Failing to get traction on their Russia “collusion” front, Sen. Mark Warner and other top Democratic inquisitors now suggest President Trump is obstructing justice by forcing a shake-up at FBI headquarters. But FBI sources tell me the pressure to clean house is also coming from inside the bureau, and it’s based on real concerns over malfeasance by top brass there.

In a healthy sign, new FBI Director Christopher Wray is slowly but surely sweeping partisan operatives out of the bureau’s executive suites all on his own. On the job just a few months, Wray told Congress in December he wanted to wait and see the evidence before taking any action against high-level investigators accused of bias and misconduct. Over the weekend, he saw some of that evidence, and it convinced him to remove his own deputy, Andrew McCabe.

“Wray is a smart, experienced attorney,” former assistant FBI Director Ron Hosko told me. “He’s not gonna fold to BS pressure with no facts, so he saw something solid, something from” the bureau’s inspector general, who has been investigating political conflicts and irregularities involving McCabe for more than a year.

Whatever Wray saw wasn’t manufactured by the White House. It came from Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, who launched his probe at the request of Democrats.

In fact, it’s doubtful there’d even be an internal inquiry if Democratic leaders hadn’t complained about the FBI reopening its probe into Hillary Clinton’s handling of State Department secrets on the eve of the election.

Yet far from trying to derail her chances, FBI brass reportedly tried to slow-walk agents’ search of a new batch of Clinton emails belatedly found on a laptop belonging to the husband of her top aide, Huma Abedin. In September 2016, agents in New York investigating Anthony Weiner for cyber-sex crimes discovered the email cache and alerted headquarters that the documents were relevant to the case McCabe and his boss James Comey had long closed.

McCabe reportedly was reluctant to move forward. He neglected to act for over a month on agents’ requests to examine the new Clinton emails, according to The Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the IG’s investigation. The IG, it reports, suspects McCabe may have sought to wait to reopen the case until after the 2016 election.

Recently released FBI emails show McCabe played an instrumental role in watering down conclusions in the Clinton case, made two months before Hillary was interviewed.

The IG is investigating whether partisan bias influenced his decisions. His wife, a Democrat, ran for Virginia state office, and McCabe involved himself in her campaign, yet refused to recuse himself from the Clinton case until a week before the election. And he used official FBI email to conduct political business on his wife’s behalf.

More troubling, the IG reportedly is investigating McCabe for allegedly asking agents to change the wording in the so-called 302 summaries of the official statements of suspects and witnesses they took in the course of their investigations, according to Fox News.

McCabe’s exit comes on the heels of the reassignments of his top lawyer, Lisa Page, and top counterintelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, who the IG caught texting political messages slamming Trump and rooting for Clinton during the election. In late October 2016, McCabe assigned Strzok to quickly sift through the thousands of new Clinton emails found on Weiner’s laptop before giving the all-clear just days before the election.

Wray is also sweeping aside Comey’s old chief of staff, James Rybicki, who appears in -mails watering down the case against Clinton. Another Comey crony, James Baker, reportedly is leaving his post as FBI general counsel. Baker recently got into hot water after internal documents revealed he contacted a reporter who wrote about the Clinton-funded dossier tying Trump to Moscow during the election.

“The FBI hierarchy, the management, has been poisoned by politics,” said Michael Biasello, a 25-year veteran of the FBI who spent 10 years in counterintelligence. “This is Comey’s legacy.”

And while Wray is trying to clean up Comey’s mess, he’s at the same time trying to block the release of documents — including the infamous memo reportedly alleging the FBI abused its surveillance powers, which will likely be released Friday over Wray’s objections — that could damage the bureau’s vaunted reputation. Restoring public trust in the FBI — the only agency the public can rely on to expose government corruption — won’t be easy. To get beyond this crisis of confidence, the FBI must come completely clean, no matter how painful the process.



Paul Sperry is author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”