Trump wanted Russia in memo firing Comey: Ex-FBI leader

Bloomberg

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 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.
Rosenstein “explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo. And the president responded, ‘I understand that, I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway,’ ” McCabe said. In the end, Rosenstein didn’t mention Russia in the memo, but Trump made the connection anyway, in a subsequent interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.
‘I Believe Putin’
McCabe also described an incident in which an FBI official whom he didn’t identify 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.”
“Intelligence officials in the briefing responded that that was not consistent with any of the intelligence our government possesses, to which the president replied, ‘I don’t care. I believe Putin,”’ McCabe said. “It’s just an astounding thing to say.”
The network had previously released parts of the interview, including an excerpt in which McCabe said Rosenstein discussed how many members of Trump’s Cabinet might support removing the president as being unfit under the US Constitution’s 25th Amendment, Rosenstein offering to wear a “wire” to talk to Trump, and McCabe’s
immediate actions to protect the Russia probe after Trump fired Comey.
McCabe is promoting a book —“The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” to be published on Tuesday— in which he writes about the 2016 election and its aftermath, as well as about his career at the FBI.

Turbulent Days
The “60 Minutes” interview focused on the turbulent days between Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller when, according to to CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, “the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president.”
Trump reacted to the “60 Minutes” excerpts in a February 14 tweet saying a “disgraced” McCabe was pretending to be a “poor little Angel” when he was a part of what the president calls “the Russia Hoax.” He reissued that tweet again, minutes before the “60 Minutes” segment aired, and also tweeted that Mueller’s investigation was a “Witch Hunt.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also said in a statement that McCabe’s “selfish and destructive agenda drove him to open a completely baseless investigation into the president” and that he “has no credibility.”