As the Wiseguys Turn: McCabe, Comey,and the FBI Boys
But nature abhors a vacuum, and now it appears we have a new crew of wiseguys, this one operating out of Washington, D.C., with its headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover building, otherwise known as FBI headquarters. The news is that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe—who has been referred to the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia for possible criminal prosecution by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice’s inspector general—wants immunity in exchange for testifying in front of the Senate judiciary committee headed by Charles Grassley of Iowa. At issue are allegedly false statements McCabe made to investigators looking into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and how that “investigation” was handled by former officials at Justice and FBI, among them attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey.
Pass the popcorn—and
this double feature’s just getting started. For, in addition to Little
Caesar, there’s a James
Cagney classic from 1935 called G Men that
everybody involved in this unintended remakeought to watch before the curtain rises. Cagney,
in his first major role as a good guy after the string of gangster movies that
made him a star, plays Brick Davis, a young lawyer whose legal education, as
luck would have it, was financed by a prominent gangster wanting him to go
straight.
Scrupulously honest,
Cagney’s straight-arrow character has no clients as a result. He turns down an
offer from a pal to join the FBI, but when his friend is murdered by gangsters,
Cagney joins the Bureau, vowing to get the killers. Naturally, this puts him in
direct conflict with his mentor, and it all ends bloodily but happily. Cagney’s
character even manages to survive, unlike in the actor’s famous outings in The Public
Enemy, Angels with
Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat.
But now it seems we’ve flipped the script: what began as an investigation into
Russian “collusion” on the part of the Trump campaign and perhaps the president
himself, is now steadily being revealed as the sham byproduct of the
fixed-fight “probe” of the Clinton email “matter” that allowed the former
secretary of state to head into the 2016 election “cleared” of any wrongdoing
by the Obama “justice” department. Vengeful over her surprising (but not to me)
loss, the Woman Scorned and her cronies in the former administration and the
intelligence community then concocted the “collusion” narrative, obligingly
peddled to the public by the Democrat-controlled media, to strangle the Trump
presidency in its cradle.
And they almost got
away with it.
The first clue that
the plot was going sideways was the December 2016 announcement by McCabe, Comey’s right-hand man, that he
would be “retiring” from the FBI in early 2018, just after fully investing in
his lavish, taxpayer-funded pension. This was, recall, before the
straight-arrow Comey’s own firing in
May 2017 by Trump, employing a legal justification for the dismissal written by
deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who then turned around and appointed
another noted straight arrow Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor to look
into the “collusion” and the origins of Comey’s canning.
Then, on the eve before McCabe was going to cash out, he was suddenly defenestrated by somnolent attorney general Jeff
Sessions for lying to investigators regarding his role in the Clinton email
investigation. He’s also suspected of leaking to various friendly media outlets
in a disinformation operation designed to cover his own posterior. And now,
facing the committee, he may well take the Fifth if his demand for immunity is not granted.
In short, it’s a
perfect circle of jerks—a bunch of Beltway lawyers (like Brick Davis) in charge
of the nation’s cop shop, but who (unlike Brick Davis) have never grilled a
suspect or traded shots with the goombahs: desk jockeys well versed in Beltway
Borgia backstabbing, but otherwise completely useless in any real investigative
function.
But that’s what
happens when you have career liars-for-hire running the investigative agencies
instead of, you know, real investigators. Back in the early days of the Bureau, the FBI
would take law-enforcement pros and make them get law degrees; now it hires
lawyers and gives them a badge and a gun. As I wrote in the New York
Post after
Comey’s firing:
So who should replace Comey? The rumor mills are already churning out names of the
usual suspects: a judge
(Michael J. Garcia), a prosecutor (Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher), a
politician (Sen. John Cornyn of Texas), a veteran fed (Acting FBI Director
Andrew McCabe) and the Richmond FBI head (Adam Lee).
But the country doesn’t need another politician, jurist
or prosecutor at the bureau. It needs someone dogged, determined, experienced,
impartial and fearless. Someone sworn to protect and serve, who will follow the
evidence wherever it leads and make the appropriate recommendations in the name
of justice. Incorruptible and impartial.
In other words, a cop—the best one we have.
That didn’t happen,
of course. Instead we got another Ivy
League lawyer,
Christopher Wray.
It remains to be seen
how this movie turns out; after all, the last act has yet to be written. But
this time, it’s the good guys—not the media mouthpieces who routinely leap to
the defense of the Democrats—acting as the screenwriters. McCabe’s in serious trouble and, if and when he
falls, or rolls over, the sanctimonious Comey may be in for it, too. What other
ending can there be in a plot for a man who leaked his own memos to the press
in order to encourage the duplicitous Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller
(Comey’s immediate predecessor at the FBI) to look into the Russian “collusion”
charges? What will satisfy the audience more than comeuppance for a man who
passed off a dossier that originated with the Clinton campaign and was
facilitated by the media in the form of Fusion GPS, the oppo-research
organization founded by former journalists and responsible for commissioning a former
MI6 spy to compile this imaginary pile of concocted hearsay called “evidence”
from Russian “sources” that was then presented by… who else? Rosenstein!—to
the FISA courts.
Can the plot get any
thicker?
As the saying goes,
you can’t make this stuff up, unless you actually do. But perhaps the gangsters
inside the FBI and Justice ought to remember how their namesake, Rico, got his
comeuppance—filled full of Hollywood lead and mouthing his last words: “Mother
of Mercy – is this the end of Rico?”
Mother of Mercy, is
this the end of Washington’s public enemies?
It’s the ending the
audience is just dying to see.
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