Ousted FBI Leader McCabe Sues Justice Dept. for Alleged Retaliation
"It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him," McCabe's lawyers at Arnold & Porter said in the complaint.
August 08, 2019 at 04:18 PM
4 minute read
The original version of this story was published on National Law Journal
Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the FBI, on Thursday sued the U.S. Justice Department over his March 2018 firing, alleging his removal from the bureau just before his retirement was unlawful and that his employment benefits should be restored.
McCabe, whose firing came on the night of his long-planned retirement, placed the blame for his termination squarely on one individual: President Donald Trump.
In a 48-page lawsuit, filed in Washington federal district court, McCabe, represented by lawyers from Arnold & Porter, accused Trump of orchestrating an “unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him.”
McCabe described his firing, under then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as a “critical element” of that scheme. Current Attorney General William Barr and Christopher Wray, the FBI director, are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
“Trump demanded plaintiff’s personal allegiance, he sought retaliation when [McCabe] refused to give it, and Sessions, Wray, and others served as Trump’s personal enforcers rather than the nation’s highest law enforcement officials, catering to Trump’s unlawful whims instead of honoring their oaths to uphold the Constitution,” McCabe’s lawyers said in the complaint. “Were it not for Trump’s plan and scheme and the complicity of Defendants and other Executive Branch subordinates, [McCabe] would have otherwise been permitted to retire as he had long planned.”
Arnold & Porter partners Murad Hussain and Howard Cayne represent McCabe with associates Owen Dunn and Ryan White.
The Justice Department did not immediately comment on McCabe’s complaint, which had not yet been assigned to a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
McCabe’s suit asks a judge to declare his firing unlawful and to be awarded “any and all relief necessary for him to retire as he had originally planned: as the Deputy Director of the FBI and an agent in good standing, with sufficient time in service to enable him to receive his full earned law enforcement pension, healthcare insurance, and other retirement benefits.”
In February 2018, a month before his firing, the Justice Department’s inspector general released its finding that McCabe had “lacked candor” describing his role in a leak of internal deliberations about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The report said “McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ.”
McCabe’s lawyers have disputed findings of the report, in which he was also faulted for violating the FBI’s media policy. His lawyers said the report “demonstrates that any and all claims that political bias or political influence affected Mr. McCabe’s actions, including charges from the president and other critics, are entirely baseless.”
McCabe’s lawsuit came two days after another former top FBI official, Peter Strzok, sued the Justice Department over his own firing. Strzok, a top counterintelligence agent who helped oversee the investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, was fired over text messages he exchanged with Lisa Page, then an FBI lawyer, in which the two criticized Trump.
Strzok is represented by Zuckerman Spaeder’s Aitan Goelman and lawyers from the Washington civil rights firm Heller, Huron, Chertkof & Salzman.
McCabe’s complaint is posted below:
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