McCabe: FBI believed ‘the president might himself pose a danger to national security’

WASHINGTON» Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe reiterated Tuesday that the bureau had reason to believe in early 2017 that President Donald Trump himself was a threat to national security, forcefully defending the bureau’s investigation of the commander in chief and his presidential campaign as Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sought to highlight mistakes he and others made.

Speaking slowly and often drawing interruptions from the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., McCabe, as he has in the past, insisted the bureau had good cause to open an investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 campaign, and later, into whether the president himself was a counterintelligence threat and had sought to obstruct that inquiry. He noted Trump had fired James Comey as the bureau’s director in May 2017 after Comey would not close an investigation into Trump’s thennational security adviser or say publicly that Trump himself was not under investigation.

“It became pretty clear to us that he did not want us to continue investigating what the Russians had done,” McCabe said, adding later, “We had many reasons at that point to believe that the president might himself pose a danger to national security and that he might have engaged in obstruction of justice, if the firing of the director and those other things were geared toward eliminating or stopping our investigation of Russian activity.”

McCabe, a longtime FBI official who briefly led the bureau after Trump fired Comey, is testifying as part of the Republicancontrolled Judiciary Committee’s review of the Russia investigation. The committee already has heard testimony from former Deputy Attorneys General Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, as well as Comey. All have defended the bureau’s work, while conceding some mistakes, and the hearings have resulted in predictable arguments between Republicans and Democrats about the fairness of the Russia probe.

McCabe’s claims about Trump are hardly new. He wrote a book, called “The Threat,” making the case that Trump put the country at risk. And like others before him, he said the bureau had made mistakes. For example, he conceded that, knowing what he knows now, he would not have signed off on an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, admitting that the package contained “numerous factual errors.” Rosenstein, Yates and Comey have all said the same.

“I accept that responsibility fully,” McCabe said.

McCabe was fired from the bureau in March 2018 over allegations he had misled investigators exploring a media disclosure; he is suing over the termination.