WASHINGTON--The U.S. Justice Department on Friday dropped its criminal investigation of a top target of President Donald Trump, former No. 2 FBI official Andrew McCabe, at the tail end of a week in which the U.S. law-enforcement agency has come under extraordinary pressure from the president.
Since he was fired by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in March 2018, McCabe has often been a punching bag for Trump, and the department's decision not to charge him could further stoke Trump's ire. Trump has spent the week criticizing prosecutors, jurors and the judge in a separate case involving his longtime political adviser, Roger Stone, raising questions about whether Trump is eroding the independence of the U.S. legal system.
Trump was irked by the decision, said a source close to the White House. He did not comment as he left Washington for his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
McCabe criticized the Justice Department for taking two years on the case, which examined whether he misled investigators about his decision to share internal communications with a reporter during the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors had been indicating since July that the investigation was largely complete. "It is an absolute disgrace that they took two years and put my family through this experience for two years before they finally drew the obvious conclusion and one they could have drawn a long time ago," he said on CNN.
U.S. Judge Reggie Walton said at a hearing in September that the delays made it seem like the department was facing political pressure. A lifelong Republican who worked at the FBI for 20 years, McCabe played a crucial role in the bureau's investigations of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
In campaign speeches, interviews and tweets, Trump accused McCabe of conflicts of interest because his wife Jill McCabe, a Democrat, received donations for an unsuccessful 2015 Virginia state senate campaign from a Clinton ally.
