Andrew McCabe on Whether He Thought Wearing Wire on Trump Was a Good Idea: ‘Absolutely Not’

Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe says that he “absolutely” did not think having Rod Rosenstein wear a wire on Trump was a good idea when Rosenstein made the offer.

McCabe continued the extensive series of interviews promoting his new book Tuesday night, appearing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. In the book and in interviews, McCabe has recounted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a serious offer to secretly record his conversations with Trump following the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

“At the time, in the book, that Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to a meeting with the president, and I know you said you consulted with the attorneys at the FBI about that, at that moment, did you think that was a good idea?” Cooper asked.

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not,” McCabe replied, emphatically.

“Why?” Cooper asked.

“You know, I felt like it was an incredibly invasive and potentially precedent-setting thing to do,” McCabe said, and added “I didn’t think it was necessary at that point.”

“If you think about it, the reason you would send someone in with a concealed recording device to tape the utterances and the statements of a subject is to capture evidence of intent,” he continued. “We didn’t need to do that in this case. We knew what the president intended. Through his own public statements, statements to Lester Holt in the infamous interview where he talked about thinking about Russia when he fired the director of the FBI, so it was really, it was a risky and controversial position that I did not want to put the agency in.”

Rosenstein has offered denials about the plan to record Trump that are, at best, incomplete.

Watch the clip above, via CNN.

[Image via screengrab]

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