Washington
In two tweets just before 10 a.m., Trump wrote: “Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!”
Trump has for days been attacking his attorney general, and he has similarly been critical of McCabe, who took over as the acting director of the FBI after Trump fired James Comey. But the president’s latest attack is curious.
Sessions was not the attorney general during the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. And the president himself could remove McCabe without Sessions. Administration officials actually contemplated doing so after Comey’s firing. Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein met with four other candidates to lead the FBI on an interim basis, though the administration ultimately stuck with McCabe.
The others who interviewed were Michael Anderson, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago division; Adam Lee, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond division; Paul Abbate, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch; and William Evanina, the national counterintelligence executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Asked during the White House news briefing on Wednesday why Trump hadn’t simply removed McCabe himself, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted he had nominated Christopher A. Wray, a white-collar defense lawyer who had previously led the Justice Department’s criminal division, to take the permanent FBI director job. She said Trump was “looking forward to getting him confirmed soon.”
In recent days, Trump has talked with advisers about replacing Sessions as his attorney general, and he has simultaneously criticized him in public. He has called Sessions “very weak” on investigating Hillary Clinton’s “crimes” and claimed he had not aggressively hunted those who have leaked intelligence secrets since he has been in office.
At a news conference Tuesday, he said he was “disappointed” in Sessions and declined to say exactly what his future was.