Trump said he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin more than US ...

President Trump told his top intelligence officials that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he did them, fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe claimed on Sunday.

McCabe said that he was told by an FBI official that Trump was convinced by Putin that North Korea was incapable of hitting the United States with ballistic missiles - even though American spy agencies claimed otherwise.

‘I don’t care, I believe Putin,’ Trump reportedly told government officials during a conversation about North Korea.

McCabe said he thought Trump’s comments were ‘shocking.’

‘It's just an astounding thing to say,’ he told 60 Minutes.

‘To spend the time and effort and energy that we all do in the intelligence community to produce products that will help decision makers and the ultimate decision maker, the President of the United States - make policy decisions, and to be confronted with an absolute disbelief in those efforts and a unwillingness to learn the true state of affairs that he has to deal with every day was just shocking.’

McCabe said he began an obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigation involving Trump and his ties to Russia after Trump fired bureau Director James Comey in May 2017. 

McCabe, who became acting director after Comey’s firing, said he was disturbed by his conversation with Trump following Comey’s dismissal and got the investigations started the following day. 

'I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly,' said McCabe. 

In the first public confirmation of the investigation by an official who was involved, McCabe described events that occurred in the eight days between Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

'I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly and reassigned or fired that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace,' said McCabe, who is promoting a book to be released next week, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.

McCabe says Trump's own comments served as adequate basis for both investigations.

He says Trump's request of Comey to drop the investigation of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians, could constitute obstruction of justice.

McCabe also mentioned Trump's request that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein write a memo listing the reasons for firing Comey.

The former FBI official revealed to CBS that Trump also asked Rosenstein: 'Make sure you put Russia in the memo.'

Rosenstein refused to do so. McCabe says that Trump wanted Rosenstein to 'give him cover' to fire Comey by citing the Russia investigation in the memo, which could be construed as an attempt by the president to interfere with the probe.

Trump then told Lester Holt of NBC that the Russia investigation was one of the main reasons he fired Comey.

In an Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials, Trump repeated this assertion.

'I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,' Trump told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office on May 10, 2017.

'I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.' 

'Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed,' McCabe told 60 Minutes. 

'The president may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey.' 

McCabe made a series of stunning revelations during his interview, which aired Sunday on CBS. 

McCabe said in the interview that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein broached the idea of using the Constitution to oust Trump, saying the Justice Department official 'discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.'

McCabe said Rosenstein was discussing 'counting votes or possible votes' to invoke the Constitution's 25th Amendment, which allows Cabinet members to seek the removal of a president if they conclude that he or she is mentally unfit.

Though McCabe wouldn't confirm that Rosenstein was plotting to get rid of Trump, he said: 'What I can say is the deputy attorney general was definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time.'

The Justice Department issued a statement Thursday that did not deny the conversation but that said Rosenstein believes 'there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was (he) in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.'

CBS News posted the excerpt of its interview on Friday after McCabe issued a statement saying comments of his on the subject had 'been taken out of context and misrepresented.' 

CBS released a story Thursday about its interview in which correspondent Scott Pelley said McCabe had confirmed a discussion about the Constitution's 25th Amendment. 

But the transcript of that section of the interview was not released until Friday, after McCabe spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz sought to downplay McCabe's involvement in any discussions about a potential removal of the president. 

McCabe is the first person to confirm that the 25th Amendment came up in the meetings. 

The ex-law enforcement official was later fired himself over conversations with the media that an inspector general deemed inappropriate.

Trump has claimed that Comey, McCabe and cohorts of theirs who worked on Hillary Clinton's email case and the Russian meddling probe were 'crooked' cops, and that's why he got rid of them.

In a chapter of his new book, 'The Threat,' McCabe suggests Trump couldn't be reasoned with.

He writes in an excerpt that appeared Thursday in The Atlantic that Trump 'flew off the handle' in a call on an unsecure line the day after he fired Comey over McCabe's decision to allow the former bureau chief to hitch a ride from Los Angeles on a government plane that was flying back to Washington.