By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday has stirred up dust inside the Beltway and beyond including talk of a Senate investigation.
McCabe, who was fired by the Trump administration, said that a “crime may have been committed” when President Donald Trump fired the head of the FBI and tried to publicly undermine an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, the Associated Press reports.
McCabe also said the FBI had good reason to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was in cahoots with Russia and posed a security threat after he fired FBI Director James Comey.
“And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, “Why would a president of the United States do that?” McCabe said.
“So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”
Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vowed on Sunday to investigate whether the top officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. plotted an “attempted bureaucratic coup” to remove President Trump from office. He said he would subpoena the former F.B.I. director and the deputy attorney general if necessary, the New York Times reports.
Graham was responding to the interview in which McCabe, confirmed an earlier New York Times report that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, had suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Mr. Trump and that Justice Department officials had discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendmentto remove Mr. Trump from office, the Times reports.
Mr. Rosenstein has disputed the account.
