In an op-ed for the Washington Post published late Friday, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe revealed that he had learned of his firing not from President Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but from a friend who was watching CNN. “On March 16, I spent the day with my family waiting to hear whether I would be fired,” he writes. “Around 10 p.m., a friend called to tell me that CNN was reporting that I had been fired. She read me the attorney general’s statement.”
McCabe goes on to say that he did receive an email from an unnamed Justice Department official notifying him of his termination, but apparently not before the White House addressed the news cycle first. “Not in my worst nightmares did I ever dream my FBI career would end this way,” he notes:
So, after two decades of public service, I found out that I had been fired in the most disembodied, impersonal way — third-hand, based on a news account. Shortly after getting word, I noticed an email from a Justice Department official in my work account, telling me that I had been “removed from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the civil service.”
That the ex-FBI deputy director learned of his fate via a news report watched by someone else isn’t unheard of in the steadily growing catalog of axed Trump White House staffers. When FBI Director James Comey was suddenly fired last May, he initially thought it was a joke when he first caught wind of it from cable news. More recently, former State Secretary Rex Tillerson was reportedly “blindsided” to learn he’d finally been ousted by Trump’s tweets announcing his replacement, CIA Director Mike Pompeo. (Steve Goldstein, the State Department aide who revealed this to the press, was promptly fired for doing so.)
(Via Washington Post)