Trump to interview Joe Lieberman, 3 others for FBI post

President Donald Trump is scheduled to interview former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman to be his FBI director on Wednesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

Trump will also interview Frank Keating, a Republican and former Oklahoma governor; Richard McFeely, a former FBI official; and Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s current acting director, for the post, Spicer told reporters gathered aboard Air Force One on Wednesday afternoon.


The four men are being considered for a vacancy caused by Trump's abrupt firing last week of FBI Director James Comey — a move that continues to reverberate in Washington.

Lieberman, who entered the Senate in 1989 as a Democrat, left as an independent in 2013. He was the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in 2000. The Yale-educated lawyer had experience running a law enforcement operation as attorney general of Connecticut from 1983 to 1989.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who removed himself from the running for the job, called Lieberman a "brilliant selection."

"I think he would get 100 votes," said Cornyn, the majority whip. "Everybody loves Joe Lieberman."

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"People know he's going to shoot straight no matter what happens, and I think it's a pretty brilliant selection if that's what he does," Cornyn said.

But a Senate Democratic leadership aide said "there couldn’t be worse time to take the unprecedented step of handing the FBI over to a politician."

"That includes Sen. Lieberman,” the aide said.

Keating, a former FBI agent, served as a U.S. attorney under President Ronald Reagan and more recently headed up the American Council of Life Insurers and the American Bankers Association.

McFeely retired from the FBI in 2014 after reaching the position of executive assistant director overseeing criminal and cyber response. He was previously in charge of the bureau's Baltimore office and now works for accounting and business consulting firm EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young.

Of the four potential FBI director nominees Trump is set to interview Wednesday, only one — McCabe — was part of a parade of potential candidates brought in for meetings Saturday at Justice Department headquarters with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That roster of possible nominees included Cornyn, former Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and New York Court of Appeals Judge Michael Garcia.

It was not immediately clear why almost none of those interviewed Saturday were scheduled for audiences with Trump on Wednesday or whether they might visit with the president later in the process. Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to queries about the status of the other candidates.

McCabe, who has served as the FBI's No. 2 since January 2016, would be an unusual and surprising choice for the vacancy caused by Trump's firing last week of Comey, who was McCabe's boss and selected him for the deputy post. During the presidential campaign, Trump appeared to accuse McCabe of shutting down the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email use because McCabe's wife received support from Clinton allies during an unsuccessful 2015 bid for the Virginia state Senate.

"The man who was in charge of the investigation of Hillary Clinton accepted essentially from Hillary Clinton $675,000 that went to his wife," Trump said at a Florida rally in October. "Never happened before. Never happened. Not in this country's history. ... This is a disgrace. And she shouldn't be allowed to run for president. She shouldn't be allowed. She's a crook."

As his search to fill the post continues, Trump is facing mounting scrutiny over his sudden decision to dismiss Comey, who was overseeing the bureau’s investigation into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.

According to a bombshell report in The New York Times on Tuesday, since confirmed by other news outlets, Comey told associates in a memo that Trump had asked him to end the FBI’s investigation into the administration’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in February. The report prompted immediate chaos in the White House and on Capitol Hill as Democrats pounced, asserting that the allegation, if true, could amount to an obstruction of justice or even merit impeachment.

The White House has contested the veracity of the memo.

Jennifer Haberkorn and Seung Min Kim contributed reporting.