The White House Has a Plan to Smear Andrew McCabe

Andrew McCabe testifies to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in May.

By Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

The White House finds itself in a familiar position: yet another tell-all book, this one by former deputy F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe, is making Donald Trump look bad. But this time, the administration isn’t just going into damage-control mode, as it did in response to similarly unflattering portraits of the president by the likes of Omarosa Manigault Newman, Michael Wolff, Bob Woodward, and James Comey. According to an Axios report, the administration is plotting to weaponize McCabe’s new best-seller, The Threat, to further the conspiracy theory that the Russia probe is part of a Deep State plot to sink Trump’s presidency.

In the book and on his accompanying press tour, McCabe portrays Trump as an incompetent, self-serving agent of chaos—an assessment shared by countless others in their accounts of his presidency. But McCabe has, in some ways, been even more blunt, telling Anderson Cooper Tuesday evening that he believes “it’s possible” that Trump is a Russian asset, and telling Savannah Guthrie that nobody in the bipartisan Gang of Eight had objected when he informed them he’d opened an F.B.I. counter-intelligence investigation into Trump. “That’s the important part here,” McCabe told Guthrie. “No one objected. Not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds, and not based on the facts.”

In more normal times, that might have been a bombshell. By now, however, such assessments are virtually par for the course. Rather than sounding alarm bells, it seems inevitable that they’ll be sifted through the partisan filters through which other warnings about this president have been received. For those who distrust Trump, McCabe will confirm their fears. For those who support him, McCabe’s book is more evidence that unseen powers have long been trying to subvert his presidency.

The White House, it seems, is attempting to use that divide to its advantage, looking to play up passages that make it seem as though a shady cabal of officials has been leading a “witch hunt.” The effort appears to already be underway: Trump has targeted McCabe with an array of Twitter attacks, accusing him of plotting a “very illegal act” with Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions, and emphasizing the link between the former F.B.I. deputy and Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017. “Remember this,” Trump tweeted Monday, “Andrew McCabe didn’t go to the bathroom without the approval of Leakin’ James Comey!” He has also backed claims by Dan Bongino, one of his Fox News buddies, that discussions McCabe said Rosenstein engineered about using the 25th Amendment to declare Trump unfit for office were part of an “illegal coup attempt.”

The notion that the F.B.I. was engaged in, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, a “silent coup” against Trump, is a matter one of the president’s top allies says he plans to investigate. “Was this an attempted bureaucratic coup? I don’t know,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on Face the Nation Sunday. “I don’t know who is telling the truth. I know Rosenstein vehemently denied it, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

That McCabe’s explanation for the origins of the Russia probe is so polarizing raises concerns about how the conclusions of that probe will be received. Robert Mueller is expected to release his findings soon, and the president’s camp is said to be worried about what will come of the investigation, which has already nabbed several top Trump officials. With Democrats controlling the House, an incriminating special-counsel report could indeed pose a threat. But in a stubbornly partisan Washington, where Trump has faced few tangible consequences, it’s far from impossible that whatever Mueller finds could be similarly swept up in partisanship. “I think that’s why we started our investigation,” McCabe told Cooper on CNN of the president’s suspiciously warm relationship with Russia. “And I’m really anxious to see where Mueller concludes that.”

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