We study the excitation of the electric current of chiral fermions along the external magnetic field, known as the chiral magnetic effect, in the presence of the background axial-vector field. The calculation of the current is based on the exact solution of the Dirac equation for these fermions accounting for the external fields. First, this solution was obtained for massive particles and, then, we consider the chiral limit, which is used in the anomalous current computation. We obtain that, in this situation, the anomalous current does not contain the direct contribution of the axial-vector field. This result is compared with findings of other authors. * maxdvo@izmiran.ru