Andrew McCabe arrives for a meeting with members of the Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees December 21, 2017. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
When Special Counsel Jack Smith entered a D.C. courtroom on Thursday afternoon to witness the arraignment of Donald Trump on four criminal counts related to the former president’s alleged attempt to “overturn” the 2020 election, one longtime Department of Justice official accompanied Smith: Molly Gaston, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia now tasked to Smith’s team.
A federal grand jury on August 1 indicted Trump on conspiracy and obstruction charges following a year-long investigation by DOJ into Trump’s post-election efforts to uncover voting fraud and halt the certification of the electoral college results on January 6, 2021. “[For] for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” Smith wrote in the 45-page indictment.
Gaston, according to reports, was the prosecutor awaiting the grand jury’s decision on Tuesday then filed the indictment with the D.C. District Court late that afternoon.
But just a few years ago, Gaston appeared unconcerned with “lies” told by another top government official. Gaston and fellow prosecutor J.P. Cooney, also currently assigned to Smith’s team, informed Andrew McCabe—the former acting FBI Director who was fired in 2018 for lying to federal investigators—that he would not be charged.
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz had concluded McCabe lied to FBI and OIG agents on four occasions—including three times [under] oath—related to his involvement in authorizing a leak to the Wall Street Journal about an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation “to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership.”
“[The] OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ,” Horowitz wrote. He then forwarded the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; the referral ultimately ended up on Cooney’s desk.
Ironically, or not, Cooney and Gaston now have a leading role in prosecuting the former president for “creat[ing] an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erod[ing] public faith in the administration of the election,”—something that DOJ employees including McCabe did successfully by attempting to run Trump out of office based on lies about Trump-Russian election collusion. (Read more: Julie Kelly, 8/05/2023) (Archive)