US Deputy AG offered to wear wire into White House: Ex-FBI official

Washington, Feb 18 (IANS) Former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe has said that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "offered to wear a wire into the White House", the media reported on Monday.

In a TV interview on Sunday, McCabe said that Rosenstein had told him that he "never got searched" when he went into the White House.

"'I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn't know it was there'," McCabe quoted Rosenstein as telling him.

In an earlier CNN report, the Deputy Attorney General denied that he pursued any recording and an informed source had said Rosenstein was only being sarcastic.

But according to McCabe's, Rosenstein "was not joking".

"He was absolutely serious," McCabe said on Sunday. "And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had. I never actually considered taking him up on the offer.

"I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time."

The controversy nearly caused Rosenstein to leave the department when it was first reported last year, but he managed to stay and continue overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

CNN reported in September that Rosenstein discussed wearing a "wire" to record conversations with Donald Trump and recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the President from office.

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page also documented Rosenstein's wire remark in her own contemporaneous memo, which corroborated McCabe's account.

McCabe was fired in March 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions after an inspector general report concluded McCabe misled investigators about his role in directing other officials at the FBI to speak to The Wall Street Journal about his involvement in a public corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation.