On Wednesday, disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok filed a wrongful termination against the Bureau, claiming he was fired for political reasons and deserved back pay and reinstatement with the FBI. As ridiculous as that lawsuit sounds, it didn’t ring any particular alarm bells. Fired employees file lawsuits against their former employers all the time, and we’re sure it happens even more often in the public sector. With a name and reputation as nationally-known as Strzok’s, we weren’t surprised at all to see him go this route in what will undoubtedly be a futile effort to clear himself.
But then came Thursday. That was when we learned that former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe was also filing a lawsuit against the Bureau, claiming, much like Strzok, that his firing was due to political pressure coming from the White House.
Hmm. Suspicious timing, to say the least.
In his lawsuit, McCabe alleges that Trump officials “responded to Plaintiff’s two decades of unblemished and non-partisan public service with a politically motivated and retaliatory demotion in January 2018 and public firing in March 2018 — on the very night of Plaintiff’s long-planned retirement from the FBI.”
Despite the fact that McCabe – again, like Strzok – was investigated by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General and found to have violated ethical, if not legal, boundaries in the run-up to Trump’s election, the former deputy director says that Trump “purposefully and intentionally caused the unlawful actions of Defendants and other Executive Branch subordinates that led to Plaintiff’s demotion and purported termination.”
In other words, Trump forced Jeff Sessions to fire McCabe, thus ruining his fine, upstanding reputation.
“It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him. Plaintiff’s termination was a critical element of Trump’s plan and scheme,” the lawsuit claims.
McCabe has been quietly threatening legal action since almost the day he was fired from the FBI, so his lawsuit is no more a surprise than Strzok’s. What is surprising is that he happened to file his only a day after the FBI agent filed his. Did they coordinate on this timing. Or, as some on Twitter have speculated, did both men just get the same news? Namely, that the DOJ’s Inspector General’s Office/William Barr is getting ready to file charges against them based on their participation in the Russian hoax? Are these lawsuits coincidental…or are they trying to preemptively retaliate?
It will be interesting to watch.
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