Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said Friday that special counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents bore “nauseating similarities” to former FBI Director James Comey’s remarks on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Hur’s report released Thursday found Biden deliberately kept classified documents, but Hur declined to charge him, describing the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and citing the fact that Biden reportedly had forgotten the death of his son, Beau Biden, among other details.
McCabe, who served as deputy director of the FBI during the investigation into Clinton, criticized Hur for including the details in the report.
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“There’s some nauseating similarities to that situation from July 5, 2016, and to what we saw in the report yesterday,” McCabe told CNN host Kaitlan Collins.
“The regulations that govern the conduct and the appointment of special counsels require that at the end of the investigation, the special counsel must submit a report to the attorney general, and it’s got to explain what he found and why he’s pursuing or declining charges,” McCabe later told Collins, a former Daily Caller reporter. “To be clear, Robert Hur’s report checks those boxes. It in great detail lays out what he found and of course why he’s not pursuing charges.”
McCabe claimed that Hur was trying to avoid criticism for not charging Biden after special counsel Jack Smith secured a grand jury indictment on 37 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, that was unsealed June 9.
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“It really felt like it was another instance of a very high-profile investigator who was coming out with a conclusion that he likely knew would not be accepted or embraced by many people and kind of attempting to even out the scales,” McCabe told Collins. “In other words, to play to the sort of – to the sort of – the segment of the audience that was going to be frustrated by the fact that he concluded not to pursue charges, that’s what it felt like to me.”
McCabe also criticized former FBI Director James Comey over the press conferences he held about the probe into the email server set up in Clinton’s Chappaqua home during the 2016 presidential campaign, which Clinton lost to Donald Trump.
“I think where we step far over the line and made a mistake was in Jim’s rhetoric clearly criticizing Hillary Clinton but of course not recommending that she be charged,” McCabe said. “The use of those terms was very likely a violation of DoJ policy which says you don’t say bad things about someone you say you’re not going to charge.”
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McCabe was fired as deputy director of the FBI in 2018 following an inspector general’s report that accused him of lying about leaks to the media, but the firing was reversed in 2021 following a legal settlement.
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