The Justice Department on Thursday rebuffed former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe after he asserted in an explosive interview that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed an effort to remove President Trump from office.
Sitting down with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” McCabe became the first former official on record to corroborate reports that Rosenstein told DOJ officials about wearing a “wire” to record conversations with Trump and that he was recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office in the days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
“As to the specific portions of this interview provided to the Department of Justice by ’60 Minutes’ in advance, the Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect,” A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the Deputy Attorney General previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the President, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.”
The spokesperson further dismissed the idea of a coordinated effort between Rosenstein and Comey to appoint special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Finally, the Deputy Attorney General never spoke to Mr. Comey about appointing a Special Counsel,” the spokesperson said. “The Deputy Attorney General in fact appointed Special Counsel Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation. Subsequent to his removal, DOJ’s Inspector General found that Mr. McCabe did not tell the truth to federal authorities on multiple occasions, leading to his termination from the FBI.”
McCabe told CBS he ordered an obstruction of justice investigation into Trump after he fired Comey in the spring of 2017.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said in his first TV interview since getting fired from the bureau last year. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
“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 added.
Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation after Comey was fired, has long been the subject of criticism of Trump and allied Republican lawmakers who have accused the Justice Department of being biased at the top levels due to document request disputes and reports in September that said he discussed wearing a “wire” to record conversations with Trump and that he was recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.
Rosenstein denied the reporting, while sources told NBC News that he was only joking about secretly recording the president.
McCabe, a 21-year veteran of the FBI who briefly served as acting FBI director after Comey was fired, has a book due out next week titled “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.”
McCabe was fired on March 16, 2018, two days before he planned to retire on his 50th birthday and collect a full pension, after the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General determined that he misled investigators about the role he had in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
He “lacked candor” on four occasions when interviewing with internal investigators, the IG report said. In April, it was revealed that the Justice Department IG had referred its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington for possible criminal charges. Federal prosecutors used a grand jury to investigate McCabe.
In a pair of tweets Thursday, Trump tore into McCabe.
“Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a ‘poor little Angel’ when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax – a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of ‘insurance policy’ in case I won,” Trump said. “Many of the top FBI brass were fired, forced to leave, or left. McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign – he gave Hillary a pass. McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article contained a clause that said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been fired when it has not been the case. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
