Since July Trump has attacked him on Twitter five separate times, for his involvement in the Clinton e-mail investigation and the fact that McCabe’s wife ran for office in Virginia and received money from a PAC with links to the former Democratic nominee. Back in December, Trump asked on Twitter why McCabe, “the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails)” received $700,000 from “Clinton Puppets” for his wife’s campaign.

It began with the number two official at the FBI, Andrew McCabe, announcing his resignation. Over the past several months, McCabe has been a regular punching bag for the president.


If we lived in an America where the president understood decorum, the rule of law, and basic political norms about politicizing federal law enforcement agencies, a tweet crudely and bizarrely accusing the deputy director of the FBI — and a potential witness against Trump in an obstruction of justice prosecution — of being corrupt would be a major scandal. In Trump’s America, we call it Monday.

Indeed, there’s little mystery as to why Trump has focused his ire specifically on McCabe, and generally on the FBI: He wants to discredit and delegitimize the Russia investigation. First he canned Comey last spring in order to pull the plug on the criminal inquiry. When that didn’t work, and Robert Muller was appointed special counsel, he tried (and failed) to fire him less than a month later.Then he began going after the FBI and Department of Justice — including his own Attorney General.

What is most disturbing, however, about the president’s escalating attacks is that members of Congress are giving him a helpful hand.


I’ve long given up any hope that Republican members of a coequal branch of a government would ever put the country and the Constitution ahead of their tribalistic devotion to Trump and the Republican Party. But that doesn’t make the abdication of their responsibilities — and their oaths of office — any more remarkable or unseemly.

Indeed, only hours after McCabe announced his intention to step down, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted to release a memo that they claim shows abuse by the FBI in the Russia investigation. Not surprisingly, the memo, the release of which Trump’s own Department of Justice has called “extraordinary reckless,” targets both McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another focus of Trump’s fury — and perhaps the greatest impediment to Trump firing Robert Mueller.

Make no mistake about what’s happening here: Republicans are openly trying to shield the president of the United States from accountability in the Russia investigation.

The tarring of McCabe and Rosenstein, the continued attacks on Mueller, and the firing of Comey represent a concerted effort to undermine the special counsel’s inquiry so that if (but more likely when) Mueller presents evidence of malfeasance by Trump and his aides it will be considered the fruits of a poisoned, partisan tree.

Indeed, it gathered little notice in the context of yesterday’s larger stories, but according to Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Republican members of the committee have even launched their own investigation of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Republicans will argue they’re concerned about potential abuses, but I think we all know the real reason: they are trying to pressure investigators to back off of Trump.


It’s extraordinary that Republicans are so willing to burn down essential democratic institutions, attack, without evidence, reputable public servants, and shred basic political norms for a leader as dishonorable and corrupt as Donald Trump, but here we are. It’s even more extraordinary when you consider that House Republicans have no idea what Mueller has on Trump and the depths of his criminality. Clearly, they don’t care, and even more clearly, there is pretty much nothing Mueller can reveal that won’t cause them to defend the president.

And as if all this is not bad enough, there’s this cherry on the sundae of yesterday’s descent into banana republic-ism: an announcement from the State Department that the Trump administration will not impose further sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Putting aside the fact that this is the umpteenth piece of evidence that the White House has no intention of ever punishing Russia for its actions during the election — and no interest in deterring further misbehavior — Trump is thumbing his nose at the law. Following through on these sanctions, which were passed by Congress as a bipartisan bill last year, is not a choice but a legal requirement, and it’s one that Trump is willfully choosing to ignore.


So from the White House and the Department of Justice to Congress and the State Department, what we saw yesterday was a full-scale assault on the rule of law and an open effort to immunize the president from legal accountability.

Whatever the president might say this evening when he speaks to Congress, we should be clear on one thing: The state of the union is not good.

Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.