On CNN Tuesday, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe took Attorney General William Barr to task for trying to discredit the inspector general report largely defending the FBI's investigation of President Donald Trump's campaign — and expressed his skepticism that the parallel criminal investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, which Barr ordered, will find anything terribly different.
Barr, said McCabe, is "doing the exact same thing with the IG report," that he did with former special counsel Robert Mueller's report, trying to taint the public's perception of it before it is released — and it is "unprecedented."
"We have seen from reports that this is an extensive report," said anchor John Berman. "This is hundreds of pages long here. You can't go into the details, but the fact that the attorney general would choose to take issue with something here, given the comprehensive nature of it, is pretty interesting."
"Well, it is," said McCabe. "And I can say that the report, at least the portions that I saw, were consistent with what you've described. It's an enormous piece of work. It likely includes the result of hundreds of interviews, probably thousands of man-hours of attorneys' and investigators' work product. They had extraordinary access to FBI materials, documents to the personal correspondences and communications of all of the individuals involved in the investigation, the Russia investigation and the FBI. So for the attorney general to try to undermine conclusions that are based on that massive tranche of evidence is going to be a very tough hurdle for him to get over, and I would say he's going to need to produce some contrary evidence, which is almost — that's going to be a tough thing for him to do."
"He's got a whole other investigation," pointed out Berman. "He's got a backup plan. The Durham investigation, which is looking into the intelligence communities as well as the FBI. Do you think that's where he might be headed?"
"It certainly could be," said McCabe. "There's a difference between the authority that a special counsel has in the case of Mr. Durham ... there could be a difference in scope there. But again, it will be really interesting to see whatever conclusions are drawn from Durham's effort. I find it hard to believe they'll come up with much that the IG hasn't already considered."
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