President Donald Trump said Wednesday that former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe seems like "a poor man's J. Edgar Hoover."
"I think Andrew McCabe has made a fool out of himself over the last couple of days and he really looks to me like sort of a poor man's J. Edgar Hoover. I think he's a disaster, and what he was trying to do was terrible and he was caught. I was proud to say we caught him, so we'll see what happens, but he is a disgraced man. He was terminated, not by me, he was terminated by others," Trump said while speaking to reporters at the White House.
Hoover, the nation's first FBI director, became a controversial figure later in his life as evidence surfaced showing he routinely exceeded the agency's jurisdiction.
"The I.G. report was a disaster from [McCabe's] standpoint," Trump continued. "Anybody reading the I.G. report would say, how could a man like this be involved with the FBI? And the FBI has some of the greatest people, some of the finest people you'll ever meet. But this man is a complete disaster."
McCabe reentered the national discussion in recent days with a series of media interviews to promote the release of his new book.
Last week, McCabe said he opened an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia one day after meeting with the president in May 2017 because he feared he would be fired. McCabe also said Tuesday that he told a bipartisan group of congressional leaders about the investigation and "no one objected."
The former deputy director was fired last March after the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General found he misled investigators "about the role he had in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation." McCabe is reported to have lied at least four times, three under oath, and "that while he had the power to approve disclosures of information to the media, his doing so in this instance violated policy because it was done 'in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership.'"