It looks like there is some serious institutional churn going on at DOJ:
The Justice Department will not bring charges against former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators about a media disclosure, according to people familiar with the matter and McCabe’s legal team, ending a long-running inquiry into a top law enforcement official who authorized the bureau to investigate President Trump and soon became the commander in chief’s political punching bag.
The department revealed the decision to McCabe’s team on Friday; it was unclear if there were other plans to make it public. The move will surely infuriate Trump, who has raged publicly and privately in recent months that McCabe and others he considers political enemies should be charged with crimes.
Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.
The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.
Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the people said. The team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the United States attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, who is handling the Flynn matter, as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen.
Over the past two weeks, the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the Washington office about various cases — some public, some not — including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why they took them, according to the people. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.
So, Barr is playing both sides here, trying to placate the DOJ by dropping the McCabe case — which will make Trump furious — while at the same time opening up another “investigation of the investigators” to protect that looney tunes Michael Flynn, which will please him greatly.
I think Trump is far less concerned about protecting his pals because he has the pardon power hanging over their heads to keep them quiet. It’s the revenge that he wants — no, needs.
Indeed, revenge is his raison d’etre.
We’ll see how he reacts but there is zero evidence that he’s going to follow any kind of strategy when it comes to this. Maybe he’s become a mature strategic thinker overnight. But I doubt it.
Stay tuned.