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Attorney General Jeff Sessions Fires Andrew McCabe
From the Washington Post:
Published in PoliticsAttorney General Jeff Sessions late Friday night fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a little more than 24 hours before McCabe was set to retire.
Sessions announced the decision in a statement just before 10 p.m., noting that both the Justice Department Inspector General and the FBI office that handles discipline had found “that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor — including under oath — on multiple occasions.”
Is he being prosecuted or was he fired and by being fired has lost his pension?
My understanding is he did not lose his pension. He gets 99.9% of it. Anyone else have more info on the details of the pension?
Reporters have been all over the map on whether his pension will be lost, pro-rated, reduced, awarded in full. I’ve stopped following it for now.
Remember when Sessions took the advice of Obama holdovers at DOJ and recused himself, setting forth this slow coup (with an assist from Trump’s bungled Comey firing).
How much credit does Sessions get for that from the MSM and the MSNBC/Morning Joe conservatives when acting upon the recommendation of the Office of Professional Responsibility now?
My guess is next to none.
This is probably going to start a ball rolling. An Indiana Jones sized ball.
I might be wrong – found this at WaPo:
No lawsuit is necessary. Yet. It’s an administrative action to deny the retirement and he can appeal the decision through the appeals process, which will eventually be decided by an administrative judge. Most likely he can’t resort to the article III courts until he has exhausted his remedies through the administrative law process. For you and me, typically that would take years. I’m sure his appeal would take until either 2020 or 2024 at the earliest, and if Trump’s successor is a democrat his appeal will suddenly be approved and he will receive retroactive retirement pay with interest.
Good info on the process. Of course, by 2020 he may well have been indicted, and if indicted he will squeal like a pig on all his former friends, including Comey. Hopefully for his sake, he doesn’t have any dirt to dish on the Clintons, because they have a way of making people shut up before testifying.
I’m verklempt.
A special counsel to clean house at the Bureau and the DoJ is badly needed. Comey, McCabe, the Ohrs, Strzok, Lisa Page should not feel that they are beyond prosecution. Comey, particularly has a habit of running off with his mouth and also leaked confidential FBI information to the press – a violation of law. It’s more problematic for McCabe to fight for his pension if he’s sitting in a jail cell. I believe there are orange jumpsuits that will fit all of these reprobates.
His pension? He’s going to get a $5 million dollar book deal. His pension will be couch change.
Exactly. For those of us who have been following all of this, and who realize that what has been going on is nothing less than the politicization of our alphabet agencies, which are not supposed to play favorites at all, there is indeed a sense of relief at hearing that the Office of Professional Responsibility has been doing its job.
Which is far more than can be said about any of the people you mention. Every one that you mention is responsible for Gen Michael Flynn taking a rap he possibly didn’t deserve and causing him his bankruptcy in the process. And in addition to the fact that the public now knows that the FBI agents interviewing people like Flynn were told to make up the reports, the 304’s, of what the interviewed subjects said, this all means Flynn might well have been innocent. However this whole gang of lizard people had to get Flynn, because they thought by getting him they could get someone who would rat out Trump.
The only “shame” here is that McCabe didn’t resign in disgrace when all these revelations began. Although I would also allow that it was a shame that Sessions didn’t fire him then.
Actually, Sessions or somebody pretty much had to fire him. His actions, even limited to the ones we know about, render him unqualified for even the lowest security clearance. When I was doing backgrounds, we would rate his activities “D-level” issues – meaning that they are on their face disqualifying.
Re: his pension – much of what you all are citing would apply if he had left under different circumstances. The fact that he was “fired,” (dismissed for cause) changes everything re: eligibility for a pension. It’s been too long since I left federal employment to remember details, and frankly I never worried about being fired, but I know that it is not going to go well for him, at least as far as his pension goes.
The book deal, the duty – less “consultant jobs” he’ll get – that’s something else. That’s the real shame.
From what I understand, the firing means only that he is no longer eligible for full early retirement, i.e., a full pension at age 50; but he will still receive his civil service pension starting at age 62.
So the firing moves him from a very, very sweet deal to only a modified, limited sweet deal. He’ll actually have to work for a few more years (unless his “lack of candor — including under oath” gets him disbarred. Stay tuned.
@fritz is correct in #42 I think. If it is similar to most federal civil service pensions, McCabe has been separated from the federal agency 1 day short of being fully vested, which is generally a big dollar amount difference in retirement income. There has been some reference in news reports to FBI having some of the best pension plans in government.
The loss in pension and possible prosecution have to be some of the most serious penalties facing civil servants. Sessions couldn’t have sent a stronger “by the book” signal that would be more understood by DOJ/FBI employees. Despite what McCabe and many press are alleging, it is based on a process that’s been in place long before Donald Trump became POTUS to address serious misconduct such as McCabe has been reported to have committed.
blood thirsty neocon
. . . the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) recommended that he be fired.
Yea, shame on Sessions. What took him so long?
Fire Mueller too.
This is exactly the way it works. This dynamic is a very, very big deal on every level of the left. It is a critical component of how the left takes and keeps ground. Every single congress person that lost their seat for voting for the ACA got taken care of.
I don’t know a lot about it, but I hear this is pretty extensive in Minnesota.
This seems bad.
I hope I get to hear one NT cogent view on this. Fat chance.
Tom Nichols weighs in.
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For the record, Trump makes me very very nervous because he lacks civic knowledge and experience etc. and he’s an inflationist. Everyone is an inflationist, but he’s more than most “capitalists”.
He’s been very good on the former considering everything, and I hope the rest of it works out.
The firing of McCabe is part of a tapestry.
It is not enough for McCabe to lose his job, it is necessary to strip him of his pension.
It is not enough to fire Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, it was necessary to do so without a face to face meeting, but by a tweet.
It is not enough to seek to discredit Stormy Daniels, it is necessary to threaten her with violence, and a $20 million claim against her.
It is not enough to push Canada on tariffs, it is necessary to lie to Canada’s Prime Minister, and then brag about lying.
Trump is a grifter and a bully. He has dishonored our country. Winning is not enough for him, he must crush his opponents. It is time for this sorry administration to end, as well as all who enable Trump.
You have no idea who is threatening her with violence. She signed a nondisclosure for compensation. What is Trump supposed to do?
My understanding is he can’t keep his pension because it’s a crime to lie to his own inspector general.
From what I can tell, McCabe is criminal jeopardy for engaging in what was normal for Soviet “law enforcement”.
How much did his old lady get from Terry McAuliffe? Remember the timing? What was it really for?
I’m really tired of hearing about McCabe’s pension.
What he did was bad enough that professionals at the Department of Justice recommended his firing after investigating his behavior. This isn’t a narcissistic Trump tantrum because McCabe called him a moron ala Tillerson, or refused to engage in unethical behavior to make the President happy like Comey or Sessions, or simply a case of not liking the man like McMaster. McCabe’s firing presumably would have happened under any President given that there was an Inspector General investigation that found what this one did.
With that in mind, this public whining about his pension is ludicrous. It’s apparently a massive injustice, because the timing of the report meant he had a few days to go, yet that doesn’t change at all that what he did was worth being fired and potentially disbarred over.
I feel like one of Zeno’s paradoxes applies here. McCabe will always have to hold on to his job some number of days to get the pension. At what point during this infinite process of movement through time does he become implicitly entitled to the pension despite never reaching the date that he is entitled to the pension?
Would this question need be asked if McCabe committed any other impropriety that would have required a firing? Would we apply this thinking to anybody else? If I murdered someone on the day before my 67th birthday, would it be appropriate for the police to wait a day before arresting me so I could file for social security?
Jeb Bush Took $2 million for being on the board of insurance company (I think over less than five years) that he knew was going to try to profit off of the ACA. They were for it. Half of the GOP Ruling Class are unethical like this.
I know a kid goes to Harvard. For some dumb reason, his government professor invited Jeb Bush to lecture. Of course he could barely handle the Q&A so he left early. He knew what he was getting into; how could that happen?
Why did he have a pension? I thought retirement was privatized for Federal Employees except for military and Congress.
Here’s a summary of the pension rules. Beware!
http://www.federalretirement.net/fers_eligibility.htm
I’d bet on two things:
1. In the end, this guy will get his full pension.
2. There will probably be some kind of investigation of how this went down.
Mean. Does that conform to Ricochet rules for behavior. I don’t think there’s an answer in there anyway.
This is McCabe’s position:
NT and the left is saying Trump pressured the IG for a result. I can’t imagine how the IG and the OPR don’t have airtight documentation given what is at stake.
If McCabe only loses his pension, he’ll be getting off way lucky. The Big House should be his home for the rest of his days, if there is any justice in the world.
More to chew on:
New Texts Reveal FBI’s Peter Strzok Had Relationship With Recused Judge In Flynn Case
by Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/16/2018 – 15:22
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Recently discovered text messages – that were deliberately hidden from Congress – reveal that disgraced FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page conspired to meet with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge, Rudolph Contreras, who as we reported last December, “mysteriously recused” himself from handling the case against Michael Flynn, reports The Federalist, which has seen the text messages.