In the aftermath of the announcement that Andrew McCabe would not be charged for lying to the FBI multiple times, there was obvious frustration among Republicans. What sense does it make for Michael Flynn to be railroaded into a guilty plea (including threatening his son), but McCabe gets completely off for doing the same thing. And not only the same thing, but doing it with a much clearer intent.
This came on the heels of former Mueller prosecutors trying to send Roger Stone away for nine years for lying to a Congressional committee. None of it made any sense and it certainly didn’t seem fair. The two tier-justice appeared to be alive and well. And it is, but perhaps not for the reason some thing.
After the DOJ sent a letter to McCabe’s lawyers telling them that the case was being closed without an indictment, the obvious person to blame was Bill Barr. He’s in charge here and it was his DOJ that appeared to be feeling into two standards of justice, whereby if you work for the government and yell orange man bad loud enough, you get away with whatever crimes you commit.
There may be some blame there, but I think the answer to why McCabe is now going on CNN and proclaiming vindication is much simpler – career officials screwed this up, either on purpose or via incompetence.
I believe that if Bill Barr and his DOJ had a decent probability for a conviction of McCabe, they would of pressed through with the case. It makes no sense to suggest otherwise. Barr stands to gain absolutely nothing by protecting McCabe and McCabe has been no friend to Barr throughout this ordeal. Why would the AG tick his boss off just to help out a guy who’s been calling for his resignation?
Andrew McCarthy touched on the problems with how McCabe’s case was handled in an article this morning.
There have been rumblings that the McCabe investigation was botched. Kamil Shields, a prosecutor who reportedly grew frustrated by her supervisors’ inordinate delays in making decisions about the McCabe probe, ultimately left the Justice Department to take a private-practice job. Another prosecutor, David Kent, quit last summer as DOJ dithered over the decision on whether to prosecute. Things became so drawn out that the investigating grand jury’s term lapsed. Meanwhile, the Justice Department endorsed Liu’s aggressive decision to bring a thin, politically fraught false-statements case against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, in connection with lobbying for a foreign country — the sort of crime that is rarely prosecuted. Craig was swiftly acquitted. Reportedly, Liu advocated charging McCabe, but the DOJ may have harbored doubts about her judgment.
There’s also the possibility that the grand jury in DC simply wouldn’t give Barr what he wanted here. The people in that city that make up said grand juries are 90+% Democrats. Would it really be shocking to find out that there’s just noway to get them to green light the prosecution of a #resistance member?
Heck, that’s about what I would expect at this point given how stupid things have gotten. You’ll notice that the only figure to be found not guilty from the Mueller probe was Greg Craig. He also happened to be a Democrat who served under Barack Obama. That’s likely not a coincidence given who makes up the juries in that district.
McCarthy does point out that none of the above absolves McCabe, nor the DOJ for how this has transpired.
The FBI’s former deputy director, though he undeniably misled investigators, remains a commentator at CNN. In the meantime, Papadopoulos is a felon convicted and briefly imprisoned for misleading investigators, while Flynn and Stone are awaiting sentencing on their false-statements charges. That covers both tiers of our justice system.
Whether it’s because the DOJ can’t get out of its own way, careerists are throwing cases, or the juries in DC refuse to hold #resistance heroes accountable, we’ve certainly witnessed the clear revealing of a two-tiered justice system in the past few days. There’s simply no excuse for Michael Flynn to be facing prison while Andrew McCabe is bloviating on CNN. This needs to be fixed, but I’m skeptical it can be given how deep the rot goes in these agencies. Bureaucrats have spent decades burrowing into their government jobs and erecting numerous layers of protection around themselves.
Perhaps Trump being re-elected can provide another shot to the system and clear some of this out? I don’t know, but I certainly hope it’s possible because the country’s trust is shot at this point.