Fired FBI Director Andrew McCabe described the Gang of Eight briefing as the moment when the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation was first announced. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Legal McCabe: Congressional leaders didn’t object to counterintelligence investigation of Trump

Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said on Tuesday that no members of the "Gang of Eight" congressional leaders objected when he informed them in May 2017 that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Donald Trump over his ties to Russia.

McCabe, who was serving then as acting FBI director after Trump fired Director James Comey, said on NBC’s “Today" show that no one in the briefing objected to the bureau’s inquiry of whether Trump was being used as a Russian asset — “not on legal grounds, constitutional grounds or based on the facts.”


The purpose of the briefing with the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees “was to let our congressional leadership know exactly what we’d been doing” after Comey’s firing, McCabe said.

David Popp, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement Tuesday, “We do not comment on or discuss the Leader’s work as it relates to the Gang of 8 and other classified issues.”

The former deputy director's comments come as he’s embarked on a press tour to promote a new tell-all book that touches on his time serving under Trump — before he was fired from the FBI for allegedly lying to investigators about his interactions with reporters.

Allies of the president have seized on McCabe’s public confirmation that he opened counterintelligence and criminal obstruction of justice investigations into Trump to point to a conspiracy against the president. They’ve argued that McCabe's revelations, if true, underscore Trump’s accusations of bias within the agencies investigating his campaign.

On Tuesday, McCabe disputed the insinuation made by some of his critics that he had decided to investigate Trump on his own, arguing that the decision was not a spurious one.

“Opening a case of this nature, not something an FBI director — not something that an acting FBI director — would do by yourself, right? This is a recommendation that came to me from my team,” he said. “I reviewed it with our lawyers. I discussed it at length with the deputy attorney general … and I told Congress what we’d done.”

In an interview with The Atlantic published Tuesday, McCabe said that while Comey’s firing may have been the catalyst for launching the investigations, “we were building to this point for months before Jim was fired.”

He said he could understand criticism if the investigations had been initiated solely as result of Comey’s ouster, but insisted that was not the case.

“We had several cases already open under the umbrella investigation of the Russia case … and the concern about the president and whether or not he posed a national security threat that we should be investigating had been building for some time," he said. "But it was the events around the firing that kind of sealed the deal for me and the folks on the team."

The former FBI deputy director said that investigations being opened does not mean the agency had drawn any conclusions.

Still, he said, “you have to ask yourself; if you believe the president might have obstructed justice for the purpose of ending our investigation into Russia, you have to ask yourself why. Why would any president of the United States not want the FBI to get to the bottom of Russian interference in our election?”

He referred to some of Trump's behaviors toward Russia, like welcoming the Russian foreign minister and state media into the Oval Office and reportedly taking the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin over that of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as “inexplicable” and “head-scratching.”

He said they “certainly could be” the mark of someone who’s compromised.

And in an appearance on “The View” later Tuesday, McCabe didn’t dismiss the possibility that Trump had fired Comey at the direction of Russia, telling co-host Meghan McCain that “we don't know” if Trump had done so.

In an excerpt of the book published last week, McCabe described the Gang of Eight briefing, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also attended, as the moment when the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation was first announced.

The office of Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to comment on McCabe’s characterization of the briefing, and spokespeople for other lawmakers who were present in the briefing did not immediately return requests for comment.

McCabe on Tuesday defended his dismissal from the FBI, which came last year just hours before he was set to retire. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited a DOJ inspector general’s report that found McCabe had been dishonest multiple times with investigators about leaking information about an investigation to a reporter, which many have argued undermines McCabe’s credibility.

The former deputy director said he plans to sue over his dismissal and claimed the report was pretextual and served to justify political motives. He said that before the watchdog report, he had enjoyed a long and blemish-free tenure at the FBI, and he told The Atlantic that it was “very hard” to be “branded a liar.”

“I've been writing and reading investigative reports for over 20 years. That report was not like anything I have ever read before,” he said on “Today.” “An investigative report includes all of the evidence. It includes all the information, not just those facts that support the conclusion that you'd like to draw.”

He declined to go into further detail, citing his pending lawsuit.

McCabe also sought to tamp down on one of the more salacious headlines emanating from his press junket, which have included a different take than Rosenstein's on how serious Rosenstein was about the idea of wearing a wire to record the president and discussions at the Justice Department about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Trump suggested such moves would be treasonous.

Rosenstein has pushed back on McCabe’s claims.

“The important part about that comment that Rod made and the comment about the 25th Amendment: There was no effort underway, nobody wore a wire into the White House, nobody was plotting to stage a coup or remove the president,” McCabe said on the “Today" Show, arguing that the situation was indicative of the extraordinary circumstances the Justice Department was in. “The point is the stress and complexity of the issues we were discussing at the time.”

He called the attention paid to his allegations a distraction and cited the uproar as a reason he didn’t include them in his book, saying in his appearance on “The View” that

He told The Atlantic: “I think it’s illustrative of the conditions we were trying to navigate at the time. It was absolutely crazy. The world was upside down.”

Appearing on CNN Tuesday evening, McCabe told host Anderson Cooper that when Rosenstein raised the subject of wearing a wire, McCabe did not think it was a good idea.

"Absolutely not. Absolutely not," he said. "You know, I felt like it was an incredibly invasive and potentially precedent-setting thing to do. I didn't think it was necessary at that point."

Asked by Cooper whether he still believes the president could be a Russian asset, McCabe replied: "I think it's possible. I think that's why we started our investigation. And I'm really anxious to see where director Mueller concludes that."

Quint Forgey contributed to this report.