Bertrand: The sense I get from your book is that you sometimes wish you had more forcefully confronted the president when you had the chance, especially after Comey was fired and Trump was pressing you to say that everyone at the bureau was happy about it.

McCabe: I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I reacted in those incredibly strange moments and what I said, and I tried to be honest in the book about that kind of reevaluation that you can only do in hindsight, right? But if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably do it just the same way. I was trying desperately to keep a large, distraught organization on its feet and moving forward. And provoking a fight with the president of the United States was not going to be helpful in kind of calming those waters and keeping everybody and getting back to work. I also would not agree with his repeated insistence that everybody was happy about Jim being fired. I would not agree to that under any circumstances.

Bertrand: Some question now why the public should believe your recollection of events when the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded last year that you had lacked candor when describing your interactions with the press. How would you respond to that?

McCabe: It was very hard to leave the organization that I loved, and still love to this day, under those circumstances. To spend 21 years as an FBI agent, living under the ideals of fidelity, bravery, and integrity, and then to be branded a liar the day before you were gonna retire. It was very tough. But in some ways, it’s also entirely predictable. The facts are that this president has a long and illustrious history of attacking the credibility of people who say things that he doesn’t like, and I believe strongly that that’s what’s happened here. Firing me for lack of candor was a perfect way to undermine my ability to, who knows, provide testimony against him, to tell these stories that I’ve now told in the book. I never, ever intentionally misled the FBI inspection division, the office of the inspector general, or any director of the FBI, ever. Not ever. I completely reject the findings, the conclusions, and the recommendations in that [inspector general] report. I am very familiar with investigative reports. I’ve been writing them and reading them for 21 years. That is not an investigative report. That was a pretext to reach the conclusion that was being demanded by the president of the United States.

Bertrand: And how would you respond to the criticism over the Russia investigation being kept a secret from voters in 2016, even though the Clinton email investigation was not? Do you regret not disclosing more about what was known before the election?

McCabe: No. I see how, on kind of a headline level, there appears to be kind of a fundamental disparity there. I don’t deny that. But you have to really get into the circumstances and the context of each investigation. The Clinton investigation was public before we even got it. The referral to the FBI was public, so we initiated our investigation, and very quickly thereafter the attorney general and Director Comey acknowledged it publicly. The whole world was kind of screaming for that conclusion as we got closer and closer to the election. The Russia investigation was very different … Counterintelligence cases are investigations best pursued quietly, and especially in the lead-up to the election, the idea that we would’ve gone forward with something that we didn’t know we had—I don’t regret handling it the way that we did.