James Clapper, formerly the Director of National Intelligence, penned a glowing testimonial to FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2018 in an strenuous effort to save Andrew McCabe’s job, calling the fired FBI deputy director a man of "self-effacing humility" and “impeccable integrity.”
The lengthy and apparently heartfelt handwritten letter by Clapper appeared amid hundreds of pages of newly released FBI documents made public through Freedom of Information Act litigation carried out by the left-leaning watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The note from Clapper to Wray, dated Feb. 25, 2018, came the same month that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz completed his investigation concluding that McCabe improperly disclosed investigative information on the Clinton Foundation to the media and misled investigators about it. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe on March 16, 2018, just before his retirement was to begin, citing Horowitz’s conclusions.
Clapper, now a strident Trump critic and who served as DNI from 2010 through 2017, was effusive in its praise of McCabe, calling him “steady, straightforward, candid, forthright, and honest” and claiming that the “biased scrutiny” and the “firestorm of criticism” against the embattled bureau deputy “completely unjustified and profoundly unfair.”
Read More...
'Impeccable integrity': Clapper intervened to lavish McCabe with praise in bid to save him at FBI
Current News
The NeverTrumper Who Lectured America on the Rule of Law Is Taking a Plea Deal
John Bolton spent years telling you that Donald Trump was a threat to American institutions. That the rule of law mattered. That classified information was sacred and the men who mishandled it were unfit for public trust. Read more
From ‘Mother’ to ‘Gestating Parent’: A Civilization Loses Its Words and Then Itself
The Roman Republic did not collapse because its legions were defeated in the field. It eroded, gradually and almost imperceptibly, from within. Sallust, writing in the generation before the Republic’s final crisis, identified the mechanism with uncommon clarity: when a civilization abandons the virtues that built it, the language through which those virtues were expressed becomes the first casualty. Words grow contested. Then they are redefined. Then they are replaced. By the time a republic wakes to what has happened, the vocabulary of self-governance has already been emptied of its meaning. Read more
The Lie of Institutional Neutrality: What Pride Month Reveals About Who Controls the Cathedral
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of democratic despotism in Democracy in America, described a system that would not tyrannize through violence but through the steady degradation of citizenship — a society in which an “immense and tutelary power” would keep citizens “in perpetual childhood,” covering the surface of society “with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” He envisioned an authority that would not break wills so much as soften them, not forbid but prevent, not punish but enfeeble. Read more
Marc Elias Went to Court to Kill the Fund That Would Pay Back His Victims. Senate Republicans Are Helping.
Marc Elias went to federal court to kill the fund that would pay back his victims. Senate Republicans are helping. Read more
They Called It a Peaceful Protest. A Reporter Had to Hide Her Network Logo to Stay Safe.
They called it a peaceful protest. Read more
Thucydides, Tehran, and the Temptation of a Quick Settlement
In the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens found itself holding a position of unexpected strength. Its navy was dominant, its treasury sufficient, its enemies fractured. Sparta, exhausted and humiliated by losses at Sphacteria, sent envoys seeking terms. The peace was theirs to dictate. Read more