Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night that he thinks that “it’s possible” President Donald Trump is a Russian intelligence asset. Hot damn. Not bad for a book tour!
Here’s the clip:
McCabe is promoting his new tell-all The Threat, which details his time as FBI deputy director under James Comey and then as acting director after Comey’s firing. McCabe eventually made way for Christopher Wray, and was then fired himself. The book has naturally landed him segments on pretty much every late night show, network and cable news program he wants. In each interview, McCabe has been teasing something a little different, so he was bound to bring a good morsel to CNN.
The former deputy director of the FBI saying that it’s possible the president is a foreign intelligence asset is significant, even though he clearly wasn’t going to give a definitive answer. If that’s true, it would (hopefully) upend the entire Trump administration. But the smoking gun is almost certainly not going to come from a former official’s cable news show book tour.
Still, McCabe is doing great at this—much better than James Comey, who did the same exact schtick last year. For instance, here’s McCabe on MSNBC, answering a “really tough question” about whether or not he hates the president.
Wow. Just really humanizing honesty from a man who ran a federal law enforcement agency for the most authoritarian president the U.S. has had in decades. Reporting on these book tour stops is interesting for the insight it gives us into the conduct and character of the people inside the Trump administration, but we absolutely should not forget that the newly-minted author was one of those people a few short months ago.
At least if The Threat sells well people won’t have an excuse to do dumb shit like crowd-funding McCabe’s legal defenses again.