It hasn’t been a great week for Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. First came the news that he’s under investigation for improperly campaigning for his wife a couple of years ago. But what’s perhaps even more interesting was a quieter report from Circa which shed some light on why, exactly the FBI might have been so very, very interested in Gen. Michael Flynn.
According to the report, FBI agent Robyn Gritz filed a discrimination claim against her employer. Flynn, then working as President Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director, wrote a letter of support for Gritz’s claim and offered to testify for her in court. McCabe was dragged into the case, having admitted that the FBI launched an investigation into Gritz’s “personal conduct” after she filed the original discrimination complaint. In other words, he allegedly used the FBI’s internal mechanisms to retaliate against Gritz and punish her for coming forward. One can imagine that McCabe, who clearly had designs on moving to the very top of the FBI food chain, was not pleased to have this black mark on his record. He may have been even less pleased at Flynn’s involvement, which gave Gritz’s complaint an entirely new degree of gravitas.
So then we fast-forward to 2016. Flynn, already on the Obama administration’s bad side for refusing to be a go-along-to-get-along kind of Cabinet member, has signed on to be one of Donald Trump’s most effective surrogates. And at the same time, McCabe has risen to become the #2 guy at the FBI, just behind James Comey, who had his hands full with the Hillary Clinton email investigation. And according to three FBI sources who spoke to Circa, McCabe made several disparaging remarks about Flynn both before and after he became a subject of investigation for his supposed ties to the Kremlin. These sources expressed their discomfort with what appeared to be McCabe’s personal agenda and how it cast serious doubts on the impartiality of the investigation.
From Circa:
FBI agents’ concerns became more pronounced when a highly-classified piece of evidence — an intercepted conversation between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — suddenly leaked to the news media and prompted Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s top security adviser.
“The Flynn leaks were nothing short of political,” one FBI employee said, noting the specific contents of the conversation were known by only a handful of government officials when they leaked. “The leaks appeared to be targeted to take Flynn out.”
How very interesting. After all of the concern about Comey, it could be that McCabe was the one to watch all along…
One thing is certain: Something stinks about this entire investigation, and the smell isn’t improving with age.
