The Department of Justice has told lawyers for former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that he will not face criminal charges for allegedly lying to investigators about a leak to the media, the ex-official’s attorneys said Friday.
“We write to inform you that, after careful consideration, the government has decided not to pursue criminal charges against your client,” J.P. Cooney of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. told McCabe’s attorneys in a letter Friday. “Based on the totality of the the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”
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McCabe’s lawyers Michael R. Bromwich and David Schertler responded in a statement, saying, “At long last, justice has been done in this matter.”
President Donald Trump had publicly urged that action be taken against McCabe, the former deputy FBI director who became acting head of the agency after Trump fired James Comey in 2017.
“He LIED! LIED! LIED!” Trump wrote in one 2018 tweet about McCabe after the Justice Department’s inspector general found McCabe “lacked candor” when being interviewed about whether he was a source for two news articles pertaining to the FBI in 2016.
The announcement came one day after Attorney General William Barr pushed back against criticism he’s using DOJ to do Trump’s bidding, and said Trump’s tweeting about his agency’s work was undercutting his authority.
“Public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department and about judges before whom we have cases make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity,” Barr told ABC News.
Trump has sounded off repeatedly about McCabe on Twitter over the past three years.
McCabe filed suit against the DOJ in August, saying he was fired as a result of “Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him.”
