Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is really getting under Donald Trump’s skin as he makes the rounds talking about why the firing of former FBI Director James Comey prompted the FBI to open an investigation into whether Trump was working for or with Russia. According to McCabe, in an interview with 60 Minutes, a “crime may have been committed” when Trump fired Comey.
McCabe laid out why the Comey firing was suspicious: “And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would a president of the United States do that?’” Well, when you put it like that …
Trump is predictably irate, spending the morning tweeting from Mar-a-Lago (before heading to his golf club for the third day in a row). In Trump’s telling, the players are “disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe” and “Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty)”—not clear here if the other beauty is Rosenstein or Sessions, the latter of whom, remember, was one of Trump’s top campaign surrogates before Trump made him attorney general, only to turn against him because he recused himself from the Russia investigation. And what were McCabe and Rosenstein doing? They “look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught.....” The illegal act? “This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”
The “illegal and treasonous” plan in question is … the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The very definition of legal, in other words. Part of the foundation of our freaking laws. But hey, a Fox News commentator says it was an “illegal coup attempt,” so case closed in Trump’s eyes.
Donald Trump’s actions and words were so suspicious that they led the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the sitting president of the United States. The special counsel’s investigation keeps getting charges against and guilty pleas by Trump’s former close associates. Trump claims this is all a witch hunt, the investigations themselves somehow evidence that he’s innocent. But really, we’re all just trying to get through the billowing columns of smoke to find out how bad the fire is.