Via Tampa Bay Times:
Fred Humphries woke up Saturday morning and for the first time ever raised a blue and white Federal Bureau of Investigation flag on the pole in his front yard.
“I was encouraged and hopeful,” said Humphries, 53, in an exclusive interview with the Tampa Bay Times, reacting to the news that former FBI director Andrew McCabe had been fired.
A day earlier, both men left the FBI after 21-year careers.
Humphries retired, a short while after serving a 60-day unpaid suspension for previously speaking to the Times without permission.
McCabe, fired after the Justice Department rejected an appeal that would have let him retire this weekend, is accused in a yet-to-be-released internal report of failing to be forthcoming about a conversation he authorized between FBI officials and a journalist.
Humphries said McCabe’s firing was good for the organization because it is important for top officials to be held accountable for the same transgressions agents like him are. The McCabe firing is fitting, Humphries says, for a man accused of lack of candor about media contacts whose office launched an investigation into him talking to a newspaper.
“Every employee of the FBI voluntarily swears to observe the bureau’s strict standards of conduct, especially in terms of candor and ethics,” said Humphries. “When we fall short of that, we can expect appropriate sanctions. Yesterday’s firing of the former deputy director demonstrates that those sanctions are meted out uniformly, regardless of rank or position.”
Humphries joined the FBI in 1997. His work on some of the bureau’s biggest jihadi cases is credited with saving lives. His investigations helped convict James Ujaama and Abu Hama al-Masri, who tried to set up jihadi training camps, and Ahmed Mohamed, one of two University of South Florida students arrested near a South Carolina military installation with explosives in their car.
He helped authorities defuse the infamous shoe bomb smuggled onto a commercial jet. And in 1999, he cultivated an asset named Ahmed Ressam, who had planned on blowing up the Los Angeles airport on New Year’s Eve, but instead became a valuable witness for the government.[…]
Humphries also found his career embroiled in politics. He was thrust into the international spotlight for his role in the investigation that ended the career of a CIA director in 2012. The story blew up in Tampa after the identify of Jill and Scott Kelley as the recipient of emails that started the investigation was leaked. It ultimately led to David Petraeus, then head of the CIA, stepping down over an affair he had with his biographer Paula Broadwell. And that led to Petraeus eventually resigning and later pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of mishandling classified information, which he had given to Broadwell, who was never charged with any crimes.
On May 11, 2017, Humphries talked to the Times about the investigations at the time into former National Security Director Michael Flynn.
Comparing it to how the investigation into Petraeus was handled, he called it “the ultimate hypocrisy and double standard.”
Said Humprhies in that article: “You are telling me that acting Attorney General Sally Yates was comfortable going to the White House to inform them of an investigation of general Flynn, but yet the attorney general and FBI director at the time said they never would have discussed such a thing during the Petraeus scandal?”
Both Yates and Flynn were ultimate fired by Trump.
Humphries said that in August of 2017, McCabe’s office asked the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, its internal affairs branch, to investigate him for unauthorized communications with the media.
In October, Humphries said, the OPR investigation found he was wrong for talking to the Times, and issued him a two-month unpaid suspension, which he served in November and December of 2017. Investigators also criticized Humphries over a November 2016 interview his wife, Sara, gave to the Times in which she spelled out the stresses her family was undergoing as the result of being thrust into the spotlight.