Monday night on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova said former FBI Director James Comey “was a dirty cop” who “dirtied up everybody else around him” — including departing FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

NBC News first reported Monday that McCabe was stepping down from his role in the bureau amid mounting pressure and concerns about anti-Trump bias among senior officials in the Department of Justice (DOJ). McCabe had previously said he planned to retire in March.

McCabe’s decision to leave took place the same day the House Select Committee on Intelligence voted to release a controversial memo drafted by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). The memo assesses classified information of widespread partisan bias at the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI, along with abuses of the government’s surveillance system.

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The person “to blame is McCabe and to blame is Comey and everybody else at the senior levels of the FBI. This is quite a disgraceful moment for the bureau,” diGenova told host Laura Ingraham of the growing scandal within the nation’s top law enforcement agency. “Comey was a dirty cop, and unfortunately he dirtied up everybody else around him.”

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John Iannarelli, a former national spokesman for the FBI, told Ingraham that “McCabe is part of Comey’s legacy. Now, Andrew McCabe did a lot of good things in the bureau during his career. But it doesn’t matter. When you’re doing something wrong, that is the time that it has to be stopped immediately.”

Comey took to Twitter on Monday evening to defend McCabe, tweeting: “Special Agent Andrew McCabe stood tall over the last 8 months, when small people were trying to tear down an institution we all depend on. He served with distinction for two decades. I wish Andy well. I also wish continued strength for the rest of the FBI. America needs you.”

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Noting that he worked with the bureau for over 30 years in various capacities, diGenova said he is “truly saddened by the fall from grace of everybody there” at the top levels following the bureau’s widely criticized investigations into the two 2016 presidential nominees.

“But make no mistake about it — this was a plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton illegally, and then if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump with an illegal crime,” diGenova said.

“This is the worst period in the history of the bureau — much worse than the late Hoover period when they were spying on domestic groups,” diGenova added. “This was the weaponization of the FBI for political purposes by all the people of the upper echelon of the bureau.”

DiGenova ripped Democrats for showing a marked lack of interest in uncovering whether or not senior DOJ and FBI officials exhibited anti-Trump and pro-Clinton biases.

“I think it’s really time for people in the other party who seem to make nothing but excuses for the senior people at the bureau and the Department of Justice, may I say, to kind of wake up and see that what’s coming now is a federal grand jury,” diGenova said. “And it’s not going to be pretty.”

Also on the Ingraham show Monday, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, cautioned against expecting the four-page Nunes memo to be the earth-shattering document some congressmen have been promoting it as in recent days.

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When Ingraham pointed to criticism from Democrats and media members claiming that some of the GOP committee members engaged in “hyperbole” about the memo, Stewart replied, “I can tell you I haven’t been.”

Stewart acknowledged, however, that “some people have, and we’ve actually cautioned against that … we’ve tried to get some people to kind of temper their language. But this is an important document. It’s very important for the American people to know that.”

Intelligence panel ranking minority member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) claimed making the Nunes’ memo public would endanger national security, but Stewart insisted that it did no such thing.

“But what it does do is, it asks these questions: Was the FBI fair? Were they accurate?” Stewart said. “That’s the kind of things this memo will address. The memo is very factual. It’s not emotional. It doesn’t draw any conclusions. It just lays out the facts and lets you draw those conclusions.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.