McCabe’s firing shows how Trump’s behavior corrodes faith in government.
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.”
That’s John Brennan, the former CIA director, slamming Donald Trump after his attorney general fired former FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Those are not normal comments from a former CIA director. But then, these are not normal times.
McCabe’s firing shows how Trump has corroded the operations of the American government. There are real questions about McCabe’s performance at the FBI. But there are even deeper questions about Trump’s public vendetta against McCabe, and the role Sessions played in his termination.
McCabe is not innocent of wrongdoing. He made a questionable call (at best) about allowing a leak to the press during the 2016 campaign and then he appears to have lied about it, though he says it was an honest mistake. You can imagine a normal administration, and a normal process, weighing McCabe’s actions carefully and seriously.
But none of this is why Trump wanted McCabe gone, and “carefully and seriously” is not how the process was conducted. Trump wanted McCabe gone because of McCabe’s involvement in the Justice Department investigation of Russian meddling in the campaign. Trump thinks McCabe is a Comey-aligned Democrat who was biased against him. Trump believes his political appointees should protect him. Trump has been explicit in public about all of this. And he has spent months publicly slandering McCabe and pressuring Sessions to fire him.
Trump’s campaign had already worked. McCabe announced his retirement. The Trump administration fired him on Friday not to remove him from government, but to deny him the pension earned for over 20 years of government service. It was an act of punishment, not of personnel management.
This, then, is part of the cost of Trump’s daily venality: even when his administration makes a decision that might be justifiable on its own terms, the process by which that decision was made cannot be trusted, and may indeed be a scandal in its own right.
