9 years for Roger Stone; No charges for McCabe

FPI / February 17, 2020

In typical end-of-the-week news dump fashion, the Department of Justice announced on Friday that disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe would not be charged over false statements he made regarding an unauthorized leak to the media.

McCabe was fired in March 2018, shortly after a report by the DOJ’s inspector general concluded that he repeatedly and blatantly lied when questioned, including under oath.

So why wasn’t McCabe charged?

RedState columnist Bonchie pointed out what many others are thinking, that McCabe’s get-out-of-jail-free card is indicative of a “two tier” system of justice.

“What sense does it make for Michael Flynn to be railroaded into a guilty plea (including threatening his son), but McCabe gets completely off for doing the same thing? And not only the same thing, but doing it with a much clearer intent,” Bonchie wrote on Feb. 16.

The news that McCabe wouldn’t be charged “came on the heels of former Mueller prosecutors trying to send Roger Stone away for nine years for lying to a Congressional committee,” Bonchie noted. “None of it made any sense and it certainly didn’t seem fair. The two tier-justice appeared to be alive and well. And it is, but perhaps not for the reason some think.”

Bonchie continued: “After the DOJ sent a letter to McCabe’s lawyers telling them that the case was being closed without an indictment, the obvious person to blame was Bill Barr. He’s in charge here and it was his DOJ that appeared to be applying two standards of justice, whereby if you work for the government and yell orange man bad loud enough, you get away with whatever crimes you commit.

“There may be some blame there, but I think the answer to why McCabe is now going on CNN and proclaiming vindication is much simpler – career officials screwed this up, either on purpose or via incompetence.”

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy noted in a Feb. 15 analysis for National Review that “There have been rumblings that the McCabe investigation was botched.”

“There are growing indications that the Justice Department had lost confidence in the U.S. attorney who was overseeing the probe, Jesse Liu,” McCarthy wrote. “While Liu was once seen as a rising Trump administration star, she was quietly edged out of her post last month, and the White House just pulled her nomination to fill an important Treasury Department post.”

McCarthy continued: “Kamil Shields, a prosecutor who reportedly grew frustrated by her supervisors’ inordinate delays in making decisions about the McCabe probe, ultimately left the Justice Department to take a private-practice job. Another prosecutor, David Kent, quit last summer as DOJ dithered over the decision on whether to prosecute. Things became so drawn out that the investigating grand jury’s term lapsed.

“Meanwhile, the Justice Department endorsed Liu’s aggressive decision to bring a thin, politically fraught false-statements case against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, in connection with lobbying for a foreign country — the sort of crime that is rarely prosecuted. Craig was swiftly acquitted. Reportedly, Liu advocated charging McCabe, but the DOJ may have harbored doubts about her judgment.”

It is also possible, analysts say, that Attorney General William Barr realized that no grand jury in the leftist-dominated Washington, D.C. swamp would give the green-light to prosecute a fellow resistance member.

“The people in that city who make up said grand juries are 90-plus percent Democrats,” Bonchie noted.

“You’ll notice that the only figure to be found not guilty from the Mueller probe was Greg Craig,” Bonchie wrote. “He also happened to be a Democrat who served under Barack Obama. That’s likely not a coincidence given who makes up the juries in that district.”

McCarthy concluded: “McCabe is not out of the woods yet, of course: The Durham investigation is a separate matter, and it is continuing. But it is unclear whether he will face any criminal charges arising from that inquiry, whereas the now-dead-and-buried false-statements case against him looked cut-and-dried.

“The FBI’s former deputy director, though he undeniably misled investigators, remains a commentator at CNN. In the meantime, (George) Papadopoulos is a felon convicted and briefly imprisoned for misleading investigators, while Flynn and Stone are awaiting sentencing on their false-statements charges. That covers both tiers of our justice system.”

Free Press International