The editor of a legal website, whom former FBI Director James Comey once described as a "good friend," expects federal criminal charges to be filed against ex-deputy director Andrew McCabe any day now.
"You should thus expect charges against McCabe to be forthcoming any day," Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare.com, said in a blog post Tuesday. "And if such charges don't happen, that doesn't mean they weren't planned but, rather, that some extrinsic event has intervened."
Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, derived at the conclusion based on a Monday report in The New York Times about McCabe's lawyers meeting with federal officials in Washington.
"Such meetings generally take place when indictment is imminent," Wittes explained. "They happen when the government plans to bring charges."
He called the Times report "shocking" because "the facts available on the public record simply don't support such charges."
However, "the only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President [Donald] Trump demanding McCabe's scalp," Wittes said.
McCabe, 51, was fired last year by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions two days before retirement eligibility, citing the unauthorized release of information to The Wall Street Journal and for lying to Justice Department investigators.
The leak concerned how the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email inquiry and a probe of the Clinton Foundation that had not yet been made public.
McCabe authorized the investigation into the Trump campaign's links to Russia.
Wittes noted, as did the Times, that testimony from Lisa Page, McCabe's former special counsel, could exonerate him.
Page told a grand jury that McCabe authorized her to talk to a Journal reporter despite his later twice lying to Justice Department officials about it and then correcting himself.
Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, has said that he did not give McCabe permission for the Journal leak.
But Page, who was linked to negative texts about Trump during the 2016 campaign with former co-worker and lover Peter Strzok, testified that McCabe had no motive to lie because he was authorized to share the information.
Wittes said he would "wait to form a final judgment," adding: "I would be lying if I said that, as I look at it now, it all seems on the level to me.
"I worry that what's happening here is simple corruption of the Department of Justice in precisely the fashion I have been worrying about since before Donald Trump was even elected."
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