McCabe: I Didn’t Think Rosenstein Offering to Wear a Wire Was a Good Idea

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe stated that he did not believe Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s offer to wear a wire while meeting with President Trump was a good idea.

Host Anderson Cooper asked, “[A]t the time that — in the book that Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to a meeting with the president…did you think that was a good idea?”

McCabe answered, “Absolutely not.”

McCabe added, “I felt like it was an incredibly invasive and potentially precedent-setting thing to do. I didn’t think it was necessary at that point. I mean, if you think about it, the reason you would send someone in with a concealed recording device to tape the utterances and the statements of a subject is to capture evidence of intent. We didn’t need to do that in this case. We knew what the president intended. He made — through his own public statements, statements to Lester Holt in the infamous interview where he talked about thinking about Russia when he fired the director of the FBI. So, it was really some — it was a risky and controversial position that I did not want to put the agency in.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett