By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

Fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who has just written a book about the FBI and Donald Trump, tells  “60 Minutes” that he ordered an obstruction of justice investigation into the president after talking with him after he fired James Comey.

“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and 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. “And that was something that troubled me greatly. ”

The full interview airs Sunday.

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

As the old idiom goes, Paul Manafort is in hot water.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of D.C. ruled Wednesday that the former Trump campaign chairman, who had been cooperating with authorities, lied to  prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post reports.

Manafort, 69, breached his cooperation deal with prosecutors by lying after his guilty plea by lying about some things including  “his interactions and communications with [Konstantin] Kilimnik,” a longtime aide whom the FBI assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence, the Post reports.

That could add years to his sentence.

Some legal observers say his only hope at this point is getting a pardon from the president. The optics of that would be terrible, but they’re seldom good in such situations.