© Provided by Washington Examiner Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is recalling the day former President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and delivered a "manic rant" about the events that led to the appointment of a special counsel investigation.
As put by David Axelrod, a onetime Obama adviser who interviewed McCabe for his Axe Files podcast, the fateful decision to fire Comey in May 2017 was followed by McCabe being summoned to the Oval Office for a meeting that would define "his own stormy relationship" with Trump.
"The attorney general tells me that they've fired the director at about maybe 5:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, May 9, 2017. And I get a message that Trump wants to see me in the Oval Office that night ... I had never been in the Oval Office. [I had] been to the White House a million times for meetings in the [Situation] Room and things like that but never been to the Oval, and so I had to have somebody show me how to get to it. I walked in, and he just launched, you know how he does, he's in like performance mode all the time," McCabe said.
"He started just kind of like really, this kind of manic rant about how great it was that they fired the director, and everybody hated him, and wasn't it true that everybody hated him, and did I know that everybody hated him, and isn't it great he's gone," McCabe recalled.
"I was just standing there, and then he launched into, like, 'I heard you were part of the resistance.' And I hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about, so I asked him, you know, I was like, 'I don't know what you mean.' And he said, 'I thought you were, I understand that you were not a friend of Jim Comey's and that you didn't agree with him on what he did, and you weren't part of all that.' And I said, 'No, that's not true. I worked very closely with Jim, I have a great respect for him, and I was part of all those decisions.' And so from that point, it was just downhill from there," McCabe added.
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel on May 17, 2017. Two years later, Mueller's investigation culminated in a report that did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump's 2016 campaign and the Kremlin but laid out 10 possible instances of obstruction of justice. Attorney General William Barr and Rosenstein concluded obstruction had not occurred.
McCabe said in 2019 he was the one who ordered an obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump after the firing of Comey to ensure the investigation would not "vanish in the night without a trace." He also told FBI investigators that Rosenstein sought Comey's advice on appointing a special counsel after playing a role in his firing.
McCabe, who now has a job at CNN alongside Axelrod, was fired from the FBI in early 2018 and sued the Justice Department for wrongful termination, seeking to regain his job and back pay and claiming that Trump was behind a scheme to force him out right before he was set to retire. A federal judge ruled in September that McCabe's lawsuit should be allowed to move toward discovery, rejecting the Trump administration's efforts to dismiss the case.
The Justice Department declined to pursue criminal charges against McCabe last year after Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in 2018 detailing multiple instances in which McCabe "lacked candor" with Comey, FBI investigators, and inspector general investigators about his authorization to leak sensitive information to the Wall Street Journal that revealed the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
Tags: News, Andrew McCabe, FBI, James Comey, Russia, Donald Trump
Original Author: Daniel Chaitin
Original Location: McCabe recalls Trump's 'manic rant' about Comey