March 19, 2018--Hell Hath No Fury . . .

Since Friday when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, under intense pressure from President Trump, fired F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe two days before he was eligible for a full government pension, there have been a series of angry crescendos from the president and his lawyers claiming it is now time to shut down Robert Mueller's investigation of potential collusion between Russians and the Trumps to tip the 2016 election by undermining the Clinton campaign. And in retaliation there have been threatening statements from McCabe and previously-fired F.B.I. directer James Comey.  

The latter two asserted ominously that very soon they will spill the goods they have regarding Trump's direct involvement in a potential criminal conspiracy. Comey  for example, who has a tell-all book about to be published, on Saturday tweeted, "Mr. Presidnet, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not."

This is ominous because Comey, we already know, wrote and secured contemporaneous memos to the file about encounters with Trump during which the president attempted to get him to agree to back off from his investigation of Michael Flynn, then National Security Adviser, now self-confessed felon. 

Drawing on these Comey surely has quite a story to tell.

Then, over the weekend, McCabe, implied there is the likelihood that he did the same thing, memorializing in real time, also via memos to F.B.I. files, conversations he had with director Comey, who seemingly and wisely for corroboration purposes filled him in about Trump's attempts to pressure him to end all investigations of Flynn and the Russian subversion of the 2016 election. Likely indictable offenses.

What with all of this and the Stormy Daniels situation spinning out of Trump control, there is good reason for the president and his enablers in and out of the White House and Congress to be more than a little worried. It would be understandable if there was out-and-out panic. Thus the flailing about, the leaks, the threats, the rushing to any media outlet that will welcome hearing about the opining and spiraling charges and countercharges. 

Of course, all of this is a Trumpian campaign to attempt to further erode public confidence in all parts of the federal justice system, from the integrity and nonpartisan history of the F.B.I. to the Mueller investigation, where there are again assertions that his senior team of invesitagors is biased (it is true that though Mueller himself is a Republican, almost all of his senior investigators are Democrats) to of course the alleged liberal bias of the media.

The real danger is the constitutional crisis that will result from any active moves to dismiss Mueller. How many Republicans would protest? I suspect only a few and that the outcry would be at most a week-long story, with Stormy Daniels again dominating the headlines  

Or is this too cynical?  

If not, the best hope for justice would be a Democratic sweep in November with the House flipping and with the then new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff immediately cranking up a real congressional investigation.

Nothing focuses a politician's mind more than the possibility of not being reelected.

In the meantime, some related news--apparently Andrew McCabe has already received four or five job offers from Democratic congressmen who have things they would like him to do for them, which would, not coincidentally, restart his pension clock. If he worked for just a few days for any of them, because these would be government jobs, it is felt he would become entitled to a pension that could pay him as much as $60,000 a year. 

Putting aside for the moment the question of any government worker being able to receive a pension after only 20 years in federal employ, whereas almost all other workers have to put in many more years than that for a lot less money, let's think of this as a warm and ironic story.

Andrew McCabe