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Under F.B.I. rules, internal reports are referred to the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which makes disciplinary recommendations. Mr. McCabe can appeal that recommendation to the attorney general. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to say whether Mr. McCabe would be fired.
“The department follows a prescribed process by which an employee may be terminated,” said the spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores. “That process includes recommendations from career employees, and no termination decision is final until the conclusion of that process. We have no personnel announcements at this time.”
Mr. McCabe declined to comment. His friends and allies have said that he denies any wrongdoing in his dealings with journalists or the inspector general. He stepped down in January and took a leave of absence under pressure over the looming inspector general’s report.
Mr. McCabe is a career agent, not a political appointee, so Mr. Trump has no direct say in his fate. The decision nonetheless comes at a moment of turnover in Mr. Trump’s national security team. On Tuesday, the president fired the secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, and named the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, to replace him. He tapped a veteran clandestine officer, Gina Haspel, to lead the C.I.A.
Firing Mr. McCabe, even on the recommendation of the disciplinary office, would be controversial. Among Mr. McCabe’s allies, the decision would raise the specter that Mr. Sessions was influenced by Mr. Trump’s frequent derisive comments. No deputy director in the history of the F.B.I. has been fired.
But Mr. Sessions would be able to point to a critical inspector general’s report and say he followed Justice Department protocol. The details of why the inspector general viewed Mr. McCabe as not forthcoming are not clear. Though F.B.I. disciplinary records show that drunken driving, domestic violence and assaults have been punished by suspension, when agents are found to have shown a lack of candor under oath, they are commonly fired.
The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced last year that he would investigate several contentious decisions made at the F.B.I. and Justice Department during the 2016 presidential campaign. In November, Mr. Horowitz indicated that he planned to issue a single report this spring encompassing his entire review, on matters including the F.B.I.’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
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There are no indications that Mr. Horowitz is prepared to release a broad report this week. It is not clear why he opted to handle Mr. McCabe separately and refer him for discipline before the release of the full report. A spokesman for Mr. Horowitz has declined to comment.
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Mr. Trump has attacked members of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for much of his first year in office. But few have been the target of presidential ire like Mr. McCabe. Mr. Trump has repeatedly remarked on the fact that Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill, ran as a Democrat for a State Senate seat in Virginia. Her campaign received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from a political committee run by Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia governor at the time and a longtime ally of the Clintons.
Mrs. McCabe lost the race and Mr. McCabe was later promoted to deputy director, where he oversaw the investigation into Mrs. Clinton. No charges were filed in that case, and Mr. Trump has pointed to the donations to Mr. McCabe’s wife’s campaign as evidence of F.B.I. bias.
In meetings with Mr. McCabe, the president questioned how he had voted and needled him about his wife, calling her a “loser,” according to people familiar with the conversations.
The precise allegations against Mr. McCabe will not be clear until the full report is released. But what is publicly known does not fit neatly into Mr. Trump’s theory of Mr. McCabe as a Democratic operator. Mr. McCabe has described himself to friends as a lifelong Republican voter.
The allegations revolve around disclosures to The Wall Street Journal, which revealed in October 2016 a dispute between the F.B.I. and Justice Department over how to proceed in an investigation into the Clinton family’s foundation. The article said that the Justice Department would not authorize subpoenas in the case. Some F.B.I. agents, the article said, believed that Mr. McCabe had put the brakes on the investigation. Others rejected that notion.
The inspector general has concluded that Mr. McCabe authorized F.B.I. officials to provide information for that article. The public affairs office arranged a phone call to discuss the case, a common practice in the federal government when officials believe that a journalist has only part of the story.
In the Journal story, a person described as close to Mr. McCabe pushed back on the notion that he had tried to shut down the Clinton Foundation investigation. To the contrary, the person described a tense conversation with the Justice Department in which Mr. McCabe insisted his agents had the authority to keep investigating.
The article was a negative one for the Clinton campaign — not Mr. Trump. It was published just days before the election, after the F.B.I. reopened its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices. The article, including the F.B.I. disclosures, made it clear that some agents saw evidence of wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation that was worth investigating.
Mr. McCabe joined the F.B.I. after law school and rose quickly through the ranks. Under the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, he ascended through several senior leadership jobs, and it was clear that he was being groomed for the bureau’s No. 2 position. His rise angered some rank-and-file agents. But supporters viewed him as a sophisticated, intellectual choice for a job that has become an integral part of the nation’s intelligence community.
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The deputy director is the chief operations officer at the F.B.I., a job that requires managing relationships with the White House and Congress. That task became unusually difficult as agents investigated the Trump campaign, straining relationships with Mr. Trump. Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, criticized the F.B.I. for failing to do enough in that inquiry, while Republicans accused agents of drumming up an investigation based on shoddy evidence.
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Toy store chain Toys R Us is planning to sell or close all 800 of its U.S. stores, affecting as many as 33,000 jobs as the company winds down its operations after six decades, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The news comes six months after the retailer filed for bankruptcy. The company has struggled to pay down nearly $8 billion in debt — much of it dating to a 2005 leveraged buyout — and has had trouble finding a buyer. There were reports earlier this week that Toys R Us had stopped paying its suppliers, which include the country’s largest toymakers. On Wednesday, the company announced it would close all 100 of its U.K. stores. In the United States, the company told employees closures would likely occur over time, and not all at once, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
Toys R Us, once the country’s preeminent toy retailer, has been unable to keep up with big-box and online competitors. The recent holiday season dealt another blow to the embattled company, which struggled to find its footing even as the retail industry racked up its largest gains in years. In January, the retailer announced it would close 182 U.S. stores, or about one-fifth of its remaining Toys R Us and Babies R Us locations.
[ At Toys R Us, hopes for a turnaround rest on a last-minute rush for holiday gifts ]
A group of toymakers led by Isaac Larian, chief executive of MGA Entertainment, the giant behind brands such as L.O.L. Surprise!, Little Tikes and Bratz, on Wednesday submitted a bid to buy Toys R Us’s Canadian arm, which includes 82 stores, according to Larian. He added that he is also looking into buying as many as 400 U.S. stores, which he would seek to operate under the Toys R Us name.
“There is no toy business without Toys R Us,” Larian said, noting that he sold his first product to the chain in 1979. “It’s a big deal and I’m going to try to salvage as much of it as possible.”
According to its September bankruptcy filing, Toys R Us owes MGA Entertainment $21.3 million.
[ ‘Unboxing’ this year’s hot toy: The L.O.L. Surprise ]
Despite turnaround efforts at Toys R Us, which included adding more hands-on “play labs,” retail experts say the 60-year-old company has been unable to get customers back into its stores. It doesn’t offer the low prices or convenience of some of its larger competitors, nor the fun-filled experience that many smaller outfits do, some analysts have said.
Toys R Us, based in Wayne, N.J., has been struggling for years to pay down billions of dollars in debt as competitors such as Amazon, Walmart and Target win over an increasingly larger piece of the toy market. Its bankruptcy filing last year cited $7.9 billion in debt against $6.6 billion in assets. The company said it has more than 100,000 creditors, the largest of which are Bank of New York (owed $208 million), Mattel ($136 million) and Hasbro ($59 million). (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
The collapse of the storied toy chain raises a number of questions for employees, as well as consumers in the coming weeks. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday urged Toys R Us to give customers cash in exchange for their unused gift cards, which he said would be “as worthless and unwanted as a lump of coal in a stocking.”
“The music is about to stop for the iconic retailer,” Schumer said in a statement on Wednesday. “Consumers could be left in the lurch.” He also urged the Federal Trade Commission to “take an immediate look” at how Toys R Us is handling the winding down of its operations.
“The liquidation of Toys R Us is the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion of a retailer that lost its way,” Neil Saunders, managing director of the research firm GlobalData Retail, wrote in an email. “Even during recent store closeouts, Toys R Us failed to create any sense of excitement. The brand lost relevance, customers and ultimately sales.”
Toys R Us got its start as a baby furniture shop in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood in 1948. It didn’t take long for Charles Lazarus, who founded the company at age 25, to realize he could make a lot more money selling toys than one-off cribs at Children’s Bargain Town. He renamed his business Toys R Us and created an emporium of exclusive products and ever-rotating inventory.
“Lazarus offered toy manufacturers the tantalizing picture of year-round toy sales and the ability to produce 12 months a year,” Eric Clark wrote in “The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America’s Youngest Consumers.”
[ Toys R Us: The birth — and bust — of a retail empire ]
At its heyday, Toys R Us had a towering flagship store in New York’s Times Square (now closed and home to Old Navy) and a ubiquitous icon, Geoffrey the Giraffe. Its catchy jingle, with the refrain “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid,” was a long-running television staple.
But in recent years, the company lost its footing as retailers like Walmart and Target began selling toys at lower profit margins. Toys R Us, which was saddled with billions in debt, couldn’t invest enough to keep its stores or websites competitive.
“We know that customers are willing to pay more for an enjoyable experience — just look at the lines at Starbucks every day — but Toys R Us has failed to give us anything special or unique,” Kelly O’Keefe, a professor of brand management at Virginia Commonwealth University, told The Washington Post this year. “You can find more zest for life in a Walgreens.”
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