On the Mystery of the McCabe Grand Jury
A rather detailed (given the context) article explaining in simple details what didn't happen today.
Normally, when the Justice Department informs a criminal target that it is moving ahead with charges, particularly when the target is a high-profile one, the indictment follows immediately. Yet in this case, no indictment materialized. And that wasn’t because the grand jury didn’t meet.
According to the Post, rather, the grand jury was reconvened on Thursday—but no public charges against McCabe were filed. Now, McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, has written to U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu, whose office is handling McCabe’s case, stating that the defense team has heard “rumors from reporters … that the grand jury considering charges against Mr. McCabe had declined to vote an indictment”—though the defense has “no independent knowledge of whether the reporting is accurate.” Bromwich added that “based on our discussion with” government lawyers, “it is clear that no indictment has been returned.”
The possibility of a criminal case against McCabe has smelled bad for a while. As one of us has spelled out in detail, this is not the kind of case that normally ends up as a criminal matter. While the Justice Department inspector general report that led to McCabe’s dismissal from the bureau is sharply critical of his conduct, indictments for false statements in internal Justice Department investigations, without some exacerbating factor, are exceedingly rare. This sort of misconduct is normally handled in internal disciplinary proceedings—and McCabe was already fired. Indeed, there’s nothing about the inspector general’s findings about McCabe that seem to make his case a likely candidate for a criminal disposition. What makes McCabe’s situation distinctive, rather, is the public campaign against him by the president of the United States, who has tweeted and spoken repeatedly about McCabe and publicly called for his prosecution.
Without saying a word in defense of McCabe’s conduct—which, if accurately described by the inspector general, is condemnable—there are good reasons to be anxious about a case that both seems far from the sort normally prosecuted and involves someone the president has singled out for persecution. There have also long been reasons to doubt the strength of the case, not the least of which is that two of the prosecutors who supervised it have dropped off the matter.
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