Andrew McCabe was facing demotion if he stayed at the FBI and told friends he felt pressured to leave. New York Times:
In a recent conversation, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, raised concerns about a forthcoming inspector general report examining the actions of Mr. McCabe and other senior F.B.I. officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the bureau was investigating both Hillary Clinton’s email use and the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. In that discussion, according to one former law enforcement official close to Mr. McCabe, Mr. Wray suggested moving Mr. McCabe into another job, which would have been a demotion.
Instead, the former official said, Mr. McCabe chose to leave.
His departure was not announced at the bureau, leaving agents to learn of it from news reports. Mr. Wray, who was sworn in as director in August, named the bureau’s No. 3 official, David L. Bowdich, as his acting deputy.
Never forget for a minute who Christopher Wray is. He's Chris Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer and was a tool of Trump’s before Trump’s nomination by tweet in the heat of the Comey hearings. Wray’s firm also represented Russian oil companies, not surprisingly. All the breadcrumbs seem to lead home to Mother Russia, don’t they? USA Today, June 8,, 2017:
The most troubling issue that Wray may face [being confirmed] is the fact that his law firm — King & Spalding — represents Rosneft and Gazprom, two of Russia’s largest state-controlled oil companies.
Rosneft was prominently mentioned in the now infamous 35-page dossier prepared by former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele. The dossier claims that the CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, offered candidate Donald Trump, through Trump’s campaign manager Carter Page, a 19% stake in the company in exchange for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. The dossier claims that the offer was made in July while Page was in Moscow.
Rosneft is also the company that had a $500 billion oil drilling joint-venture with Exxon in 2012, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was Exxon’s CEO. However, the deal was nixed by President Obama in 2014, when he imposed the sanctions that crippled Russia’s ability to do business with U.S. companies. The lifting of sanctions by the Trump administration would enable Exxon to renew its joint venture agreement with Rosneft, and the law firm of King & Spalding could end up in the middle of the contract negotiations between those two companies.
There is a lot of reason to question whether Wray can lead the FBI with the level of independence and non-partisanship that has characterized other directors. The fact that Andrew McCabe just got railroaded out of the bureau would tend to belie that premise.