a sham election. “Not all members of Congress welcomed Corker’s visit to the South American country, especially in the wake of a presidential race the United States, several Latin American countries and some European…

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DOJ IG: McCabe Used Strzok’s Mistress To Bypass Chain Of Command To Monitor Clinton Probe

McCabe Page and Strzock

by Luke Rosiak    – Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe used Peter Strzok’s mistress, Lisa Page, to get information on the FBI probe into investigation of Clinton’s private servery  – McCabe used Page to “circumvented the official chain of command”  – Other bureau officials took issue with the decision Then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe tasked the mistress of lead agent Peter Strzok to stay appraised of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s private server — a decision that other bureau officials took issue with at the time, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s bombshell report. McCabe was supposed to be insulated from the probe by two levels of management: Strzok worked for counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who worked for national security head Michael Steinbach, who reported up to McCabe. However, Strzok communicated about the probe with his mistress, Lisa Page, who worked directly for McCabe and acted as a liaison for the Clinton investigation for the deputy director. The report says: Lisa Page, who was Special Counsel to McCabe, became involved in the Midyear investigation after McCabe became the Deputy Director in February 2016. Page told the OIG that part of her function was to serve as a liaison between the Midyear team and…

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DOJ Report Says Journalists Gave FBI Agents Freebies For Leaks in Clinton Email Case

Hillary Clinton

The Department of Justice inspector general identified a number of times where FBI employees allegedly spoke with members of the media and received freebies, The Daily Caller and Breitbart say. On page XII in the report, the IG says the department “identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters,” The Daily Caller writes. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General made the discovery as it tried to identify “possible FBI agents improperly transmitting to reporters, according to its report released Thursday on the agency’s handling of the 2016 probe into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, private email server,” Breitbart writes. The IG expressed “profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered our review.” The IG report says, “In addition to the significant number of communications between FBI employees and journalists, we identified social interactions between FBI employees and journalists that were, at a minimum, inconsistent with FBI policy and Department ethics rules. For example, we identified instances where FBI employees received tickets to sporting events from journalists, went on golfing outings…

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Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Seeks Immunity For Senate Testimony

James Comey, Andrew McCabe

by Chuck Ross Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, is seeking immunity in order to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to documents released Tuesday. “This is a textbook case for granting use immunity,” Michael Bromwich, an attorney for McCabe, wrote Monday in a letter to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the judiciary panel. “Mr. McCabe is willing to testify, but because of the criminal referral, he must be afforded suitable legal protection,” Bromwich said. “Accordingly, we hereby request that the Judiciary Committee authorize a grant of use immunity to Mr. McCabe.” Grassley invited McCabe and other FBI officials to a hearing tentatively scheduled for July after the expected release of a Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. McCabe was fired in March, two days before his retirement, for a “lack of candor” during interviews with the office of the inspector general (OIG) and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility about his role in authorizing FBI contacts with the media about the Clinton probe. The OIG found McCabe gave misleading statements in three interviews when asked whether he authorized former FBI lawyer Lisa Page to talk…

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