Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on Tuesday that no members of the “Gang of Eight” congressional leaders objected when he informed them in May 2017 that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Donald Trump over his ties to Russia.
McCabe, who was serving then as acting FBI director after Trump fired Director James Comey, said on NBC’s “Today” show that no one in the briefing objected to the bureau’s inquiry of whether Trump was being used as a Russian asset — “not on legal grounds, constitutional grounds or based on the facts.”
The purpose of the briefing with the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees “was to let our congressional leadership know what exactly what we’d been doing” after Comey’s firing, McCabe said.
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On Tuesday, McCabe disputed the insinuation made by some of his critics that he had decided to investigate Trump on his own, arguing that the decision was not a spurious one.
“Opening a case of this nature, not something an FBI director — not something that an acting FBI director — would do by yourself, right? This is a recommendation that came to me from my team,” he said. “I reviewed it with our lawyers. I discussed it at length with the deputy attorney general … and I told Congress what we’d done.”
In an interview with The Atlantic published Tuesday, McCabe said that while Comey’s firing may have been the catalyst for launching the investigations, “we were building to this point for months before Jim was fired.”
He said he could understand criticism if the investigations had been initiated solely as result of Comey’s ouster, but insisted that was not the case.
“We had several cases already open under the umbrella investigation of the Russia case … and the concern about the president and whether or not he posed a national security threat that we should be investigating had been building for some time,” he said. “But it was the events around the firing that kind of sealed the deal for me and the folks on the team.”
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Still, he said, “you have to ask yourself; if you believe the president might have obstructed justice for the purpose of ending our investigation into Russia, you have to ask yourself why. Why would any president of the United States not want the FBI to get to the bottom of Russian interference in our election?”
He referred to some of Trump’s behaviors toward Russia, like welcoming the Russian foreign minister and state media into the Oval Office and reportedly taking the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin over that of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as “inexplicable” and “head-scratching.”
He said they “certainly could be” the mark of someone who’s compromised.
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McCabe: No one in Gang of Eight objected to counterintelligence investigation of Trumphttps://t.co/O3ou7nH6gV
— POLITICO (@politico) February 19, 2019
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