Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe claimed he did not "leak" any information to reporters about ongoing agency investigations and said it was within his "authority" to release information to the media, The Hill reported Saturday.
McCabe maintained he was using that authority when he gave information to a reporter in 2016 to shift the narrative that he was slow-walking the FBI's investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
"The department was not impressed with the case, and they didn't believe it should be going forward," McCabe told ABC News in a recent interview the news agency reported shortly after his firing was announced late Friday evening.
McCabe explained he authorized the release about "the content of a conversation that I had had with [a senior official] from the Department of Justice" about the investigation.
"The decision to share information with the media is absolutely within my authority as deputy director," he explained. "I am one of three people in the FBI who has the independent authority to make that decision. People could disagree about the decisions I made ... but the fact is this is not a leak."
"This is not a clandestine contact with a reporter," McCabe added. "It was done by my media representative and my counselor. It took place over the course of several days. ... So to be kind of retrospectively misrepresented as sort of a clandestine secretive leak is sort of just – it's not the case and it's just an unfair portrayal."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced McCabe's firing Friday evening in a statement. One of the reasons he gave for the firing was that reports "concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media."
The ABC News interview also had other revealing statements by McCabe, including that he had "considered myself to be a Republican my entire life," albeit "a moderate Republican." He also said he had "voted for every Republican candidate for president in every election, except the 2016 one, in which I did not vote. And I chose not to vote because of the political nature of the work that we were engaged in."
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