Jill McCabe: ‘We Will Not Allow Ourselves To Be Defined By A False Narrative’

Jill McCabe, who is married to fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, broke her silence about her husband’s ousting — just hours before he was set to retire — and defended herself and her family from President Trump’s attacks in a Washington Post op-ed published Monday.

“Now that I can speak on my own behalf, I want people to know that the whole story that everything is based on is just false and utterly absurd,” she said. “Despite everything, we are closer than ever. Andrew and I have amazing children and a support network that knows who we truly are. We will not allow ourselves to be defined by a false narrative.”

As an emergency room pediatrician, McCabe outlined her decision to run for state office in 2015, a move that was presented to her by then-Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam after she was quoted in a local newspaper, talking about the need for Medicaid expansion in Virginia.

Before she made the final decision to run as a Democrat on the Medicaid platform, the couple took pains to avoid any perceived conflicts of interest that could arise from Andrew McCabe’s work and her political bid. Andrew McCabe, a “reliable Republican,” consulted with the ethics department at the FBI and did not participate in any aspect of her campaign, she said, save taking one family photo wearing a campaign t-shirt.

But those efforts have fallen on deaf ears, she said. Trump has used her acceptance of $675,000 from the state Democratic Party and other groups connected to former Gov. Terry McAuliffe as the cudgel to attack Andrew McCabe and his handling of the probe into his former opponent Hillary Clinton. Clinton and McAuliffe are longtime friends, which Trump seized on as defense of his claims that Andrew McCabe and FBI leadership were biased in their investigation into Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state, which culminated with no criminal charges against her.

“I made the decision to run for office because I was trying to help people,” McCabe wrote. “Instead, it turned into something that was used to attack our family, my husband’s career and the entire FBI. … Andrew’s involvement in the Clinton investigation came not only after the contributions were made to my campaign, but also after the race was over.”

McCabe lost her state legislative bid and wrote Monday that she has no intention of running for office again.

Mere hours before Andrew McCabe was set to retire last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him because he “lacked candor” and allegedly made an “unauthorized disclosure to the media.” Andrew McCabe has vehemently denied the allegations and has suggested that Sessions’ decision was meant to hobble his credibility and prop up Trump’s baseless claims of an anti-Trump bias within FBI leadership. 

Read McCabe’s full op-ed here.