Trump asks for scrutiny of McCabe text messages — with an unfortunate typo

(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

published 11 August 2018

President Trump reiterated his complaints about fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and the FBI more generally in a pair of posts on Twitter Saturday:

Trump has long claimed McCabe abused his position in exchange for donations to his wife's Democratic congressional campaign. The donations came from from a PAC run by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who was chair of Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, but McCabe did not have oversight of Clinton's emails investigation until after his wife lost her race. While she was running, the FBI said he "implemented a system of recusal from all FBI investigative matters involving Virginia politics" to avoid conflicts of interest.

The president's vendetta against McCabe is, at this point, well-established, so his tweets mostly garnered attention for an unfortunate typo in their initial incarnation. In his first post, Trump accidentally wrote of the FBI giving "text massages":

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

The tweet was eventually deleted and replaced.

Explore More

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.