Whatever Else Donald Trump Has Said, He Really Wanted the FBI to Like Him, According to New Book

In May 2017, one day after President Donald Trump made the highly unusual move of firing the director of the FBI, he requested a visit to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he hoped to be greeted by a large and adoring crowd.

Andrew McCabe, who had stepped in as acting director after James Comey was dismissed, had an immediate response: He prayed for rain.

“[Trump] said he wanted me to promote the visit internally as much as I could — he wanted a big crowd,” McCabe writes in his new book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.

“Make sure that courtyard is full, he told me,” McCabe writes. “Praying for rain, I shook his hand, and I was dismissed.”

In The Threat, McCabe explores the ways in which he says Trump is undermining both democracy and the nation’s security by attacking the integrity of America’s intelligence community. (The president has a long history of either criticizing, contradicting or undercutting the work of American intelligence officials, including in the investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and in the killing of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian dissident.)

McCabe also explains why he didn’t want to the president visiting FBI headquarters — a visit that never ended up happening, according to his book.

McCabe writes that it’s imperative the FBI operate independently of politics and presidents. (This belief is also the guiding theme of James Comey’s 2018 memoir, A Higher Truth.)

Trump, who fired McCabe last year just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement, fired back about McCabe’s book days before it was published last month.

“Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a ‘poor little Angel’ when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax – a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey,” Trump wrote on Feb. 14 in a series of tweets about McCabe.

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McCabe does not have kind words for his former boss either. He writes that not only was Trump’s proposed meeting with the FBI problematic, the way he went about requesting the meeting was also bizarre.

According to McCabe, Trump called on an unsecured line while McCabe was meeting with the team then responsible for the Russia investigation. The president could not stop talking about how pleased people were that Comey had been fired.

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