Obama team prepares to defend Andrew McCabe in court

A procession of national security officials from the Obama era pledged to testify on behalf of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, to appear in court on charges that it would have misled the officials about the leaks.

The list, detailed in a note that McCabe's legal team submitted to the Department of Justice last month, includes former leaders of the DOJ, CIA and all intelligence services in the country. The former boss of McCabe, however, former FBI director James Comey said he could testify against him, from the testimony of Comey before an internal monitoring body that seemed to contradict the version of McCabe's events .

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McCabe was fired in 2018 after the Inspector General of the Justice Ministry concluded that the FBI's number 2 had displayed a "lack of sincerity" in his investigation of media revelations about the police investigation. office on the Clinton Foundation. McCabe argued that he did not intend to mislead the investigators and argued in a lawsuit commenced in August that his ouster was a reprisal in nature. Politics – led by President Donald Trump – intended to punish him for his role in investigating the links of the Trump campaign with Russia.

Nevertheless, prosecutors have recommended that McCabe be indicted for his actions during the investigation conducted by the IG.

If eventually McCabe faces charges, he will have some big names lined up as character witnesses. Former senior officials who have pledged to defend him include former Attorney General Eric Holder, former CIA director John Brennan, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice.

Mary McCord, DOJ lawyer who oversaw the investigation in Russia as head of the DOJ National Security Division, and David Cohen, CIA number two from 2015 to 2017, are also ready to speak on behalf of McCabe.

McCabe's legal team had previously asked the GM to overturn the prosecutors' recommendation to impeach, but was dismissed, according to someone familiar with the case. The lawyers drafted an 11-page legal analysis entitled "Reasons Not to Prosecute Andrew McCabe" as part of their efforts to convince the DOJ not to lay charges.

However, it is still unclear whether the grand jury in the McCabe case issued an indictment. McCabe's lawyer, Michael Bromwich, sent a letter last Thursday to US lawyer Jesse Liu – whose office in Washington DC was handling the case – asking for "rumors" that jurors would have refused to sue McCabe for the alleged leak in the media.

Bromwich argued that if this were the case, "the manual of justice requires you not to resubmit the case to an identical or different grand jury".

It is also unclear what charges the prosecutors have recommended against McCabe.

McCabe – who launched a counter-intelligence investigation on Trump after firing Comey in 2017 – said in an interview earlier this year that he thought his dismissal was "an ideal way to undermine my ability to provide testimony against "the president. He also insisted that he "had never, intentionally, ever misled the FBI's inspection division, the office of the Inspector General or an FBI director. ".