Comey/McCabe/Rosenstein: The Coup Co-Conspirators

This conspiracy was a much more significant assault on our Constitution than Richard Nixon’s concealment of the DNC/Watergate burglary.

“We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” —John Adams (1797)

Disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who became acting director after Donald Trump fired his disgraced mentor and boss, James Comey, is doing a masterful job promoting his new book, The Threat.

Last weekend, he launched the book tour with a “60 Minutes” interview — the first public interview since his own firing. McCabe managed to parlay that softball session into top-of-the-fold headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and a succession of follow-up interviews featuring his ever-evolving justification for his actions.

Seeding interest in McCabe’s remarks, his interviewer, CBS’s Scott Pelley (who must be getting a cut of McCabe’s book sales), offered up this teaser: “The most illuminating and surprising thing in the interview to me were these eight days in May when all of these things were happening behind the scenes… There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment. These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president.”

Until now, discussions about using the “25th Amendment” to remove our duly elected president from office, originally attributed to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as well as Rosenstein’s own suggestion that he could wear a wire to entrap Trump, had been dismissed as facetious.

But McCabe says no. Rosenstein “raised the issue” of the 25th Amendment and “offered to wear a wire into the White House.” McCabe says Rosenstein added: “I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there.”

McCabe insists, “He was not joking. He was absolutely serious. And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had.”

Asked by Pelley if Rosenstein was “actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the Cabinet who would vote to remove the president,” McCabe replied, “That’s correct. Counting votes or possible votes.”

McCabe claimed he rejected Rosenstein’s offer to surveil Trump: “I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time.”

Huh? “I never actually considered” it, but “I did discuss it” with everyone, including the lawyers?

He said then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker rejected the idea: “I think the general counsel had a heart attack. And when he got up off the floor, he said, ‘I, I, that’s a bridge too far. We’re not there yet.’” In his testimony before the House in October 2018, Baker confirmed, “I had the impression that the deputy attorney general had already discussed this with two members in the president’s Cabinet and that they were on board with this concept already.”

Let this sink in.

According to McCabe, and confirmed by Baker, the highest-level officials at the FBI and DoJ were seriously discussing use of the 25th Amendment to remove the president of the United States from office. They were doing so, undoubtedly, with the full knowledge and support of then-FBI Director James Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan.

As I noted last week, former Harvard constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz protested the McCabe/Rosenstein conspiracy: “The 25th Amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It’s not about the most fundamental disagreements. Any Justice Department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution.”

Indeed, the fact that the highest levels of the FBI and DoJ had become so politically compromised that a discussion of the 25th Amendment was acceptable and not laughable is grievous. And outrageous. And the stuff of banana republics.

These bureaucrats have been drinking government Kool-Aid made with contaminated Beltway water for so long that their chronic “Potomac fever” has grotesquely distorted their perception of reality.

However, it’s what they did next that is the most egregious insult to their oaths “to support and defend” our Constitution.

McCabe was already knee-deep in the conspiracy to take down Trump.

Recall that he was one of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s most influential deep-state operatives, and he became suspect in his role to oust Trump from office after a series of text messages between McCabe’s FBI colleagues, Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page, were disclosed in December 2017.

Ahead of the 2016 election, Strzok, who was also the FBI’s lead “investigator” of the Clinton email scandal, described the prospect of Trump defeating Clinton as “terrifying.” Page wrote to Strzok, “There is no way [Trump] gets elected.” Strzok replied, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office … that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy…”

But Strzok and Page were not referencing McCabe’s 25th Amendment discussions. They were referring to the real coup d’etat strategy cooked up by McCabe and Rosenstein — a slow-burn coup against Trump to set him up for impeachment.

The most revealing thing about McCabe’s CBS interview was notthe discussion of the 25th Amendment but his actual admission he lit the fire on that slow-burner.

McCabe (whose wife, a candidate for political office in Virginia, was also embedded within the Clinton political machine) initiated theTrump/Putin collusion investigationbased on the FISA warrant made possible by the fake Clinton/Fusion dossier leaked by James Comey.

According to McCabe: “I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion. That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. … I wanted to make sure that … if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision.”

According to that record, there are Comey and McCabe fingerprints all over the origins and motives of the Trump investigation. It was then Rosenstein, with McCabe’s backing, who appointed Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team of Clintonistas, though there is no indication Mueller was connected to the Clinton/FBI/DoJ endeavor to set Trump up.

Consequently, Mueller has spent the last two years, with the assistance of Democrat Party principals and their Leftmedia publicists, doing everything possible to obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Regarding Mueller’s investigation, asked if he believed Trump was a “Russian asset,” McCabe replied, “I think it’s possible. I think that’s why we started our investigation. And I’m really anxious to see where Director Mueller concludes that.”

Asked if he believed Russians ordered Trump to fire Comey, McCabe answered, “We don’t know.”

Seriously, he is that delusional. That answer is as absurd as if he had given the same response when asked, “Did aliens from another galaxy order Trump to fire Comey?”

Regarding his own firing, McCabe now laughably claims that was because he opened the Trump investigation — part of his book-promotion schtick. But the DoJ inspector general’s report notes that, indeed, McCabe lied under oath repeatedly and was fired for “lacking candor [read: lying] under oath.”

Regardless of political affiliation, all Americans should be gravely concerned about this dangerous episode in American political history — a much more significant assault on our Constitution than Richard Nixon’s concealment of the DNC/Watergate burglary. In fact, Watergate was a wading pool compared to the deep, dark depths of collusion between the FBI, DoJ, and the Clinton campaign. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy concludes that the whole “collusion” charade is about “the criminalization of policy disputes.” And he’s absolutely correct.