Andrew McCabe is now opening up about why he chose to have the FBI investigate Trump in 2017 after Comey was fired, claiming he was worried Trump was an agent of Russia.
Watch:
Here’s more from Politico:
Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Thursday confirmed the existence of investigations into whether or not President Donald Trump was acting either knowingly or unwittingly as an agent of Russia, saying in an interview that he was “very concerned” and wanted to make sure the Russia investigation was on solid footing in case he was sacked.
In an interview set to air Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” McCabe told host Scott Pelley that he took the extraordinary step of opening the investigation in May 2017, almost immediately after he took over as acting director of the FBI in the wake of the president’s move to fire former bureau Director James Comey. He said he wanted to ensure there was documentary evidence that the probe was underway in the event that he too was removed.
In a clip of the “60 Minutes” interview aired Thursday on “CBS This Morning,” McCabe told Pelley that he met with the president at the White House the same day Comey was fired.
“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency, and won the election for the presidency, and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage and that was something that troubled me greatly,” he said.
As a result, he said, “I think the next day, I met with the team investigating the Russia cases, and I asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward.”
McCabe recalled that he wanted to make sure the Russia probe, which includes whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russian meddling efforts, was on “solid ground” because he feared the White House would try to shut it down.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace,” he told Pelley. “I wanted to make sure that our case was on solid ground and if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they were not be able to do that without creating a record why they’d made that decision.”
This is what happens when you have Democrats running the FBI. Yeesh. McCabe sounds like one of these conspiracy-theory-minded liberals back in 2017 claiming that Trump was doing the bidding of Putin.
Sarah Sanders responded to interview saying that McCabe “opened a completely baseless investigation into the president.”
Completely agree.