Citrus Heights Lime Festival

Meanwhile, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe repeatedly appeared on CNN, where he’s been a paid contributor since 2019. McCabe said the raid is “something that would have been planned out and re-evaluated and legally examined from every possible angle” and FBI agents would have needed to convince a judge of “probable cause to believe… that a federal crime has been committed.”

McCabe was fired in March of 2018 after the same IG Horowitz concluded he lied in connection with a 2016 leak to the Wall Street Journal. The essence of the case was McCabe putting out a story to rebut allegations of favoritism. An October 23, 2016 Wall Street Journal article reported that the political action committee of longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton confidant and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe gave $467,000 to the state senate campaign of McCabe’s wife, Jill, at a time when McCabe ran the Washington field office of the FBI, which the WSJ said “provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email probe.”

Horowitz found McCabe “lacked candor” on four occasions, in interviews under oath, and that was just the beginning. A later IG report found McCabe “concurred” with the use of the infamous Steele dossier to obtain a secret FISA warrant against ex-Trump aide Carter Page, and pressed for Steele material to be included in an Intelligence Community Assessment as evidence that Russians sought to “denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton.” McCabe also approved the pre-election use of an FBI agent posing as part of a team briefing then-candidate Trump on foreign threats, in order to snoop on his aide Michael Flynn, and overruled recommendations that Strzok be removed from the Trump-Russia investigation, among other issues.

McCabe, in other words, not only has a history of lying, but a specific history of misconduct involving improperly obtained warrants in Trump-related investigations. Paying him to go on air and offer “analysis” of an FBI warrant on Trump is an expression of total journalistic surrender on the part of CNN. They should be ashamed, but obviously aren’t, since they also employ another liar-under-oath, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who went on CNN’s “Newsroom” last Saturday to offer another master class in Trump-era journalism. Clapper shoved off hard from the pier of fact before inviting audiences to dream nightmare scenarios.

“You find yourself almost hoping it was carelessness, and there wasn’t some more nefarious explanation,” Clapper said. “Was there for example, and I’m going to go out on a limb, some prospect for some kind of sweetheart deal with Putin…? The imagination can run wild...”