Perhaps hearing the footsteps of Attorney General Bill Barr, U.S. Atty John Durham, and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz getting closer, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe crawled out from the rock he had been hiding under long enough last Thursday night to appear on CNN with Chris Cuomo. Like his yet unindicted co-conspirator and boss in the Russia “collusion delusion” coup attempt against President Trump, former FBI Director James Comey, McCabe sought to mask his own real crimes while joining the media frenzy over President Trump’s suggestion that he would at least listen to a foreign source reporting to have “dirt” on an opponent, passing the information on to the FBI if warranted.

McCabe was quick to excuse Hillary Clinton and the DNC for funding a fake dossier through a British agent using Russian sources while suggesting that, yes, he would at least pick up the phone and listen. As noted by Ian Schwartz on Real Clear Politics:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said the impeachment of President Donald Trump is "absolutely" warranted in an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Thursday. McCabe denounced Trump, saying there is a difference between taking information acquired "illegally" from "representatives" of a hostile foreign government while defending Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, as CNN's Chris Cuomo put it, "paying Russians for information to amass a dossier."…

"Not at all, Chris. There's no equivalence between those two examples," McCabe responded. "To openly invite foreign intelligence officers, representatives from a hostile foreign government to steal information, to acquire opposition research in anyway, in any illegal way that they might do that and to present it to you is one thing."

"For a campaign to hire a law firm, an American law firm who then turns around and hires an American research company that then contracts out with a foreign individual, that is not illegal," McCabe emphasized.

McCabe also commended British operative Christopher Steele for informing them of his dossier because "he was so troubled."

Uh, the “hostile foreign power” Trump said he might accept campaign “dirt” from was Norway and there is no evidence, except in the dreams of Rep. Adam Schiff, that Trump ever solicited any foreign actor in any way to acquire anything illegally. To receive information in and of itself is not a crime.

It is the Steele dossier, despite McCabe’s obfuscation, that was acquired illegally. Money was laundered through a law firm to a dirt-gathering opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to Russian sources making most of the stuff up. The fact that the transaction went through multiple hands does not make it any more legal. It just makes the upcoming indictment longer.

McCabe, Comey, and the people who worked under McCabe, such as Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, then took this fruit of foreign interference in our election and used it to commit a fraud upon the FISA court to trigger the illegal surveillance of one political campaign by another with the aid of co-conspirators at the DOJ and FBI.

Steele troubled? McCabe’s concern over Christopher Steele’s angst is laughable. Steele was no Hamlet but a co-conspirator in a deep state coup to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. That McCabe himself was a key architect of this coup is found in the texts of FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who speaks of the plan hatched in “Andy’s office” to stop Trump at all costs, with this end justifying any and all means:

Out of all the damning, politically charged anti-Trump text messages released, one text from Strzok to (Lisa) Page on August 15, 2016, raised the most suspicion. It referred to a conversation and a meeting that had just taken place in "Andy's" (widely believed to be Deputy FBI Dir. Andrew McCabe's) office. According to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Strzok had texted this: "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office [break]... that there's no way he gets elected. I want to believe that... But I'm afraid we can't take that risk... We have to do something about it."…

"This goes to intent," Jordan said. "We can't take the risk that the people of this great country might elect Donald Trump. We can't take this risk. This is Peter Strzok, head of counterintelligence at the FBI. This is Peter Strzok, who I think had a hand in that dossier that was all dressed up and taken to the FISA court. He's saying, 'we can't take the risk, we have to do something about it.'"

McCabe testified under oath he could not verify the accuracy of virtually anything in the dossier and has acknowledged that without the “salacious and unverified” document, as Comey once described it, no investigation of Team Trump would have occurred.

Rep. Devin Nunes, as quoted by the Washington Examiner, reports:

“Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information,” a controversial memo composed by Rep. Devin Nunes' staff claims in regard to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. As noted at Legal Insurrection:

The House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) grilled FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for seven hours over the dossier published against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and the FBI’s investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server…

McCabe told the panel that the FBI worked hard “to verify the contents of the anti-Trump ‘dossier’ and stood by its credibility.” However, he could not tell the lawmakers if “the bureau has been able to verify the substantive allegations in the dossier, or even identify a substantive allegation that has been corroborated.”

The lawmakers asked him which part of the dossier was true and Mccabe only pointed to the part “that the unpaid, low-level Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page visited Moscow in July 2016.”

McCabe was one of the signers of the FISA applications based on the fraudulent and politically motivated Steele dossier.

…according to the memo crafted by House Republicans, Comey personally signed three FISA court applications utilizing that same dossier that he labeled “salacious and unverified” eight months later to obtain FISA court warrants to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The memo documents that on October 21, 2016, the FBI and Justice Department sought and received the FISA order against Page, and that the agencies sought the renewal of the order every 90 days in accordance with court requirements.  Renewals require separate finding of probable cause each time, the memo relates.

According to the memo, Comey “signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one.”

McCabe is in legal jeopardy on many fronts. As the Washington Examiner notes of McCabe’s impressive credentials:

McCabe was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, after the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General determined he misled investigators about the role he had in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe argued that his firing was an attempt to discredit the FBI and Mueller's investigation.

In April 2018, it was revealed that the Justice Department inspector general had referred its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington for possible criminal charges, and his lawyer confirmed in February that McCabe was still under investigation.

As National Review reported:

An OIG report released last week confirmed that McCabe had in fact misled federal investigators on four separate occasions by insisting that he did not approve the leak, which was apparently intended to rebut rumors that McCabe had told FBI agents to “stand down” from their investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

Andrew McCabe should not be a national pundit on CNN calling for Trump’s impeachment. He should be preparing his legal defense against indictments that can’t come a moment too soon.

Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.