Former Democratic Sen. Al Franken (Minn.) on Friday called Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe “hypocrisy at its worst.”
Franken said it was “ironic” that Sessions would fire McCabe for what he claimed was a “lack of candor” under oath given Sessions’s own mixed messages to Congress about his communication with Russians as a campaign adviser to President Trump in 2016.
{mosads}”But the fact that Attorney General Sessions would claim that a ‘lack of candor’ justified Mr. McCabe’s termination is hypocrisy at its worst,” Franken said in a Facebook post, one of few public statements he has made since resigning from office in January amid sexual misconduct allegations.
A year before his firing, McCabe himself oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor in his testimony before Congress on his contacts with Russian operatives, ABC News reported this week.
Franken, who as a senator at the time pressed Sessions during his confirmation hearing, recalled asking Sessions about the developing story of communications between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, of which Sessions said he was unaware.
The Democratic senator accused Sessions of willingly misleading lawmakers after it was reported that the former Alabama senator had met several times with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign. Sessions later was forced to recuse himself from the federal Russia probe.
“That the attorney general would fire the man who was tasked with investigating him raises serious questions about whether retaliation or retribution motivated his decision. It also raises serious questions about his supposed recusal from all matters stemming from the 2016 campaign,” Franken said of McCabe’s firing.
Trump has long been a critic of McCabe, who helped oversee the FBI investigation into his former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton, and openly pressured Sessions to fire the veteran law enforcement official, claiming he was biased against him.
Sessions fired McCabe last week, citing a watchdog review and internal recommendation that he be terminated. Sessions said McCabe was found to have made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and “lacked candor” on multiple occasions, claims McCabe denies.