In a new wide-ranging interview in The Atlantic with reporter Natasha Bertrand, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe dished on not just the shocking things he heard Donald Trump say with his own mouth, but on his own insight into the Mueller investigation — as someone who’s held the deputy post to the position that Mueller became famous for when he ran the FBI himself.
McCabe, of course, has a new book he’s promoting — doesn’t everyone who makes it out the other side of the Trump administration? But McCabe’s tome, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, is unlike the Fire and Fury or Unhinged tell-alls from Wolff and Omarosa. In fact, Bertrand says, it has little to do with Trump himself.
But that didn’t stop him from noting that the arc of his career sort of began and ended with Donald Trump, having started out in the New York bureau investigating Russian organized crime:
It has occurred to me on a number of occasions that, you know, Donald Trump and I know some of the same people.”
That’s not a good thing. Plenty has been written about Trump’s having sold real estate to Russians who ostensibly laundered money almost in the open in the 1980s, as well as at least one later discovered to have been running an actual organized crime ring that specialized in bootlegging gasoline.
Maybe that’s why McCabe was so forthcoming about what he told Bertrand that Robert Mueller’s likeliest tactic was: RICO charges. She asked him, given that so many legal experts have pointed to Trump as an example of someone you might examine like a mafioso, whether he thought Trump was still a “target” of the Mueller investigation all the way up until the end. McCabe was clear:
There are a lot of patterns in what Director Mueller [was] doing that are very familiar to me. Those patterns of targeting and investigating people who may have had more of a hands-on role, albeit at a lower level, and using those investigations to develop information and informants and cooperators—I mean, it is really the classic enterprise investigation that Director Mueller and his team have pursued. So do I think the case into Trump is open or closed? There’s absolutely no reason for me to believe that it’s closed. And you can certainly look at what Mueller’s done so far to say he is doing exactly what we would do with the investigation of a cartel or an organized-crime family.”
If McCabe is correct, there’s almost no chance that the arrest of Don Junior — or as many on social media call him, “Fredo” — wouldn’t lead to the same kind of charges for anyone in the family who could be proven to have known about any aspect of what Trump or even his eldest son was up to. And now that Junior’s been subpoenaed, that just got a little likelier.
And remember — Mueller’s the guy that prosecuted John Gotti and Sammy the Bull… He’s got more than a little experience with organized crime, even if it’s as disorganized as the Trumps.
Featured image via screen capture
