I’m a criminal? No YOU’RE a criminal.

I’m a criminal? No YOU’RE a criminal.

by digby

I wrote about the memos, the referrals and the long list of political enemies the Republicans want locked up for Salon this morning:

If I had read this opening paragraph of a CNN story four years ago I would have assumed it was actually an excerpt from a bad movie script:

A week after the tell-all book from James Comey exploded onto the scene, President Donald Trump is telling aides and confidants something he rarely does: He’s pleased at how Republicans and the White House led the charge to try and discredit the former FBI director.

Setting aside the ridiculous notion of Donald Trump being president, I would have said the stuff about the White House and Republicans openly celebrating a campaign to discredit an FBI director, much less a stalwart Republican like Comey, would be absurd and no one would believe it. They were the “law and order” party. They love FBI directors.

There’s no need to belabor this little time-travel exercise. It’s just that sometimes you have to acknowledge the strangeness of what’s going on. This is just one small example, but it’s a significant one. The president and his minions in the media and, more significantly, in the Congress are working overtime to discredit witnesses in a counterintelligence investigation involving … the president. And they are bragging about their success to the news media.

On Thursday night the Department of Justice finally relented and released the long-sought “Comey memos,” which the former FBI director had written to document his meetings with Trump and other members of the White House during those first few months of the Trump administration. Just like the infamous “Nunes memo,” they are basically duds as far as new information is concerned. This should come as no surprise: Comey testified at length before Congress and wrote a book about all this that he’s currently appearing on every TV show in the known world to promote. Apparently, Trump’s allies hoped or believed these would prove Comey was lying and instead they have now proved to everyone that he wasn’t. They’re reduced to making absurd observations that Comey never once wrote that he “felt obstructed.”

Still, it was a thrilling day for Trump. His Justice Department referred former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for possible criminal charges. Finally, one of his perceived political enemies was getting what was coming to him.

McCabe was referred on the basis of the FBI inspector general’s report finding that he had shown a “lack of candor” about an unauthorized leak to the Wall Street Journal confirming that the FBI was still investigating the Clinton Foundation. You’ll recall that McCabe was fired in a highly unorthodox fashion for this infraction, just hours before he was to officially retire and weeks before the report was released in full.

According to former FBI counter-intelligence official Frank Figliuzzi, who recently discussed all this on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” this referral is unusual:

If it is true that the charge that is being referred is for a lack of candor during an internal inquiry, I cannot recall that ever happening in my 25-year FBI career. I also headed the office of professional responsibility adjudication unit. I was the chief inspector of the FBI during my career and that’s a new one on me. So, what I was thinking is that the referral would be for an unauthorized leak — that McCabe actually conceded that he did allow his subordinates to talk to the media and disclosed the existence of a case. That sounded more prosecutable than lacking candor during an internal inquiry. I don’t know if he was under oath or not, but nonetheless the remedy for that is termination not criminal referral. So I’m troubled by this, if the reporting is correct.

James Comey told Rachel Maddow on Thursday night that there were two people in the FBI who had authorization to provide such information to the media at the time: Himself and Andrew McCabe. So a criminal referral on that count would seem to be odd as well.

It appears that McCabe is facing potential criminal indictment for a so-called crime not easily found in the statute books (“lack of candor”) or over a leak he was specifically authorized to make. This is not the end of this story.