Donald Trump's return to the presidency has prompted discussion about accountability for the members of the FBI who conspired to undermine him during his first White House term.
One of the key players in that effort, Andrew McCabe, went to extraordinary lengths to obstruct Trump - opening a counterintelligence probe of the president's alleged Russian ties that was based on information the FBI knew was unreliable.
According to FBI documents, McCabe sought information from Christopher Steele on May 12, 2017, six months after the FBI had already fired Steele as a source.
McCabe became acting FBI director after Trump fired James Comey in May 2017. One of McCabe's first moves was to order investigations of Trump for espionage and obstruction.
As McCabe put it at the time, he was eager to make the Trump-Russia investigation stick after Trump fired Comey.
"I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion," McCabe told CBS in a 2019 interview. "That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace."
What McCabe did not say is that he turned to a discredited source to shore up the Russia probe.
A top DOJ official, Bruce Ohr, had warned McCabe about Christopher Steele's anti-Trump political bias as far back as August 2016. Steele, a former British spy, had compiled his infamous dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russia on behalf of the Clinton campaign through opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
Without divulging his ties to Clinton, the FBI repeatedly used Steele's unverified work to convince the FISA court to authorize surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The FBI even fired Steele in November 2016 for credibility problems.
Still, McCabe's FBI reached out to Steele again to get more dirt on Trump in May 2017, according to RealClearInvestigations. Ohr confirmed to Congress that he reconnected Steele and the FBI and continued to relay information between them until November 2017.
With shocking hubris, McCabe later admitted in a 2019 CBS interview that there had been talks at the top levels of the FBI about removing Trump under the 25h Amendment. McCabe justified the drastic, and likely illegal, moves he took against Trump as a response to fears that Trump was working with Russia.
"I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and just won the election for the presidency. And who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage," McCabe said. "And that was something that troubled me greatly."
The Trump administration fired McCabe in 2018, hours before his retirement, after he was caught leaking to reporters and then lying about it. McCabe later sued to get his full pension back.
After leaving the FBI, McCabe joined CNN as a contributor, where he has continued to regularly criticize Trump and his alleged plans to use the FBI for retribution.
McCabe has ripped Trump's FBI director nominee, Kash Patel, as dangerous and unqualified.
“If you enter into that position with nothing more than a desire to disrupt and destroy the organization, there is a lot of damage someone like Kash Patel could do,” he said.
