Congressman John Ratcliffe Says DOJ 'Is Going To Have To Indict' McCabe
For Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, there’s no question about whether the Justice Department should indict former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
In fact, he said, the decision has already been made — at least when it comes to men associated with President Donald Trump.
The only question is whether the Justice Department will be consistent in how it applies the law.
“It was last year that the inspector general found that Deputy Director McCabe authorized the disclosure of sensitive investigative information to a reporter and then, more importantly, repeatedly lied about it to investigators,” Ratcliffe, a former prosecutor, told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Not being truthful to investigators bent on trapping him got Trump’s first national advisor, retired Army Gen. Michal Flynn, into a jam that resulted in him pleading guilty in December 2017 to lying to federal investigators.
He lost his national security advisor job, of course, but has not been sentenced yet.
Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos also ran afoul of the law — and got a 14-day prison sentence — for lying to the FBI. His prosecution was part of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Now, Ratcliffe said, the same standards need to apply to Trump’s opponents — like McCabe.
“As your viewers also know, the Department of Justice has, through the special counsel, recently made a cottage industry out of charging people like General Flynn and George Papadopoulos for lying to investigators.
“Here, you have the inspector general stating that Andrew McCabe did that multiple times, and the magic words, did so ‘intentionally and knowingly,’” Ratcliffe said.
“I think the Department of Justice is going to have to indict Andy McCabe, simply because to do otherwise would be to admit that there are separate standards for people doing the same thing for the same conduct.”
McCabe was fired from his FBI job in March 2018, a day before he could have retired with a full federal pension.
He’s not exactly repentant.
He still denies leaking the information, has written an anti-Trump book that he’s hawking at Democratic fundraisers, and he’s taken a job with CNN as a political analyst. Plus, he’s filed a lawsuit against the DOJ and the FBI, claiming his getting fired was due to political pressure from the Trump White House.
He might see a pretty rosy financial future in front of him, but Ratcliffe — most recently in the headlines for his grilling of Mueller in late July and a short-lived bid to be national intelligence director — sees something different for the former FBI deputy director: Disgrace and indictment.
“I don’t know how you can’t indict him when he is engaged in the same conduct that other people have recently been charged for at the Department of Justice, particularly when your own watchdog says that those lies were done intentionally and knowingly and done repeatedly,” Ratcliffe said.
“You can’t really tell the public, ‘look we’re going to treat people differently with different standards for the same conduct.'”
No, you can’t, not if you don’t want your country turning into some socialistic hell-hole with banana republic standards of justice.
The Justice Department has already decided to charge men associated with Trump with lying to investigators.
It owes it to the country to do the same for Andrew McCabe.
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