Politics

John Ratcliffe: DOJ ‘Is Going To Have To Indict’ Andrew McCabe

No featured image available

Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe said Sunday he expects Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director who now works as a CNN analyst, to be indicted on charges of lying to the government.

“Here, you have the inspector general stating that Andrew McCabe did that multiple times, and the magic words, did so intentionally and knowing,” Ratcliffe said in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“I think the Department of Justice is going to have to indict Andy McCabe, simply because to do otherwise would be to admit that there are separate standards for people doing the same thing for the same conduct.”

Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor said that the Justice Department, through the special counsel, “made a cottage industry out of  charging people like General Flynn and George Papadopoulos for lying to investigators.”

McCabe was fired on March 16, 2018 upon the recommendation of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. An inspector general’s report said that McCabe displayed a “lack of candor” during four interviews about his authorization of a disclosure of information about an investigation of the Clinton Foundation in October 2016.

As second-in-charge at the FBI, McCabe would have been authorized to release information about ongoing investigations to the media as long as it was done in the public interest. But Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that McCabe authorized the leak “in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership.”

McCabe has denied lying to investigators about authorizing the leak.

The New York Times reported on Aug. 26 that McCabe’s lawyers had met a week earlier with Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen about his case. The move was widely interpreted as an indication that McCabe could be indicted.

McCabe sued the Justice Department and FBI on Aug. 8, alleging that he was fired because of political pressure from President Donald Trump. CNN hired him as a law enforcement analyst on Aug. 23, several days before The Times report was published.

Ratcliffe noted that he has discussed the McCabe case with other prosecutors and that “there is a difference of opinion” over whether he should be charged.

“I don’t know how you can’t indict him when he is engaged in the same conduct that other people have recently been charged for at the Department of Justice, particularly when your own watchdog says that those lies were done intentionally and knowingly and done repeatedly,” he said.

“You can’t really tell the public we’re going to treat people differently for the same conduct.”