The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, privately complained that he was ordered by president Donald Trump to write the notorious memo justifying the firing of the FBI director James Comey, according to Comey’s former deputy.

Andrew McCabe writes in a new book that Rosenstein, who has publicly defended the memo, lamented that the president had directed him to rationalise Comey’s dismissal, which is now the subject of inquiries into whether Trump obstructed justice.

Rosenstein made his remarks in a private meeting at the justice department on 12 May 2017, according to McCabe’s memoir, which also accuses Trump of operating like a criminal mob boss and of unleashing a “strain of insanity” in American public life.

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In his sharpest criticism, McCabe writes that after firing Comey, Trump and the White House counsel, Don McGahn, acted like mobsters by in effect offering McCabe protection in return for loyalty.

“The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate,” McCabe writes, recalling an Oval Office meeting soon after his elevation to acting FBI director.

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He is also sharply critical of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, saying he had trouble focusing, frequently flew into red-faced rages and confused classified intelligence with things he had read in the media.

He accuses Trump of using the tactics and rhetoric of totalitarian dictators in persuading loyal “shock troops” that anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor.

Trump’s “heedless bullying” and refusal to tolerate any view other than his own is “nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue” that is then further amplified by online media, McCabe writes.