McCabe Reveals He Briefed House Leaders on Counter-Intel Probe of Trump: ‘No One Objected’
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said in an interview on the Today show Tuesday morning that he had briefed House leaders about the counterintelligence investigation into President Donald Trump — and no lawmaker objected.
In an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, McCabe was asked to elaborate on his view of Trump as a threat to the country. McCabe answered that it was “entirely possible” as he shrugged off the president’s accusation that he was involved in “treasonous” acts.
When Guthrie pivoted to the investigations on Trump that started when the president sacked Former FBI Chief James Comey, she asked McCabe about the nature of his relationship to the counter-intelligence probe on Trump. This led to McCabe saying he ordered the investigation as he explained the basis of concerns at the time about possible crimes committed and threats to national security.
“We had information that led us to believe that there might be a threat to national security – in this case – that the president himself might, in fact, be a threat to the United States national security,” McCabe said. “We had a number of very concerning things that we were considering at the time. One of them was the fact that the president in our view had gone to extreme measures to potentially impact, negatively impact, possibly turn off our investigation of Russian meddling into the election and Russian coordination with his campaign.”
Guthrie continued by asking if McCabe thought Trump was “working for Russia” throughout his campaign, to which, McCabe replied, “We thought that might be possible, yes.” Guthrie also asked McCabe to explain why the investigation operated under that premise instead of conducting a “normal” criminal inquiry of Trump’s possible obstruction of justice.
“If you believe that the president might have obstructed justice for the purpose of ending our investigation into Russia, you have to ask yourself, why?” McCabe said. “Why would any president of the United States not want the FBI to get to the bottom of Russian interference in our election?”
McCabe revealed that he told lawmakers about the counter-intelligence investigation on Trump when he spoke to Congressional leaders after Comey’s firing.
“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 acting FBI director would do by yourself. This was a recommendation that came to me from my team. I reviewed it with our lawyers, I discussed it at length, I told Congress what we had done…no one objected.”
Watch above, via NBC.
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