Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said he had seen the “rambling four-plus” page letter that President Donald Trump wrote listing his reasons for firing former FBI Director James Comey.
McCabe said, “Here’s what I’ll say, Nicolle, it was curious and certainly concerning to me when the president brought me up to Jim Comey on three separate occasions in those private meetings and said things to Jim like, what’s the story with that deputy director of yours? Does he have a problem with me? From the very beginning, I got the sense that the president wanted me out of there. And so for him to say today that, ‘Oh, it was somebody else fired him’ as a result of this IG investigation, it directly contradicts my own experience. I would add, something I have not discussed before and 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.”
He continued, “In a rambling four-plus pages, it goes through all of the different reasons why he’s firing the director of the FBI. 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. That was a letter written long before the IG had concluded their investigation and drawn their, I believe, false conclusions in that report that I’m still having to deal with. So for the president to say today ‘Oh, we caught him’ and it’s the result of the IG investigation, is just simply contradictory.”
Host Nicolle Wallace said, “Let me make sure I’m catching all of this. You have seen the letter that instead of this from Rosenstein, the president wanted to accompany with news of Jim Comey’s firing?”
McCabe said, “That’s right. The president wrote his own letter that he, I guess, was thinking of delivering to the director, firing him, and it was that letter that the group gathered to discuss on May 8, the day before Jim was fired.”
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