The Biden administration’s Department of Justice revealed Thursday that it had reversed a Trump administration decision to fire former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe for “lack of candor” under oath, and restored his pension and honors.
In a settlement agreement published by CNN, Attorney General Merrick Garland agreed to revise McCabe’s departmental record to reverse his firing by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, shortly before McCabe reached his retirement date.
The Department of Justice also agreed to pay McCabe for missed pension payouts dating to 2018 — roughly $200,000, according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner — and agreed to pay over $500,000 in legal costs for McCabe.
As York noted, the Department of Justice Inspector General — an appointee of President Barack Obama — found in 2018 that McCabe had misled an investigation about unauthorized leaks to the media about the probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The Inspector General concluded:
[T]hen-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
Some prosecutors recommended criminal charges against McCabe, but the Department of Justice decided in 2020 not to pursue them.
McCabe’s lawyers argued that what happened to him was a “travesty” and had been politically motivated.
After leaving the FBI, McCabe landed a job as a CNN contributor. He became a reliable source of anti-Trump and left-wing viewpoints on the network, including the argument that the January 6 rioters should have been charged with “sedition.”
On announcing Garland as his nominee in January, Biden lamented that the Department of Justice had allegedly been “politicized” under Trump, and promised repeatedly to keep politics out of the Department of Justice after he took office.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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