Rubio criticizes McCabe firing, worries about morale of FBI

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says he supports the special counsel’s work in the Russia investigation and criticized the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

“I don't like the way it happened,” Rubio told NBC’s “Meet the Press With Chuck Todd” on Sunday. “He should've been allowed to finish through the weekend. That said, that there’s an inspector general report that’s due and work that’s being done and after he had retired that report would’ve indicated wrongdoing or something that was actionable there’s things that could've been done after the fact.

“But 48 hours to go before retirement, I would’ve certainly done it differently. Given the fact there’s still this report out there that hasn’t come in.”

Rubio said President Donald Trump “doesn’t like McCabe and he’s made that pretty clear now for over a year.”

Yet, the senator repeated about McCabe’s firing: “I don’t like the way it went down. I would’ve done it differently. I’m not the president. But I certainly would’ve done it differently if I was.”

Rubio said he’s worried about the effect that political fighting in Washington could have on workers in the FBI and the CIA.

“They’re just out there doing their work every single day,” Rubio said. “I would hate to demoralize the workforce. And more importantly I would hate to discourage new people from coming into that. So I just don’t like the whole tone. I don't like the fact they’re in the news every day.”

Rubio added: “I think we need to be very careful about taking these very important entities and smearing everybody in them with a broad stroke.”

Todd asked about a Trump tweet that “The Mueller probe should never have been started and that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not simply looking at collusion, Rubio replied.

“They’re looking at the entire thing and what happened with regards to Russian interference and whether there was any U.S. laws broken in the process of Russian interference in our elections,” the senator said.

“It is not a collusion probe. It is much broader than that,” Rubio added. “Now, obviously once you open that up and you start looking, you can go in one direction or another. You go where the evidence takes you and that’s what I support.”