Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe made a stunning claim Wednesday which adds a new wrinkle to the timeline of events that led to his dismissal from the bureau.
In an interview with MSNBC, McCabe said a letter Trump initially intended to use to fire FBI Director James Comey criticized Comey for not firing his deputy.
“I have to be careful in the way I talk about this, but I have seen the letter that the president wrote purportedly himself justifying the firing of Jim Comey,” McCabe said.
He said in a “rambling four-plus pages,” the letter went through a number of reasons why he was firing Comey.
“Now I am not going to go through all of those with you but I will tell you one of them is he claims to want to fire the director of the FBI because of his failure to fire me,” McCabe said.
Trump never ended up using the letter. The New York Times reported last year that White House officials urged him not to send it. He instead cited a memo written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, focusing on the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, as justification to fire Comey in May 2017.
McCabe was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, less than 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. 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 while McCabe is mulling whether to sue the government to get his pension back.
McCabe noted in his interview with MSNBC that Trump’s firing letter was written “long before.”
“So for the president to say today, ‘Oh, we caught him and it’s the result of the IG investigation,’ is just simply contradictory,” McCabe said.
