Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe said Tuesday that “no one objected” when he briefed congressional leaders about the counterintelligence probe he had recently opened into President Trump in May 2017.“That’s the important part here, Savannah,” McCabe told Savannah Guthrie on NBC's Today show. “No one objected. Not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds, and not based on the facts.”> Did you tell the “Gang of Eight” that you had opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump? @savannahguthrie asks Andrew McCabe pic.twitter.com/w4cKwAvvF9> > -- TODAY (@TODAYshow) February 19, 2019McCabe's emphasis on the lack of pushback from the Gang of Eight — a bipartisan group of leaders in the house House and Senate — appeared designed to insulate him from the criticism, repeatedly leveled against him by the president and White House allies, that the investigation was politically motivated.Critics of the intelligence community's treatment of the president were angered Sunday by McCabe's claim during a 60 Minutes interview that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered wearing a wire to record Trump as part of a plot to recruit cabinet members to declare him unfit for office.McCabe, who is promoting his new book The Threat, explained to Guthrie that FBI officials opened the counterintelligence probe into Trump because they believed it “possible” that he was working on behalf of the Kremlin when he fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017.“It is saying that we had information that led us to believe that there might be a threat to national security — in this case that the president himself might, in fact, be a threat to the United States’ national security,” McCabe said.McCabe was fired in March 2018 after the Department of Justice inspector general found that he disclosed classified information to the media without authorization. McCabe maintains that he was authorized to disclose the information under DOJ guidelines, and has argued that he was fired because he opened an investigation into the president.
