NPR Interviews Andrew McCabe

"I don't know that we have ever seen in all of history an example of the number, the volume and the significance of the contacts between people in and around the president, his campaign, with our most serious, our existential international enemy: the government of Russia," McCabe told NPR's Morning Edition. "That's just remarkable to me."

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Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The president, in short, was taking the word of Putin over his own top advisers.

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McCabe confirmed that he opened counterintelligence and obstruction of justice investigations into Trump after Comey was fired but said he and Justice Department leaders ultimately rejected the idea of secretly recording the president.

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"We all agreed it was a horrible idea and it was not something that we would pursue," McCabe said. "So while the deputy attorney general says he never authorized anyone to wear a wire, that is true — he never authorized it because we never asked him for that authorization."

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[McCabe] is now the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation for alleged false statements. A grand jury has been impaneled in the case but it isn't clear whether prosecutors will bring criminal charges. McCabe refused to engage in his NPR interview over findings by the Justice Department's inspector general, calling that report a "selective presentation of evidence and conclusions designed to reach the result the president was clearly calling for."

  NPR

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