Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director fired on Friday night, kept memos detailing his interactions with President Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.

McCabe was terminated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions ahead of a forthcoming inspector general's report that has found he lacked candor when speaking with investigators about his disclosures to the media. But McCabe has connected his firing to what he describes as a broader campaign to discredit him given his likely cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian electoral meddling and Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey.


The 49-year-old bureau veteran's move to memorialize his interactions with the president adds a new wrinkle to the circumstances behind his firing, which leaves McCabe's pension in jeopardy and raises the still-unanswered question of whether he will pursue legal action. The news was first reported by the Associated Press.

McCabe has passed the memos on to Mueller’s team, according to a second source briefed on his decisionmaking.

In an interview with POLITICO before his firing, McCabe recalled "a series of interactions with the president" in May — "the night that Director Comey was fired, the next morning on the phone, that afternoon in person, and then about a few days later when I was interviewed for the job of permanent director. In every one of those interactions, the president brought up my wife."

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Jill McCabe lost a 2015 campaign for Virginia state Senate in which she received nearly $500,000 in contributions from the political action committee of then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.), an ally of Hillary Clinton. The media disclosures at the heart of the inspector general report into Andrew McCabe's actions stem from reporting that discussed whether McCabe should have recused himself from Clinton-related investigations in light of the contributions.


"In one notable case, [Trump] referred to her as a 'loser'," McCabe said earlier this month of the president's comments concerning his wife. That reference was made on the phone, according to a January NBC News report.

"But typically he would say, he would refer to her and her campaign as ‘that problem’ I had, ‘that mistake’ I made. And of course I disagreed with him each time he referred to it that way, which I’m sure he did not appreciate."

Comey also kept memos of his interactions with Trump, which sparked a court challenge from media organizations seeking their public release.