Andrew George McCabe (born March 18, 1968) is an American attorney who served as the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from February 2016 to March 2018 and as the acting Director of the FBI from May 9, 2017, to August 2, 2017. McCabe joined the FBI as a special agent in 1996 and served with the bureau's SWAT team. He became a supervisory special agent in 2003 and held management positions of increasing responsibility until he was appointed deputy director of the FBI in February 2016. McCabe became the acting Director of the FBI following James Comey's dismissal by then President Donald Trump, and served in that position until Trump's appointment of Christopher A. Wray. McCabe later departed from the FBI on poor terms with Trump. After leaving the Trump administration, McCabe has been a contributor at CNN since 2019.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe on March 16, 2018, 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. Sessions announced that he based his decision on reports from the DOJ Inspector General and the FBI's disciplinary office saying that McCabe had secretly and improperly authorized releases of information to The Wall Street Journal about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation and had misled agents who questioned him about it on four occasions, three of which were under oath. McCabe disputed these charges and alleged that his firing was politically motivated.
In September 2019, federal prosecutors recommended McCabe be indicted for actions relating to the leak, but the grand jury did not return an indictment. On February 14, 2020, the Justice Department informed McCabe's attorneys that it had declined to prosecute McCabe.
In October 2021, McCabe settled with the Justice Department a wrongful termination suit he had filed in August 2019. As part of the settlement, the government agreed to "rescind and vacate" McCabe's termination, correct its records "to reflect that Mr. McCabe was employed continuously by the FBI from July 1996 until he retired on March 19, 2018 as the FBI Deputy Director" in "good standing," restore his pension and other benefits, pay his legal fees and expunge any record of having been fired.
Early life and career McCabe was born in 1968. He graduated from The Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida in 1986. He graduated from Duke University in 1990 and obtained a J.D. degree from Washington University School of Law in 1993. He was also a brother of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. During law school he interned in the criminal division of the United States Department of Justice.
Due to a hiring freeze, McCabe spent three years in a private law practice in Philadelphia before joining the FBI in 1996.
He began his FBI career in the New York Field Office in 1996. While there, he was on the SWAT team. In 2003, he began work as a supervisory special agent at the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force. Later, McCabe held management positions in the FBI Counterterrorism Division, the FBI National Security Branch and the FBI's Washington Field Office. In 2009, he served as the first director of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a program to research interrogation techniques that was created after the Department of Defense Directive 2310 ban of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. McCabe was part of the investigation of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. McCabe secured the arrest of Ahmed Abu Khattala for suspected involvement in the 2012 Benghazi attack.
Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2016–2018) FBI Director James Comey appointed McCabe as deputy director of the FBI on January 29, 2016, and he assumed those duties on February 1, 2016.
On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened their Crossfire Hurricane investigation into whether the Trump campaign was collaborating with the Russian government. Both Comey and McCabe were briefed on the Investigation. After Trump was elected, he also was briefed on the investigation.
In March 2018, it was reported that, upon receiving a referral from Congress in 2017, McCabe had authorized a criminal investigation into whether Sessions had lied to Congress in 2017 about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak; the investigation was later closed.
Comey termination On May 9, 2017, McCabe became acting director of the FBI after Trump dismissed Comey as director. In the absence of a Senate-confirmed director, the deputy director automatically becomes acting director. Statute allows the president to choose an interim FBI director (acting director) outside of the standard order of succession. That process began on May 10, 2017, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein interviewed four candidates to serve as interim FBI director. Sessions said that McCabe was "also under consideration". Shortly after Trump fired Comey, McCabe visited the White House for an introductory meeting in the Oval Office with the president, during which time Trump reportedly asked him for whom he had voted in the 2016 election. However, no interim director was named, and McCabe remained as acting director. Christopher A. Wray was ultimately nominated as the new director on June 7, 2017, and confirmed on August 1, 2017, at which point McCabe reverted to his position as deputy director.
In a February 2019 interview with Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes McCabe said that in the days after Comey was fired, he ordered the probe of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, taking action to protect the Russian-interference investigation from successors who might terminate it, because he or Robert Mueller could be removed from their positions. He said "I wanted to make sure that our case was on solid ground and if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision." McCabe also had concerns about whether Trump "had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests" causing "the highest levels of American law enforcement [to try] to figure out what to do with the president", including the possibility of advocating vice presidential and Cabinet use of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution to have Trump suspended from office, and ultimately removed by Congress. Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who had previously been reported but denied having discussed such matters with his colleagues, denied McCabe's assertion as "inaccurate and factually incorrect". McCabe's revelation prompted Senate Judiciary Chairman, Chuck Grassley, to promise investigation of the claims.
Wall Street Journal articles and aftermath
The Wall Street Journal published articles on October 23–24, 2016, regarding an investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, suggesting that McCabe had a potential conflict of interest caused by donations to his wife's campaign as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate. On October 24, 2016, the Wall Street Journal reporter emailed an FBI official following up on McCabe's involvement in the FBI's investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which had begun in 2015. Four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock—were pursuing the investigation, with some field agents advocating that it be aggressively continued, while some supervisors and prosecutors believed there was insufficient evidence and that the investigation was too expansive. In July 2016, McCabe decided that the New York FBI office would continue investigating, with assistance from Little Rock. The Wall Street Journal reported that a senior Justice Department official called McCabe to express his disagreement with this decision, with McCabe reportedly asking, "Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?" to which the unnamed official replied, "Of course not." The contents of this phone call were included in the follow-up article that was published on October 30, 2016. Although the existence of the FBI's investigation in the Clinton Foundation had been leaked, the FBI up until that point had not officially confirmed the investigation.
In January 2017, the inspector general of the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee investigated McCabe over concerns that he should have recused himself from the investigation of the Clinton email scandal. The investigation ceased one year later, in January 2018, with the release of FBI documents showing that McCabe had followed FBI protocol regarding potential conflicts of interest. In 2015, before his wife, Jill McCabe, ran for political office in Virginia, McCabe had notified the FBI about her plans and consulted with the FBI about how he would avoid a conflict of interest. McCabe did not oversee the Clinton email server probe while his wife was running for office, and he was excluded from FBI investigations into public corruption cases in Virginia. According to USA Today, "the internal documents, published on the FBI's website, support what the bureau has asserted previously: that McCabe had no conflicts when he assumed oversight of the Clinton investigation. His role began in February 2016, following his appointment as deputy director and three months after his wife lost her bid for a state Senate seat." However, starting in July 2017 while McCabe was the acting director, Trump repeatedly attacked McCabe in Twitter comments, suggesting that Sessions should dismiss McCabe because of the potential conflicts being investigated, and taunting McCabe about "racing the clock" until his retirement.
In May 2017, an investigation by the FBI Inspection Division into the leaks regarding the investigation in the Clinton Foundation was expanded to include the leak of the contents of the phone call that was published on October 30, 2016. McCabe was interviewed twice by the Inspection Division, in May and August 2017, and the conflicting information in those interviews led the OIG to open an investigation in late August 2017. This was a separate investigation from the ongoing one for conflict of interest.
Political pressure In January, 2018, the Nunes memo, which alleges improper activities in seeking a warrant to surveil former Trump associate Carter Page, was prepared by the House Intelligence Committee. It asserted that McCabe "testified before the [House Intelligence] Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier", a document many Trump supporters insist is completely false. However, McCabe's testimony was in classified session and no public transcript is available to confirm the Nunes memo assertion; disclosing contents of the classified testimony would be unlawful. Democratic representative Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the Nunes memo "seriously mischaracterizes the testimony of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe." The Nunes memo also asserts that a text message from Peter Strzok discusses "a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an 'insurance' policy against President Trump's election". However, The Wall Street Journal reported on December 18, 2017, that Strzok associates said the "insurance policy" meant the FBI continuing its investigation into possible collusion between Trump and Russians, in case Trump won the election.
By January 2018, it was also reported that Sessions had been pressuring Wray to fire McCabe. However, Wray refused and reportedly threatened to resign if McCabe was removed.