Democrats squelch consequences to FBI's McCabe for professional misconduct

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Office of Professional Responsibility recommended the firing of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Friday for leaking to the media and lying about it to investigators, as is about right for an embattled bureau seeking to rectify the damage to its reputation for probity. McCabe politicized the bureau's work, bet wrong on who would win the election and kept at it, fighting like an Iraqi dead-ender at Fallujah. It's normal that someone who does what he did should be fired. Actions have consequences. One of those could be indictment, as Thomas Lifson noted here, but at the least, it's legal to fire such a person for obvious politicking who would lose his pension as a consequence. Because some kinds of behavior, particularly from the top, such as lying, from an agency that makes it a crime to lie to them, really is unacceptable. If this kind of behavior is not checked, it lowers the bar for everyone and opens the door to widespread corruption through the ranks. It makes sense that there's some kind of punishment for federal employees who break these rules, given the vulnerability these agencies in their headquarters have to politicking.

But not to Democrats, for whom the politicization of the entire government remains live, something they root for ,as they cool their heels out of power. Far from allowing consequences for Andrew McCabe, recommended by his own agency acting on its standards, they remain all-in for McCabe. One obscure leftwing congressman, some Wisconsin guy named Mark Pocan, apparently with a lot of money to throw around for political hires, has offered McCabe a make-work job doing "security" for campaign events to McCabe, because that will ensure he keeps his pension. In its headline, the Washington Post's cheerleaders crowed that "It might just work." At least one Democratic congressman has offered McCabe a temporary job so he can get full retirement benefits — and McCabe appears to be considering. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) announced Saturday afternoon that he has offered McCabe a job to work on election security in his office, “so that he can reach the needed length of service” to retire. “My offer of employment to Mr. McCabe is a legitimate offer to work on election security,” Pocan said in a statement. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of American democracy and both Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about election integrity.” It's not as if McCabe is a fellow Democrat. According to his Wikipedia page, he's a Republican. So what we have here is a politically useful act for the Democrats, an all-out effort to negate any effort to discipline the federal workforce into the apolitical serve-everyone bureaucracy they were designed to be, ever since the civil service codes went up in the early 20th century. They don't want McCabe to have any consequences. They want everyone in the federal workforce to behave as he did, because he served their interests. And they want to encourage federal workers to break the rules with abandon if it helps Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, because whatever fallout might happen internally, they'll be there to catch them for such consequences if the politics are useful. It's an amazing undercutting of professional standards and obviously meant to encourage McCabe to continue to act as their tool to Get Trump. This isn't the first time they've done this, by the way. IRS tax-exempts chief Lois Lerner, after admitting she spied on political dissidents, wrote nasty statements about them on government electronic communications, destroyed her emails so investigators could not read them, and took the Fifth before Congress, was happily allowed to retire to her multimillion-dollar mansion in the Washington suburbs, utterly consequence-free. Now we see the same thing with McCabe. Democrats' efforts to shield them both from consequences of unprofessional behavior is a signal of how they see government and how they will govern - with a politicized Deep State as their valuable tool. A lot of things need to be cleaned up and hosed out from these sorry affairs. Number one, who hooked up the complex pension regulations to permit political hires to keep their pensions. Who came up with the idea of 20-year service requirements for full lifetime pensions? All of these things need to be hosed out. President Trump has his work cut out for him. As he works with legislators to fix this, perhaps he can call the reforms the McCabe Abuses Prevention Act.