Natasha Bertrand: You don’t talk in the book about the discussions that took place about “wearing a wire” into the Oval Office or invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. But you’ve since confirmed that these discussions took place in the days after Comey’s firing in May 2017. What made you and other officials so concerned about Trump’s ability to be president, about his fitness to serve?
Andrew McCabe: Neither issue is mentioned in the book because I felt like both were so inflammatory and could become very distracting. 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.
Bertrand: Rosenstein really seems to have taken the lead here in throwing out these highly controversial ideas—wearing a wire, invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, etc. How do you square that with his writing the memo that was used later by Trump to justify Comey’s firing?
McCabe: It was a huge conflict, and one that I struggled with at the time. 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.
The Atlantic
McCabe explains how the investigations into Trump's ties to Russia began:
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: How would you respond to criticism that when the counterintelligence investigation into the president was opened, the FBI’s judgment was clouded because emotions were running so high in the aftermath of Comey’s firing?
McCabe: I could see how that would fit if we had initiated this concern in the wake of Jim’s firing. The fact is, we were building to this point for months before Jim was fired. We had several cases already open under the umbrella investigation of the Russia case … and the concern about the president and whether or not he posed a national-security threat that we should be investigating had been building for some time. But it was the events around the firing that kind of sealed the deal for me and the folks on the team.
I'm sure at that point they wondered if the entire organization was going to be sidelined or disbanded.
UPDATE:
