McCade's unjust reward for bad conduct

Roger Kimball:

I was going to pass by in silent contempt the news that CNN—the network that patrons of airport lounges cordially dislike and that no one else watches—just decided to hire disgraced former FBI honcho Andrew McCabe as a commentator. He’ll fit right in, I thought, with other such mountebanks barking against Donald Trump not only at CNN but also at MSNBC not to mention The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other retirement homes for the anti-Trump fraternity.

But Andrew McCarthy’s column at NRO on Saturday reminded me that the case of McCabe is important. It says something critical not just about one of the most important players in (to cite the subtitle of McCarthy’s new book) “the plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency,” but also about some larger issues, which from one perspective might be said to turn on the task of guaranteeing the peaceful transition of power in a democracy and, from another, on the ambition of our justice system to provide (as the legend chiseled into the pediment of the Supreme Court says) “equal justice under law.”

As I have noticed before in this space, Andrew McCabe was a central player in the pseudo-investigation of Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified information and self-enrichment schemes while secretary of state. He was one of the people who made sure that the probe went nowhere.

McCabe was also a central figure in the get-Mike-Flynn operation and, later, the Great Trump Hunt that occupied Andrew Weissmann’s Howdy Doody dummy Robert Mueller for some two years. McCabe leaked information about an investigation to a Wall Street Journal reporter and lied about leaking in casual conversations with superiors as well as under oath. Yet he will soon be reporting for duty at CNN.

Andy McCarthy contrasts that happy ending with the treatment meted out to George Papadopoulos, the twentysomething nobody who told the FBI that he met with Main Mystery Man Josef Mifsud—the Maltese professor who reputedly told Pappy that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton—just before he joined the Trump campaign, when in fact it was just after he joined the campaign. This misstatement—was it even a lie?—earned him the full-bore attention of Mueller’s attack team. They swooped down on him as he disembarked from a plane, made sure he spent a night in jail, and, for a tantalizing moment, convinced our former “newspaper of record” that the whole “Russian collusion” wheeze started with him. Meanwhile, where is Mifsud? No one seems to know what’s become of that shadowy intelligence asset.

Eventually, Papadopoulos got off with a sentence of 14-days in the clink, a pro-forma punishment but one designed, I suspect, to show him, and by extension the rest of us proles, just who is boss: the Left’s former sweetheart Robert S. Mueller III and his ilk, not folks like you and me.
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Andy McCarthy draws two important lessons from this sorry episode. The first lesson is this: “Government officials who leak while demonstrating their contempt for Donald Trump manage to land on their feet. . . . [N]on-government types who mislead government investigations don’t do so well.” As McCarthy observes:

McCabe joins a CNN stable that includes former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper, who is best known for lying to Congress about the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata . . . and for discussing Steele dossier information with CNN shortly before the network published a report about it . . . and not long before it hired Clapper as a commentator. CNN missed out on former Obama CIA director John Brennan, who falsely denied to the Senate that his agency spied on the chamber’s intelligence committee. Brennan, who said he was really sorry, was inked by MSNBC.

There really is not enough contempt to go around for these creeps.
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All who pursued a coup attempt against the President should be brought to justice and not rewarded with jobs in the same media which acted as co-conspirators in the coup attempt with them.  Hopefully, one day they will be brought to justice although it may take more turnover at the DOJ and FBI to find enough honorable people to do so.