Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told Today's Savannah Guthrie that Congressional leadership knew about the counterintelligence investigation into President Trump because he personally briefed them, and no one objected to the inquiry.
McCabe was asked directly if he informed the Gang of Eight about the investigation and replied: “The purpose of the briefing was to let our Congressional leadership know exactly what we'd been doing. Opening a case of this nature, not something that an FBI director, not something than an acting FBI director, can do by yourself, right?”
“This is a recommendation that came to me from my team, I reviewed it with our lawyers, I discussed it at length with the deputy attorney general, and I told Congress what we had done.”
Pressed on whether any of the senior Republicans or Democrats fought against the investigation, McCabe responded: “That's the important thing here, Savannah—no one objected, not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds, and not based on the facts.”
McCabe elaborates on the meeting in his book. According to The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand, he wrote: “No one interrupted. No one pushed back. The mood in the room was sober. Schumer had been nodding his head and looking at me very directly throughout. On McConnell’s side of the table, I sensed a great deal of resignation.”
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[A]sked on Today if he thinks if his actions will be vindicated once Robert Mueller releases his report, McCabe replied: “I anxiously await the results of Director Mueller’s work and I hope that we all get to see that. I think all Americans have the right to see the results of that work.”
The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand has conducted an extensive interview with McCabe in which he discusses further several of the revelations emerging about the FBI's investigation, the president's behavior, and that matter of the 25th Amendment.
“We felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist,” McCabe told me. And FBI officials felt this way, he said, even before Trump fired Comey. That firing set off a chain of events that, as McCabe put it, turned the world “upside down.” McCabe wrote contemporaneous memos describing “key” conversations he had during that chaotic period—with the president, with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and others—that are now in the hands of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
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The bulk of McCabe’s book has little to do with Trump. Much of it focuses on his time working on counterterrorism cases and as the head of an interagency team founded by President Barack Obama to reevaluate the country’s torture practices. Perhaps in a nod to the arc of his career, though, it begins and ends with Trump—McCabe spent his first 10 years at the bureau in New York City, investigating Russian organized crime.
“It has occurred to me on a number of occasions that, you know, Donald Trump and I know some of the same people,” he told me.
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Andrew McCabe: ... The Twenty-Fifth Amendment conversation was really nothing more than that. It was something Rod [Rosenstein] brought up off the top of his head in the overall context of thinking about what the president’s intentions were in firing the FBI director and asking us to drop this case. At no time did I think that there was actually an effort under way to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or remove the president. I heard it discussed, but there weren’t meetings about it. It was simply a comment that Rod made. And I think it’s illustrative of the conditions we were trying to navigate at the time. It was absolutely crazy. The world was upside down.
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... Rod is the guy that volunteered to write the memo firing Jim Comey, and then, in the days after, he asked me to put him in touch with Jim Comey to discuss the special-counsel selection. So these things were in complete conflict. But at the time, I had to focus on the work we knew we needed to get done and needed to get done quickly. What was important to me was to ensure that we got a special counsel appointed and we put the investigation on as solid ground as we could.
Bertrand asks McCabe for his thoughts on Trump's meeting in the Oval Office with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak the day after firing Comey and about the president's insistence he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence officials.
McCabe: It was the latest in a string of head-scratching, completely shocking events. For counterintelligence investigators, the idea that the American president would have a Russian foreign minister and his media into the Oval Office and that he would make a comment like that—a comment that so clearly undermined the effectiveness of his chief law-enforcement and intelligence agency—was just confounding.
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Bertrand: That reminds me of a passage that jumped out at me in your book: “He thought North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so … the president said he believed Putin despite the PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] briefer telling him that this was not consistent with any of the intelligence that the US possessed.” How do you explain that?
McCabe: It’s inexplicable. You have to put yourself in context. So I am in the director’s chair as acting director. My senior executive who had accompanied the briefer to that briefing, who sat in the room with the president and others, and heard the comments, comes back to the Hoover Building to tell me how the briefing went. And he sat at the conference table, and he just looked down at the table with his hands out in front of him. I was like, “How did it go?” And he just—he couldn’t find words to characterize it. We just sat back and said, “What do we do with this now?” How do you effectively convey intelligence to the American president who chooses to believe the Russians over his own intelligence services? And then tells them that to their faces?
Bertrand: Does this strike you as the behavior of someone who’s compromised?
McCabe: I mean, it certainly could be. I don’t know that for a fact. That was the reason we initiated the [counterintelligence] investigation. We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist. And, in fact, that a crime may have been committed: obstruction of justice. My own view of it is that those two things, the obstruction and the national-security threat, are inextricable. They are two sides of the same coin. To not have opened a case under those circumstances, particularly because the person who’s the subject of that investigation is the president, would have been a complete abdication of our responsibilities.
Bertrand and Guthrie both asked McCabe about the matter of his credibility given why he was fired from the FBI. McCabe tells Guthrie he believes, very strongly, he was fired because he opened a case against the president of the United States.
Watch:
Here is his answer to Bertrand:
McCabe: ... To spend 21 years as an FBI agent, living under the ideals of fidelity, bravery, and integrity, and then to be branded a liar the day before you were gonna retire. It was very tough. But in some ways, it’s also entirely predictable. The facts are that this president has a long and illustrious history of attacking the credibility of people who say things that he doesn’t like, and I believe strongly that that’s what’s happened here. Firing me for lack of candor was a perfect way to undermine my ability to, who knows, provide testimony against him, to tell these stories that I’ve now told in the book. I never, ever intentionally misled the FBI inspection division, the office of the inspector general, or any director of the FBI, ever. Not ever. I completely reject the findings, the conclusions, and the recommendations in that [inspector general] report. I am very familiar with investigative reports. I’ve been writing them and reading them for 21 years. That is not an investigative report. That was a pretext to reach the conclusion that was being demanded by the president of the United States.
McCabe says he believes Mueller's investigation into the president is still very much in full swing.
McCabe: ... So do I think the case into Trump is open or closed? There’s absolutely no reason for me to believe that it’s closed. And you can certainly look at what Mueller’s done so far to say he is doing exactly what we would do with the investigation of a cartel or an organized-crime family.
Bertrand: So Trump strikes you as someone who runs his organization, and now is running his administration, like the Mob.
McCabe: Well, that was my own experience with him, right? That kind of overwhelming or overriding focus on loyalty and sorting everybody out immediately—like, you’re either with us or you’re against us. Those are all traits that you see in organized-crime enterprises.
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Bertrand: Do you think we’ll ever hear from Mueller? Do you think he’ll come out and explain his findings once all this is over?
McCabe: He’ll explain his findings in the report, and then if he’s called upon to testify about it, he’ll certainly do that. But he is always the guy who will say less than more. He’ll seek less attention than more attention. He is perfectly happy to do his job and to do it fully and completely. And then, when it’s all said and done, he’ll lock the door behind him and go home.
Andrew McCabe: We Told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan About the FBI Counterintelligence Investigation into Trump (Daily Beast)
Andrew McCabe Couldn’t Believe the Things Trump Said About Putin (The Atlantic)