Saunders: Take McCabe with grain of salt

“That’s obviously the problem he has as he’s doing his book tour and describing various situations with the president,” said Gregory A. Brower, Nevada’s former U.S. attorney and a former FBI congressional liaison who worked with McCabe.

‘Singled out’

McCabe’s interview with “60 Minutes” arrived ahead of the release next week of his memoir, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.”

At the time of his own firing, McCabe said in a statement, “I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.”

Trump first set his sights on McCabe because the FBI deputy director oversaw the FBI probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, despite what Trump saw as a conflict of interest.

McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, ran for the Virginia state Senate in 2015. She lost, but a PAC run by the Virginia Democratic Party and then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a supersize figure in Clinton’s world, gave her campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the FBI began the investigation into the Clinton emails, McCabe did not recuse himself because the campaign was in the past and he was not involved in it. On Nov. 1, 2016, after The Wall Street Journal reported on McCabe’s role, he recused himself from the Clinton probe.

As The Wall Street Journal started looking into McCabe’s role, he decided to leak information about a Justice Department higher-up having pushed him to back off on the Clinton probe because it was happening close to the 2016 election. Like so many leakers, McCabe was behind a leak that made him look good. And when federal investigators started to probe the leak, McCabe told them a lot of information seemed to be coming out of the New York FBI office, according to the IG report.

Later, after McCabe decided to set the record straight and admit he was the source, an agent testified that he told McCabe: “Sir, you understand that we put a lot of work into this based on what you told us. I mean, and I even said, long nights and weekends working on this, trying to find out who amongst your ranks of trusted people would, would do something like that.”

On “60 Minutes,” McCabe talked about meetings at which Department of Justice officials discussed whether there were enough officials — the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet — to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment.

Brower objects to the way Trump talks about the FBI probe as stacked against him. If there were conversations about the 25th Amendment, he added, “Obviously nothing ever happened.”

Got it. But when you see McCabe on television talking about his fears about Russia having gotten Trump into the Oval Office, remember that the inspector general concluded that he misled federal authorities — and he was so good at it, they believed him.

Debra J. Saunders is a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist. dsaunders@reviewjournal.com; Twitter.com/DebraJSaunders