On Friday morning, three days after James Comey had been fired as the director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe had his first meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in his new capacity as acting director. It was a routine discussion with staff members present, and afterward McCabe asked to speak to Rosenstein alone.

When the others left, they stayed in their seats on opposite sides of the conference table. McCabe told Rosenstein he needed to help him coordinate requests to interview witnesses in the Russia investigation, now that multiple congressional committees were pursuing the issue. Typically the FBI needed to have the first—and, in some cases, the only—access to key witnesses to protect the investigation. “I need your help on this,” McCabe said.

Rosenstein said fine, no problem, but he didn’t seem to be really concentrating.

His gaze shifted toward the closed door to the room, somewhere off in the distance. His eyes looked glassy. His voice wavering, his eyes teared up. He said he couldn’t believe what was happening. The White House was trying to make it look as if it were his idea to fire Comey. That wasn’t true. The president had asked him to write the memo only after announcing that he was firing Comey. Rosenstein was obviously struggling to keep his emotions in check.

McCabe was shocked Rosenstein was confiding in him, essentially calling the president a liar; they barely knew each other. But he wanted to be compassionate.

“Are you okay?” McCabe asked.

“No.”

“Are you getting any sleep?”

“No.”

“Is your family okay?”

Rosenstein said there were news trucks parked outside his house. His wife and family were upset.

There was a pause, then Rosenstein said, “There’s no one here I can talk to about this. There’s no one I can trust.” Rosenstein seemed again to be struggling to hold his emotions in check.

After a pause, he asked if McCabe thought he should appoint a special counsel, and McCabe said yes, it would be a good idea. Rosenstein said he’d always considered Jim Comey a friend and mentor, someone he looked up to. “The one person I wish I could talk to is Jim Comey.”

“Good luck with that,” McCabe thought, but said nothing. He was startled by the idea that Rosenstein wanted to seek guidance from Comey, whom he had just helped fire.

McCabe left the meeting in a state of shock.

As soon as he reached his office, McCabe confided in Lisa Page, his special counsel, that Rosenstein seemed in a fragile emotional state and had said he wanted to talk to Comey. Page was equally astonished. In her view, Rosenstein had just betrayed Comey and helped fire him, and now wanted to confide in him? Surely Rosenstein wasn’t so naive that when asked to write his memo, he had no idea to what use it would be put. McCabe and Page had fervently hoped that Rosenstein would stand up to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House and defend the FBI. But now “we really are alone,” she said.

McCabe agreed. Still, he felt he owed Rosenstein more thoughtful comments on the question of a special counsel. Everyone in the Obama administration had been dead set against naming one in the Clinton email case. The ill-fated consequences of that decision were now clear. Had Clinton been cleared by a special counsel, there would have been no need for Comey to make any announcement, and the FBI could have stayed out of politics, its integrity and reputation intact. McCabe made an appointment to see Rosenstein again that afternoon at 4:00.