Andrew McCabe, Fired F.B.I. Deputy, Is Said to Have Kept Memos on Trump

By MATT APUZZO MARCH 17, 2018

WASHINGTON — Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director who was fired late Friday, kept contemporaneous memos about his interactions with President Trump and his conversations with the former director James B. Comey, a person close to Mr. McCabe said on Saturday.

The memos could bolster the account of Mr. Comey, whose own memos and testimony describe repeated requests by Mr. Trump to clear his name. Mr. Comey said Mr. Trump also asked him to shut down a criminal investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Both matters are under investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is considering whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.

Mr. McCabe’s memos were left at the F.B.I., which means that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have access to them as they work to corroborate Mr. Comey’s account. Mr. Trump has denied pressuring Mr. Comey to end the Flynn investigation. Mr. Comey was fired last spring, and the revelation of his conversations with Mr. Trump helped lead to the special counsel’s appointment.

Mr. McCabe is known to have had at least three meetings with the president. In one, he asked Mr. McCabe how he had voted in the presidential election. In each, he asked about Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill, who ran a failed campaign as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate. Mr. McCabe has identified as a lifelong Republican but did not vote in the 2016 presidential race.

The existence of his memos was first reported by The Associated Press.

Mr. McCabe was fired less than two days before his retirement. Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited what he said was a lack of candor by Mr. McCabe in interviews with internal investigators. His firing had been recommended by career disciplinary officials at the F.B.I.

Mr. McCabe immediately declared that his firing was part of a Trump administration effort to discredit him and damage the special counsel’s investigation. In an interview, he said he had not made false statements. “This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness,” he said.

He was among the first F.B.I. officials to scrutinize possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. Mr. Trump has taunted Mr. McCabe both publicly and privately, and Republican allies of the president have cast Mr. McCabe as the center of a “deep state” effort to undermine the Trump presidency.

His lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said Justice Department officials had rushed to fire Mr. McCabe before he could qualify for his pension. “This distortion of the process begins at the very top, with the president’s repeated offensive, drive-by Twitter attacks on Mr. McCabe,” Mr. Bromwich said late Friday.

Mr. Trump kept up his Twitter barrage on Saturday, pointing to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Ms. McCabe’s campaign from a political committee run by Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and a longtime ally of the Clintons.

The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

The president’s personal lawyer seemed to lend credence Saturday to the idea that Mr. McCabe and Mr. Mueller were linked in the eyes of the president. Asked by The Daily Beast for a response to Mr. McCabe’s firing, the lawyer, John Dowd, sent an email saying it was now time that the special counsel investigation be shut down.

NYT