President Trump ordered deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to write the infamous memo justifying why former FBI Director James Comey was fired and Rosenstein was privately emotional and frustrated by the task, according to a new memoir by Andrew McCabe, Comey’s former deputy.
In the new book obtained by The Guardian, McCabe says Rosenstein was “glassy-eyed” and upset during a May 12, 2017 meeting at the Justice Department where he told officials that he wrote the memo against his will. Rosenstein has publicly supported the memo that was used to justify Comey’s firing, which fueled inquiries into whether Trump obstructed justice. In the memo Rosenstein wrote that Comey was fired over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, not the Russia probe, as Trump later admitted.
“He said it wasn’t his idea. The President had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe wrote, according to the Guardian. McCabe said that Rosenstein admitted he was having trouble sleeping and told people in the meeting, “there’s no one here that I can trust.”
The book is entitled, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump” and will be released later this month, according to the Guardian.
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