By Steve Neavling
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Tuesday defended the bureau’s investigation into President Trump’s campaign’s links to Russia, saying the bureau had reason to believe Trump was a national security threat.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, McCabe also said the FBI had sufficient reasons to investigate whether Trump obstructed the investigation and was a counterintelligence threat, The Washington Post reports.
“It became pretty clear to us that he did not want us to continue investigating what the Russians had done,” McCabe said.
He added, “We had many reasons at that point to believe that the president might himself pose a danger to national security and that he might have engaged in obstruction of justice, if the firing of the director and those other things were geared towards eliminating or stopping our investigation of Russian activity.”
McCabe’s testimony is part of the committee’s inquiry into the Russia investigation.
Following the testimony, Trump slammed McCabe, calling him “an ignorant fool.”
“Andrew McCabe was exposed for who he is today in the U.S. Senate,” Trump tweeted. “He was totally destroyed – an ignorant fool. The great people of the FBI must make sure that he and his former boss, James Comey, pay the price for what they have done to the reputation of the FBI.”
The Senate committee has already questioned Comey, as well as former deputy attorneys general Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, all of whom defended the FBI’s investigation.
