Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI and former interim director of the FBI, has produced a book about his bitter experiences with Donald Trump and is now puffing that book in interviews. In an interview with CBS he recalled his (hysterical) reaction to the firing of the egregious James Comey, director of the FBI, whose career of government-enabled arrogance Trump finally ended.
McCabe said that he, McCabe, immediately decided to instigate a high-profile probe of the president’s alleged obstruction of justice in firing Comey and of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. He decided, in addition, to institutionalize these probes so firmly that they could never be stopped without additional charges of obstructing justice.
McCabe also said that he discussed with his boss, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, the latter’s plan to enlist cabinet members to consider taking Trump out by means of the 25th Amendment, and that this project was seriously considered.
From McCabe’s point of view, Trump’s offenses, besides firing the FBI director, included daring to criticize the FBI’s activities (imagine that!):
The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt, publicly undermining the effort of the investigation.
Intolerable, is it not, that Trump should have spoken in such a way about investigations of himself?
McCabe himself was subsequently fired for lying and leaking, and his accounts of other people’s actions have been denied by some of them. He has tried to soften the impact of a few of his statements. That having been said, we can assume that his first account of his own doings, which he delivered with self-righteous braggadocio, can be given credence. He bragged about trying to stage a coup d’etat — exactly the kind of thing that supposedly paranoid libertarians have always suspected that “intelligence” agencies are able and willing to do. This is something even worse than the soft coups that such agencies have chronically staged, leaking or merely letting it be known that they possessed damaging information against public figures whom they distrust. A good example is J. Edgar Hoover’s stranglehold on Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and his threats against Martin Luther King.
Whatever libertarians think of President Trump — and there is a wide range of opinion — they should receive McCabe’s revelations as a sign that their paranoia was fully justified, and as a warning about what will happen if libertarians ever do predominate, or look as if they may soon predominate, in government.
Picture it. Murray Rothbard Jones, senator from Idaho, is thought to be the likely nominee of the Republican Party. Jones is an antagonist of government surveillance and of what he calls “our institutionalized system of prying, snitching, and intimidation.” He has attacked and ridiculed the “process violations” that the FBI uses to send people it dislikes — such as Martha Stewart(!) — to jail. He has vowed that if he becomes president, one of his first objectives will be a “full house cleaning at the FBI.”
What do you think will happen to Murray Rothbard Jones?
Here’s what. As soon as Jones shows any chance of winning, the FBI will covertly investigate him for collusion with corporations that seek the repeal of antitrust and other trade-restrictive legislation. Is he not in favor of such repeal? And has he not taken contributions from corporate executives? So investigate; you’re likely to find something — on anybody. And of course you can leak it.
Meanwhile, the CIA will covertly investigate Jones for collusion with foreign countries. Is he not in favor of reducing tariffs? And has he not traveled to foreign countries and conferred with their leaders?
Information will be stockpiled, doctored, invented, and divulged. The FBI and CIA will collaborate in sponsoring stories about Jones’s nights in a Beijing luxury hotel, where he paid prostitutes to piss on him in a bed where Huma Abedin once slept. This purported information will be assiduously leaked by the same people who will proceed to vouch for its value. Investigation will follow investigation, paralyzing the Jones regime — as mobs roam the country, denouncing all Jones supporters as racists and sexists (after all, doesn’t Jones want to end racial and gender preferences?).
Well, this is more or less what happened to Trump. Now comes the part about the 25th Amendment.
What more proof do you want that Jones is unfit to discharge the duties of his office than his insane ideas about reducing military expenditures, ending American interference in foreign countries, and (gasp!) stopping the government’s subsidies to schools? The one thing lacking might be skepticism about the usefulness of the FBI and CIA, but now we know he’s crazy in that way too. If Jones survives, it will be a miracle. If he accomplishes any part of his program, it will be an apocalypse.
So, speaking of apocalyptic thought: libertarians should not imagine that their only enemies are demagogic pols, social scientists with incomplete educations, and the people standing behind the counter at the DMV. They’re just some of the hosts arrayed against us. The others are the guys in expensive suits whom St. Paul pictured as “powers” in “high places,” and “the rulers of the darkness of this world.”
