The former FBI acting director tells 60 Minutes about the measures taken to ensure investigations into President Trump wouldn’t “vanish.”
Soon after speaking to President Trump about the firing of his boss James Comey, Andrew McCabe, who became the bureau’s acting director, began obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president and his ties to Russia. In his first television interview since his own firing, McCabe tells 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley he wanted those inquiries to be documented and underway so they would be difficult to quash without raising scrutiny.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe tells Pelley in the interview. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
The interview with the veteran FBI agent who rose to acting director of the bureau will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, February 17 at 7:00 p.m., ET/PT on CBS.
“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,” McCabe said.
The White House responded to the opening of that investigation, calling it a “completely baseless investigation.”
“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and just won the election for the presidency. And who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage,” McCabe said of the meeting with President Trump. “And that was something that troubled me greatly.”
The first excerpt from the interview was broadcast on “CBS This Morning” Thursday as Pelley appeared on the program to talk about his report on McCabe.
