After Comey was fired in May 2017, McCabe became the FBI’s acting director. Two days later, he was asked at a congressional hearing if the shake-up was affecting operations.
“Quite simply put, sir, you cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, protecting the American people, and upholding the Constitution,” he replied, a comment that cheered the FBI’s rank and file.
But McCabe became a target of Republicans who questioned the FBI’s impartiality in how the Clinton investigation was conducted.
When McCabe’s wife, Jill, ran for the state Senate in Virginia in 2015, she accepted a donation from a political action committee controlled by Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a friend and supporter of Hillary Clinton’s — and that became the basis for a series of Twitter attacks from Trump.
“Problem is that the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!” Trump wrote in July 2017, erroneously claiming that McCabe had a role in facilitating the contribution.
The next day, the president asked in a tweet, “Why didn’t [Attorney General] Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of the Clinton investigation?”
In response to criticism that McCabe should not have played a role in the Clinton investigation, the FBI said he consulted with internal ethics officials who concluded that because his wife’s campaign ended before the investigation began, there was no conflict.
The number-two official at the FBI is now Acting Deputy Director David Bowdich, who supervised the investigation of the deadly 2015 shooting at the San Bernardino, California, community center.