It's been less than a week since former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions after a recommendation for termination from the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility.
The drama surrounding the lawful and justified firing hasn't stopped since and late Wednesday night, ABC News dropped a bombshell story alleging Sessions was under FBI investigation last year for perjury. The man leading the charge? Andrew McCabe.
Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a "lack of candor," McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.
Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.
According to the report, the investigation came after Democrat Senators requested the FBI look into contacts Sessions had with the Russians during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign and the White House transition between November 2016 and January 2017.
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."
Yikes.
As Mollie Hemingway notes over at The Federalist, this story was likely leaked to ABC by team McCabe or McCabe himself in an effort to undermine Sessions in the wake of his firing. That strategy is backfiring and instead bolsters accusations the FBI is highly politicized and allowing Democrat Senators, with whom they agree, to drive criminal investigations.
