WASHINGTON -- Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said Tuesday that officials briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers after the bureau opened an investigation into President Donald Trump in May 2017, and that no one in the room pushed back.
"That's the important part here, Savannah," McCabe said in an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC's Today show. "No one objected. Not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds and not based on the facts."
The comments seemed designed to rebut criticism that McCabe has faced from Trump and other Republicans for initiating the investigation into Trump and participating in conversations about other, more dramatic steps against the president.
McCabe said on CBS' 60 Minutes over the weekend that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein talked with him about Rosenstein wearing a wire to surreptitiously record the president, or using the 25th Amendment to oust Trump -- prompting a strong, negative reaction from Trump and his GOP allies. Rosenstein has vaguely disputed McCabe's description of those conversations.
"Treason!" Trump wrote Monday night on Twitter, after apparently quoting from a segment on Sean Hannity's television show about McCabe.
The briefing, McCabe said, was with the Gang of Eight -- a bipartisan group of lawmakers comprising the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, as well as the leaders from both parties of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
McCabe -- who is in the middle of a media tour promoting his new book, The Threat -- told Guthrie that the FBI felt it had good reason to investigate Trump in May 2017 after he fired James Comey as the bureau's director. He said the bureau thought it was "possible" that Trump was working on behalf of Russia, and opening a case signified that the FBI was treating the matter as a national security threat.
"It is saying that 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.
McCabe, who has long been a target of criticism from Trump, was fired from the FBI in March 2018, after the Justice Department's inspector general alleged that he lied repeatedly to investigators exploring a media disclosure.
McCabe has said he believes he was fired because he opened the investigation into Trump. He told Guthrie that he plans to sue the Justice Department over his dismissal, although he did not specifically address the evidence that the inspector general detailed against him.
On Tuesday, Trump again lashed out at McCabe -- though he took aim not at McCabe's comments about the Russia investigation, but instead his separate assertion that Trump commented negatively on McCabe's wife's unsuccessful run for a state Senate seat in Virginia.
Trump has repeatedly noted that Jill McCabe took money from the group of a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton, and Andrew McCabe alleged in his book that Trump told him in a conversation that his wife's loss "must have been really tough."
"To lose," Trump said, according to McCabe's account. "To be a loser."
In a tweet Tuesday, Trump wrote, "I never said anything bad about Andrew McCabe's wife other than she (they) should not have taken large amounts of campaign money from a Crooked Hillary source when Clinton was under investigation by the FBI. I never called his wife a loser to him (another McCabe made up lie)!"
Asked on ABC's The View about the president's recent tweets about him, McCabe said, "The president has been lying about me and my family for the last two years."
BACKUP PLAN
Separately, the FBI developed a backup plan to protect evidence in its Russia investigation soon after Comey's firing in the event that other senior officials were dismissed as well, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.
The plan was crafted in the chaotic days after Comey was fired, when the FBI began investigating whether Trump had obstructed justice and whether he might be in league with the Russians.
The goal was to ensure that the information collected under the investigations, which included probes of Trump associates and possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, would survive the firings or reassignments of top law enforcement officials. Those officials included special counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed eight days after Trump fired Comey in May 2017.
McCabe, who became acting director after Comey was fired, asked investigators to develop a plan to ensure that evidence would be protected, said the person, who was not authorized to talk about those discussions publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A plan was then created, according to the person, who would not provide specifics. A second person familiar with the talks, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, also said the FBI discussed preserving evidence so that it would outlast any firing or effort to stymie the investigation.
A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment Tuesday.
McCabe hinted at that anxiety in his 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, saying he met with investigators after Comey's firing.
"I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion," McCabe said. "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 added, "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 would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision."
Trump has repeatedly decried the Mueller probe as a "witch hunt" and has suggested that investigators themselves should be investigated. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced out last year amid the president's anger over his recusal from the Russia investigation.
Information for this article was contributed by Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post and by Eric Tucker of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/20/2019