By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Suffice to say, the book does not portray President Trump in a flattering light.
“The FBI has always been the nemesis of criminals. Today the FBI is under attack by the president of the United States,’ writes McCabe, a lifelong Republican who is married to a Democrat.
He also takes shots at others, according to a review in the Guardian newspaper:
Pulling no punches, he takes to task Loretta Lynch, Obama’s second attorney general, for her refusal to recuse from the Clinton email investigation while attempting to maintain a show of being above it all. As McCabe sees it, Lynch and Sally Yates, then deputy attorney general, wrongly viewed “the investigation of Hillary Clinton … likely nominee of the Democratic party, who was being supported by the president of the United States, to whom they owed their jobs … as a case they could handle without prejudice”.
According to McCabe, Lynch and Yates “made a feckless compromise”. Specifically, “they designated career professionals in the National Security Division as decision-makers in this case but didn’t unambiguously commit to abide by those people’s decisions”. It was, he writes, “the worst possible choice afforded by the situation”.
It didn’t end there. There is Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport and again McCabe does not mince words: “The tarmac meeting was a horrible lapse in judgment by Loretta Lynch. She should have recused herself … she did not – she made things worse.”
With the advantage of hindsight, McCabe is critical of the decision taken by Comey, his boss at the time, to publicly announce the FBI’s recommendation that no charges should be pursued against Hillary Clinton. In “retrospect”, as McCabe frames it, “perhaps I would have said to Comey, ‘Don’t do it. Let’s be the normal Bob Mueller, say-nothing FBI of old.’”
