Former US intelligence and law enforcement officials are fretting that they may face retribution, including incarceration, if Donald Trump wins back the presidency in November, an ex-deputy director of the FBI has claimed.
Andrew McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration in 2018 for lying to investigators about a media leak, revealed his fears in a CNN segment on Thursday. Now working as an analyst for the media outlet, he called the prospect of a potential Trump victory in the presidential election “terrifying” and “frightening.”
“If he feels like he’s been wronged in some way, then he focuses on revenge and vengeance,” McCabe said. “And so, he’s made it perfectly clear that that’s what he’s going to do.”
McCabe did not spell out what he and other Washington officials had done to make themselves enemies of the former president, but some of their clashes with Trump are well known. Trump has accused the US Department of Justice (DOJ) of trying to help block his return to the White House by filing bogus criminal charges against him. Just last month, Trump said FBI agents were “locked and loaded” to potentially shoot him when they raided his home for classified documents in 2022.
The FBI improperly spied on a Trump campaign staffer in 2016 and lied to the US FISA court to obtain warrants in a probe of alleged Russian interference in that year’s election. The agency also covered up its knowledge that the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy narrative was false. A high-level FBI agent and his mistress, an FBI lawyer, discussed the use of the Russia investigation as an “insurance policy” to ensure that Trump did not win the election. Trump suggested in 2019 that McCabe and other FBI leaders had committed treason.
More than 50 former intelligence agency officials put their thumbs on the scale in the 2020 election when Trump was running against Joe Biden. They falsely claimed that a Biden influence-peddling scandal – reported by the New York Post just weeks before the election – appeared to stem from “Russian disinformation.”
McCabe said he has spoken to many former intelligence and law enforcement colleagues who are trying to assess the risks they would face in a second Trump presidential term. “On a very personal level, these are torturous discussions with their family members about whether or not they have to leave the country to avoid being unconstitutionally and illegally detained. I mean, people are actually worried about being thrown in jail or grabbed in some sort of extrajudicial detention.”
Trump runs the risk of “dismantling and gravely incapacitating” the DOJ and the FBI, McCabe argued. “That is something that Americans on both sides of the political aisle should be worried about. We depend on those institutions to protect us, and he is proposing to tear them down.”