President Donald Trump started tweeting early Sunday morning — Christmas Eve — railing against Andrew McCabe, the Clintons, and conspiracy theories that claim the FBI investigation into his ties with Russia is driven by a partisan vendetta. His tweet hinted at a purge of government workers for being insufficiently loyal.

.@FoxNews-FBI’s Andrew McCabe, “in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.” — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017

The president’s Christmas Eve tweets hint at a political purge — pushing out career government officials whose personal politics don’t match up with his own. “You obviously cannot do this,” he tweets.


The presidential rant comes just a day after reports emerged that former acting director McCabe will retire from his post at the FBI.

Marc Short, White House director of legislative affairs, defended the president’s statements on Fox News Sunday. “The president believes the American people have a right to know as to what happened in that investigation.” He explains the conspiracy theory about campaign donations from the Clintons to McCabe’s wife, which has been debunked, as a way to claim that the current Russia investigation is politically motivated.

But the president continues to contradict his own claims about the FBI’s relationship to Clinton: he ostensibly fired FBI Director James Comey because the agency was too hard on Clinton.

Reminder: Trump's (fake) rationale for firing Comey, put in writing by DAG Rosenstein when Trump wanted a (fake) pretext, was that Comey had improperly *criticized* Clinton at July 2016 presser. Comey also announced "new" emails 11 days before elex. Trump seized on both. https://t.co/jabR5WYm1e — Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 24, 2017

McCabe reportedly knocked down that reasoning this week in Congressional testimony, telling the House Intelligence Committee that Comey described to McCabe his conversations with Trump, which confirmed that Trump fired Comey to stifle the Russia investigation.