Less than a week after Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to fire FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe mere days before his planned retirement, a new ABC News report indicates McCabe helped to launch a criminal probe of Sessions following complaints about his congressional testimony. According to the report, “several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe” sometime last year. Despite McCabe’s involvement, Sessions had no knowledge of the investigation’s existence when he decided to fire him late last Friday.
The probe into Sessions was evidently initiated after “Democratic lawmakers… repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate”:
According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate “all contacts” Sessions may have had with Russians, and “whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred.”
While Rosenstein and McCabe’s decision to “put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move,” however, Sessions by then had already recused himself from all things Russia. The criminal probe and related matters were ultimately folded into Robert Mueller’s expanding investigation per Rosenstein’s orders, resulting in the attorney general’s subsequent interview with the special counsel’s team.
Even so, Sessions’s personal attorney, Chuck Cooper told ABC News that “[t]he Special Counsel’s office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress.”
(Via ABC News)