Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially made the decision last week to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, threatening his full pension. McCabe, who has a net worth of $11 million, is still eligible for a partial pension, but not the full $1.8 million he would’ve received, had he not been fired before turning 50.
Liberal pundits were quick to blast the move as a politically motivated – which I’m not sure anyone doubted in the first place. McCabe himself said much of the same in a statement following his firing, stating, “This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally.”
The firing of McCabe certainly was politically motivated and for good reason. The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that he had improperly talked to the media and had “lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions” during the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. It was also highly suspicious that McCabe stepped down from his post just days before the Nunes Memo was published.
McCabe is hardly innocent, and, ironically, McCabe himself has suspended an FBI agent without pay for a similar offense.
According to the Conservative Tribune:
Back in 2017, Fred Humphries — a 21-year veteran of the FBI, the same as McCabe — complained to the Tampa Times of a double standard in how the Michael Flynn and David Petraeus cases had been handled by the FBI.
The story of Humphries’ involvement in the Petraeus case is a rather torturous one. As the Tampa Times points out, Humphries came into the spotlight in 2012 “after family friend Jill Kelley reached out to him about a troubling e-mail received by then-Marine Gen. John Allen, one of her military friends. It ‘disparaged Kelley and made reference to an upcoming dinner they were having with several senior foreign intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials,’ according to court documents later filed.” Kelley was concerned about a possible breach of security, considering that Gen. Allen had recently taken over for Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan after Petraeus became President Barack Obama’s CIA director. After turning it over to his FBI office’s cyber crimes investigator in June of 2012, he noticed that the investigation was being delayed.
The investigation eventually revealed Petraeus was having an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and had also passed confidential information to her. That led to his political downfall. However, Humphries’ problems were just beginning. Humphries had contacted his old supervisor about his concerns that the affair was being hushed up because, in the supervisor’s words, “hey, nobody wants to stir anything up before the election.”
The supervisor, concerned Petraeus could be blackmailed, contacted a congressman who contacted then-House Whip Eric Cantor, a GOP representative from Virginia. He contacted the FBI, wondering why there was a cover-up.
There’s a certain level of hypocrisy there, when “the DOJ was willing to go to the Trump White House over concerns that Flynn could be blackmailed for his ties to Russia, yet Obama’s DOJ during the Petraeus scandal claimed they had done nothing to inform the president that Petraeus could be blackmailed.”
Humphries’ mistake here was speaking to the press about his concerns without permission, and he was punished accordingly. Andy McCabe promptly ordered an investigation into Humphries, which led to a 60-day suspension for him, and his eventual resignation for the Bureau. He resigned from the Bureau the same day McCabe was fired, by the way. Unlike McCabe, his departure was by choice.
“I was encouraged and hopeful,” Humphries said following McCabe’s firing. “Every employee of the FBI voluntarily swears to observe the bureau’s strict standards of conduct, especially in terms of candor and ethics. Saturday’s firing of the former deputy director demonstrates that those sanctions are meted out uniformly, regardless of rank or position.”
Amen.
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