"...
[W]e are unaware of prior cases in which authorities rushed through the merits against a long-serving official in a naked and transparent effort to beat the clock of his retirement. . Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing McCabe, described the process as follows:
The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part, its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.
Even allowing for a certain degree of lawyerly hyperbole in this account,
the process described here seems highly irregular. McCabe, in his statement Friday, suggested one possible reason for the acceleration:
The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey's accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG's focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.
In an interview with the New York Times, McCabe said directly that his dismissal “is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”
In other words, even if McCabe’s firing proves to be justified on the merits,
the question is what could have possibly justified breaking it off from the larger probe and rushing it to completion and adjudication in time to beat the deadline of McCabe’s retirement—particularly in context of presidential demands for his removal and Trump’s broader assault on independent and apolitical law enforcement.
Trump’s reaction to the firing only accentuates this point. He tweeted Friday night:
"Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!"
In the end, such conduct necessarily taints the merits of the action against McCabe. Even if the Justice Department’s process proves pure as the driven snow and the case against McCabe proves compelling,
who is going to believe—in the face of overt presidential demands for a corrupt Justice Department—that a Justice Department that gives the president what he wants is anything less than the lackey he asks for? ..."
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-firing-andrew-mccabe
