After a handful of sobering interviews on CBS’ 60 Minutes and NBC’s Today show this week, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe took his book tour to The View on Tuesday.
The author of The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump joined the ABC morning show hosts, who were eager to get even more dirt on the behind-the-scenes machinations at the bureau after President Trump fired McCabe’s boss, James Comey, and he took over as acting director in May 2017.
Unsurprisingly, there was one host who was more skeptical than others when it came to McCabe’s version of events.
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“Bear with me on this one,” Meghan McCain told their guest. “I don’t believe you’re a reliable narrator. And I’m not convinced this isn’t just some kind of P.R. campaign to stop yourself from getting indicted.”
Noting that McCabe was ultimately fired by the FBI for his “lack of candor,” she said, “I would like you to say right here on national TV that you are not a source for The New York Times, you were never a source for The New York Times or any other publication, considering that is what you were accused of lying about. Basically, were you ever a leaker to The New York Times?”
That seemed like a somewhat unreasonable question coming from someone who is ostensibly acting as a journalist, but McCabe did not hesitate in his answer. “Absolutely not,” he replied. “Not at any time ever.”
“You should understand, Meghan,” he added, “that when I was serving as deputy director, I was one of two people in the FBI who had the authority to disclose information to the media.” Asked by McCain why Comey denied the claims that he “approved” McCabe’s leaks to the press, he answered, “I don’t know why Jim Comey doesn’t remember the conversations that we had in the same way that I do.”
“I thought you guys wrote everything down,” Joy Behar chimed in, to which McCabe replied, “We wrote down things when we were dealing with people we didn’t trust.”
“Like the president,” Behar added.
“Exactly,” McCabe said.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that McCabe had been fired last March—just days before his planned retirement—after an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that McCabe had “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor—including under oath—on multiple occasions.”
In his book, McCabe accuses Sessions of making racist comments about suspects and says Sessions once told him the FBI would be “better off” if it only hired Irishmen.
“The conversations I had with Attorney General Sessions were unlike anything I had seen from any other attorney general,” McCabe told The View. “The obsessive focus on immigration when, in many cases, it simply wasn’t relevant to the threats we were discussing. The off-handed comments, the racist comments, and things of that nature—it was a challenge to make sure the attorney general was getting the benefit of the intelligence we were presenting him.”
