FBI officials were “quite worried” then-director James Comey would appear to be blackmailing President-elect Donald Trump – using tactics notoriously associated with J.Edgar Hoover – at a Jan. 6, 2017, meeting where Comey told Trump about allegations he’d consorted with prostitutes in Moscow, ex-FBI general counsel James Baker says.

In the podcast Skullduggery posted by Yahoo News, Baker said both he and Comey determined the FBI had an obligation to tell Trump of the allegations in an uncorroborated dossier by ex-British spy Christopher Steele because “the press has it; it’s about to come out. You should be alerted to the fact.”

“We were quite worried about the Hoover analogies, and we were determined not to have such a disaster happen on our watch,” Baker said in a wide-ranging interview about discussions of how to handle the Russia investigation in its early stages and how much to tell Trump about it.

In the interview, Baker, who served for more than 20 years in Justice Department and FBI roles, also pledged to cooperate with a new investigation by U.S. Attorney in Connecticut John Durham into the origins of the Russia probe.

“I welcome scrutiny,” Baker said in the interview. “I plan to fully cooperate with the department to help them figure out what happened. Because I believe what happened was lawful, at least based on every piece of information that I have.”

Trump and his allies believe Baker and other officials conspired to launch a baseless probe influenced by a dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But Baker said the FBI would’ve been derelict in its duty if it didn’t investigate allegations of Trump campaign ties to Russia during the 2016 election.

The issue was so sensitive that when Comey was preparing to brief Trump after the election, Baker was at odds with the director about how to handle the matter. Baker urged Comey not to go through with his plans to reassure Trump by telling him he was not under investigation by the FBI.

“I didn't think it was accurate to say that he wasn't under investigation,” Baker said.

Baker said Trump was clearly a “subject” of the investigation because, as head of his own campaign, he was among those whose activities were being examined by the FBI. In the end, Comey told Trump he wasn’t under investigation—a comment he later refused to repeat publicly, a factor in Trump’s decision to fire him, Yahoo noted.