occurred, the irs was run by a trump appointee. comey, who said trump demanded his loyalty in a private dinner, was fired four months after trump took office. it led to robert mueller s investigation into possible links between the trump campaign and russia. it also led to mccabe s promotion to acting fbi director before he, too, was fired one day before he was set to retire. in a statement to the times, the irs notes any allegations of wrongdoing are passed along for further review. a trump spokesman told the paper the former president had, quote, no knowledge of those audits. joining us now, the author of the new reporting, new york times correspondent, national security analyst michael schmidt. michael, good morning. how rare is this audit? and is there any possibility it is actually a coincidence, that these two men, the targets of donald trump s ire for many years now, were audited in the same years?
i was looking at data, and i think in 2013, which was the last i was able to find data, it was like five in all of the federal cases, which is tens of thousands. it just rarely, rarely happens. often when it happens you suspect that prosecutors didn t really want to bring the case. like in police shootings where while they presented it to a grand jury but they didn t ask them to do anything. that is not the situation here. as the justice department has made very clear, they re on board with the prosecution. the u.s. attorney is on board. the deputy attorney general s on board. they ve communicated that to mccabe. but what is unclear is why a prosecution hasn t happened if that s the case. exactly. and just for clarification on this, you talked about how weird it was that the grand jury came back. is this actually did the first grand jury expire and this is now a second grand jury they ve convened to look at the mccabe stuff or did they bring back the one that hasn t been there for
the president denies it. we need to find out what the facts are. i think the new york times story is indicative of a larger pattern, so many of the details and the narratives that we ve learned about are being told by self interested parties, whether it s james comey, andrew mccabe who gave this information to the new york times. we have yet to hear from a neutral arbiter other than inspector general for it s in report which led to mccabe s denial today that he illegally leaked information. so who is the neutral arbiter? we have a new attorney general, bill barr, who was immensely qualified and been in the job before. it s incumbent on him once mueller is finished to lay out all the facts and say that this is where the doj-fbi went wrong and this is how we ll fix the situation. bret: i ve heard it more and more, will we know everything? will we know the end of the mueller? will we know the answers? that s a really good question
president, about mccabe s interview on 60 minutes, at least in part, he said this. this was the illegal and treasonous insurance policy in full action. were those discussions that mccabe and rosenstein, according to mccabe, had, illegal and treasonous? they weren t illegal and treasonous. they weren t particularly good ideas which is why they didn t actually happen. i think we need to take ourselves back to what the situation the justice department and fbi officials were faciing n that moment. they were investigating russian election interference. they d seen an absolutely disturbing, bizarre, number of contacts with the campaign of the individual who would become president. they re interviewing michael flynn for his contacts with russians and lies about those contacts. the president of the united states asked the fbi director to see his way to letting flynn go, which the fbi believes is potentially obstruction of justice. then the president actually fires the fbi director which
the deputy attorney general rod rosenstein, he s still at least for now, the deputy attorney general, actually considered wearing a wire to secretly go into the white house and record what the president was saying and actually also, according to mccabe, discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th amendment to the constitution to remove the president from office. was any of this ever taken seriously? you know, i think it depends on who you ask. you know, when mccabe is doing these interviews and talking about it, he certainly came away with the impression that it was a serious discussion. but now what we re hearing from officials that are at the justice department as well as the spokesperson at the justice department, they re sort of saying, you know, some of this was said in jest, some wasn t said seriously. certainly, rod rosenstein never had any reason to believe the president should be removed by the 25th amendment, so he may be seeing a little l bit of damage control going on