‘Trump believed Putin more’
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump wanted the Russia investigation cited in the memo firing FBI director James Comey, and believed Russia’s president over his own intelligence agencies about North Korea’s missile capability, former acting FBI director Andrew Mccabe said.
Mccabe said in a pre-recorded interview on CBS’S 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein didn’t want to include a reference to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in the memo he wrote citing reasons why Comey should be fired, but that Trump insisted.
Trump told Rosenstein “I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway,” according to Mccabe. In the end, Rosenstein didn’t mention Russia in the memo.
Mccabe also described an incident in which an FBI official heard Trump say he didn’t believe that North Korea could hit the US with ballistic missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin “had told him that the North Koreans don’t actually have those missiles.” AGENCIES