The Daily - Monday, Mar. 19, 2018

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

President Trump called the firing of Andrew G. McCabe, the deputy F.B.I. director, a “great day for democracy.” Mr. McCabe says it’s further evidence of the president’s efforts to undermine the Russia investigation. What really happened? Guest: Matt Apuzzo, a New York Times reporter in Washington. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump calls the firing of Andrew McCabe a great day for democracy. Andrew McCabe says it's further evidence of the president's efforts to undermine the Russia investigation. What really happened to the deputy director of the FBI? It's Monday, March 19th.

Matt, take us back to the tweet that President Trump sent about Andrew McCabe way back in December. What did that tweet say? The tweet said, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits, 90 days to go. Question mark, three exclamation points. Matt Apuzzo covers national security for The Times.

What was that tweet supposed to mean? The news had just broken that Andrew McCabe intended to retire as soon as he was eligible in March. And so he had 90 days to go. And obviously, when he got to that mark, he would be eligible for his full pension and his full benefits. I have to say here, Donald Trump tweeted very clearly that he was angry that McCabe was being allowed to retire with full benefits. He sees that as some sort of injustice, right? And so it had this sort of hint of what's going to happen to Andrew McCabe. Will he make it to 90 days? Will he get the retirement? Donald

Trump was actually hinting and sort of telegraphing that he wanted him fired before he could get his pension. So it was kind of a threat. Yeah, in that sort of Trumpian way. Donald Trump clearly thinks he will write Andy McCabe's story one tweet at a time. And why would the president be threatening McCabe back in December? McCabe was the FBI deputy director in 2016 during this crazy period where the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign. NBC News has learned that there's an ongoing FBI inquiry into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his ties to Russia. But was also investigating Hillary Clinton in her private email server. More breaking news, a bombshell in the race for the White House just 11 days

before Election Day. The head of the FBI sent a letter to Congress today announcing it is reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email use. And the Clinton Foundation. Fox News has learned this second ongoing FBI investigation looking into allegations of a pay for play scheme between Hillary Clinton's State Department and the Clinton Foundation has now taken a, quote, very high priority. And this is CNN breaking news. There's a big internal investigation going on into how the FBI handled all that. The inspector general of the Department of Justice has just launched a full-scale investigation of the Justice Department, the FBI's handling of investigations into the Hillary Clinton private

email server, among other issues. And McCabe was at the center of that investigation. Trump now stirring up politics even more. The president tweeting last night about McCabe questioning campaign donations to a political campaign of his wife's and speculating that McCabe had little time left in his tenure. wife's and speculating that McCabe had little time left in his tenure. McCabe's wife ran for a Virginia state Senate seat and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from a political ally of the Clintons. It's clear that the president wanted McCabe out by all accounts. Another tweet on December 23rd, Huck and FBI director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge,

along with Lincoln, James Comey of the phony Hillary Clinton investigation, including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails, be given $700,000 for his wife campaigned by Clinton puppets during investigation? And so Trump has sort of seized on that. Trump has accused McCabe of bias after an ally of Hillary Clinton's donated to his wife's political campaign. Trump tweeting on McCabe, these were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton. And you add all those together and McCabe is kind of like the perfect foil for the president. And, you know, he really symbolizes all that is irksome and loathsome about the FBI to the president. all that is irksome and loathsome about the FBI to the president.

Donald Trump has been tweeting about McCabe for quite some time. He can't stand the guy. So McCabe is under internal investigation to determine if he actually did anything wrong when it came to how the FBI conducted those two investigations involving both presidential candidates, Clinton and Trump, back in 2016. Right, and he actually, in anticipation of this report, took a leave of absence and has essentially been on the sidelines waiting for his retirement this month. The Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has just fired the former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe a little more than 24 hours before McCabe was set to retire after over two decades

as a federal employee. So Matt, was McCabe's firing on Friday night, was it based on the findings of this Department of Justice investigation? So I preface this by saying the inspector general's report has not been released. And so we haven't seen the full allegations against him. What we know is that McCabe was asked about his decision to let the public affairs office at the FBI and a senior lawyer at the FBI engage with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal about the kind of behind-the-scenes machinations that were going on during the Clinton Foundation investigation. So during the campaign? In the final days of the campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, secret recordings of a suspect talking about the foundation sparked an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the between the Justice Department and the FBI, where it appears that McCabe and the FBI engaged with the journal to basically say, no, no,

we are pushing forward in that investigation. Despite DOJ's reluctance, we do think there's a reason to investigate. The Wall Street Journal was first to report last night that the Justice Department was in fact tapping the brakes on these public corruption cases. And in the summer, when Justice Learned FBI agents were still pursuing these leads connected to Clinton, they were beyond upset. And when asked about this, it appears that he was, according to the Justice Department, not initially truthful. McCabe. Correct. So that makes sense.

McCabe is trying to shore up the FBI's reputation and also his own when it comes to this investigation. But why would he be dishonest about it? I don't know the answer to that. And everybody I know in the FBI is asking that same question because it doesn't completely make sense that McCabe would go in there and just straight up lie. I really want to read this report because it doesn't make sense. He would have to have known that that was a catastrophic decision if he decided to go in there and lie. Well, Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he was just following recommendations from Justice Department officials because Andrew McCabe, quote, made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor,

including under oath, on multiple occasions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions put out a statement that relied on the findings of this Inspector General report and said that McCabe showed a lack of candor. A lack of candor. And that is pretty much the kiss of death at the FBI. The FBI disciplinary process excuses a lot. You can get suspended for DUIs or domestic violence, assault and battery, losing your gun.

But ultimately, you typically keep your job. Showing lack of candor is usually the death sentence. So ultimately, the stated reason for McCabe's firing doesn't actually have to do with this idea that President Trump has, which is that McCabe was biased against him because of his wife and the political donations and decisions he made around what to investigate or what not to investigate. around what to investigate or what not to investigate. It's that he was dishonest in his interactions around this contact with the media. Right. And so once the Inspector General report was finished, it was referred to career people at the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility. They're basically the internal affairs of the FBI. And they reviewed it, and they made a recommendation that he be fired.

And Sessions ultimately was the final arbiter of, was that a fair recommendation? Did he indeed show a lack of candor, and did he deserve to be fired? Well, obviously McCabe tells a different story, stating, For the last year and a half, my family and I have been targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Obviously, McCabe has come out very strongly in response to all this, and he's given a very different explanation for why he thinks that he was fired. Can you tell us what his version of this all is? Sure. I spoke to McCabe about this at length, and he's adamant that he did not mislead the Justice Department. And he can't talk about exactly what was going on because as part of the investigation, they make everybody sign

these nondisclosure agreements. So until the report is out, we can't kind of get involved in a fact-by-fact analysis. But he basically said that he was truthful and that when he believed he was being misunderstood, he contacted the investigators to correct their misunderstanding. And that had the effect of looking like he had not been candid on the front end. So that's kind of what he says what's going on. But what he really says is going on is that I'm being singled out because of the role I played, the actions I took and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. The focus on me is part of an unprecedented effort by the administration, driven by the president himself, to remove me from my position and destroy my reputation. Well, McCabe's version of this,

that it's not about any lie he told, but that it's political, would seem to be supported by the president sending that tweet back in December, suggesting that McCabe might not make it to his retirement. And then, of course, when he was fired on Friday, it was 26 hours before he was set to retire, which just doesn't seem like a coincidence. And then... Shortly after the announcement, President Trump tweeted, Andrew McCabe fired a great day for the hardworking men and women of the FBI, a great day for democracy. Sanct and women of the FBI, a great day for democracy, sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choir boy.

He knew all about the lies. That feels like it really calls into question the idea that this firing isn't in some way political, right? It's hard to say without seeing the accusations against him. And I hate to keep coming back on that. But again, if the report comes out and it's as damning as Jeff Sessions says it is, I think then we think differently about the firing. But McCabe is coming out, you know, really, really aggressively in his own defense and saying, it's absolutely not true. I did not lie. I did not mislead anybody. And I'm being treated unfairly. And so right now, it's a lot of conflicting information. And the president doesn't help the Justice Department argue that this is a fair and non-political process by repeatedly engaging on this and gloating about this and having his

press secretary preemptively call him a bad actor before any decision is made. Sarah, if I could ask, does the president feel the Justice Department should act by Sunday to fire Andrew McCain? That's a determination that we would leave up to Attorney General Sessions, but we do think that it is well documented that he has had some very troubling behavior and by most accounts, a bad actor and should have some cause for concern. But that would be a determination that DOJ would have to make. What you have to understand is McCabe was deputy director and was directly overseeing the Russia investigation from its first days. So if you can damage McCabe's reputation and you can sort of say he's not credible,

then everything he touches becomes suspect. But secondly, as deputy director, he was witness to some of the things that are now under investigation as to questions of whether President Trump tried to obstruct justice, namely his conversations with James Comey, the now-fired FBI director, whether Trump tried to get Comey to shut down an FBI investigation, whether Trump tried to demand a loyalty oath. Those were things that were happening between Comey and Trump that are now being investigated, and McCabe was Comey's deputy. And Comey shared those conversations with McCabe. And so McCabe is in a position to corroborate key information

that Jim Comey had. And so his credibility, right, goes to the very credibility of Comey's own accusations. The big reveal over the weekend after McCabe's firing was, like former FBI director James Comey, McCabe wrote detailed memos describing his personal interactions with President Trump, which are important because Comey has made allegations that the president tried to get him to shut down investigations and tried to get him to take a loyalty oath. And the president tried to get him to shut down investigations and tried to get him to take a loyalty oath. And the president denied all this, but McCabe is in a position to corroborate those and apparently kept contemporaneous memos

on his conversations with Comey and kept notes and memos on his interactions with President Trump. So these memos that McCabe has kept, they could become part of the Mueller investigation, presumably. We have to assume they already are because they were left at the FBI. And because they are FBI materials, all of that is available to Mueller. So as Mueller goes out trying to corroborate what Jim Comey says, he has whatever McCabe left behind.

Does this all fuel Mueller's case for obstruction of justice, firing a senior level FBI figure involved in the original Russia investigation? Or does the fact that they found McCabe to be not candid make it kind of a safe move for the president and for Sessions? Yeah, I think it's hard to argue that firing McCabe fits into an obstruction case based on what we know now. Because there were recommendations by career people and they did follow a process, I think it becomes very hard to say that that was any sort of effort to shut anything down. The caveat there is we don't know yet what conversations the White House might have had with DOJ, what the president might have had with Sessions. If those conversations

were to come out where the president was talking about McCabe to Sessions, then I think that could be a problem. But as of the information we know now, it does feel like it would be hard to make that a part of any obstruction case. But was it short-sighted of the president to send that initial kind of ominous tweet way back in December about the 90-day countdown? And then this gleeful tweet over the weekend after McCabe was fired. Isn't this sort of like when Trump openly admitted that he had fired Comey because of Russia after he had fired Comey. And can't that be used against him? Well, it certainly undermines the Justice Department's efforts to make this look as apolitical as possible.

There's no question about that. administration would benefit from having people accept this firing as justified and by the book, then of course, these tweets do incredible damage to the credibility of that process. But if your goal is to get people suspicious of the Russia investigation and kind of just like make Andrew McCabe a shorthand for shenanigans at the FBI. And when you hear McCabe, don't trust that. If that's the goal, then he's doing exactly what he should be doing. So it looks like the White House is actually doing the work of connecting the firing of McCabe to its own argument for why the Mueller investigation should be shut down. So it does appear that they're making a case for ending what Mueller's up to. They are definitely trying to make that case, it appears. And I say it appears because

that's what's happening, you know, at this moment that I sit here, their strategy has sort of ping-ponged back and forth. And we appear to now be in this moment of where the gloves are off and the president and his lawyers want to go after Mueller directly. Maybe this is frustration that the investigation is still going on, but the stance on Mueller has definitely changed at the White House from, I think he's a good guy, a fair guy, and he's going to make a fair decision. To? Let's shut it down. Thank you, Matt.

Anytime. On Sunday morning, President Trump extended his accusations of partisan bias to include special counsel Robert Mueller's team, whom he has avoided going after until now. Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big crooked Hillary supporters, and zero Republicans, Trump tweeted. Does anyone think this is fair? Fact-checkers immediately cast doubt on that claim, noting, among other things, that Mueller himself is a Republican. And on Saturday, President Trump's personal lawyer called on the Justice Department to end the special counsel's investigation. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

A data consulting firm hired by the Trump campaign to build voter profiles bought private information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook users to develop its techniques. Times reporting found that the company, Cambridge Analytica, bought the information after receiving a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, on the promise that the company could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But at the time, the company lacked the data to actually do it. So the information was purchased from Facebook under the guise of academic research

and taken from people's Facebook profiles without their permission, making it one of the largest data breaches in Facebook's history and providing Cambridge Analytica with the information that underpinned its work with the Trump campaign. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked on the campaign. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.