Bill Barr is acting as 'the president's lawyer' against the agency he is supposed to be leading: Ex-FBI deputy director

On Tuesday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe excoriated Attorney General William Barr for trying to poison public perception of the FBI — even as his own department's inspector general debunked right-wing conspiracies of an FBI-centric "deep state" working to bring down President Donald Trump.

"The attorney general of the United States is saying others, but also you, acted in bad faith," said anchor Erin Burnett.

"That's absolutely false," said McCabe. "It didn't happen. I know that. I didn't need the IG to tell me that. But it's good the IG reported there is no situations of that what so far."

"I think what the attorney general has done here with the last reference you showed is he is actually proactively misrepresenting the whole — the findings of the report," continued McCabe. "The comment of 'there wasn't a satisfactory explanation given' was what the IG said with respect to the fact that he found no evidence that the investigative level personnel responsible for the error did so intentionally. He said he didn't get great explanations for why they didn't include that fact or this fact. But they didn't do it out of bias,  and never intentionally misled the court. For the attorney general to get on television and suggest that the mere absence of a perfect explanation is an indicator of malice or ill will or intentional misconduct is really really unfair to those people."

"Who do you think he considers his ultimate loyalty right now, the president?" asked Burnett.

"Yeah, sure. He is the president's lawyer, in a way that I don't think I've ever seen certainly in my life or my career, and I've worked with several attorneys general," said McCabe. "I've never seen an attorney general put himself that far out there to defend the president at all costs, in contradiction to clear fact and reality. It's remarkable."

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