TRUMP ATWITTER ABOUT THE FBI
‘I never asked Comey’ to stop probing Flynn
• U.S. President Donald Trump issued a fresh denial Sunday that he asked former FBI director James B. Comey to halt an investigation into the conduct of his dismissed national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn,” Trump said in a pre-dawn message on Twitter. “Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!”
The tweet was the latest in a running commentary on the case from Trump that began Saturday, a day after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with a Russian official.
In other tweets Sunday, Trump also seized on news that Peter Strzok — the former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election — was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton. Strzok was also a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, which ended without charges against her.
“Report: ‘ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE’ Now it all starts to make sense!” Trump wrote, before proceeding to criticize the FBI and promise to bring it back to “greatness” under his administration.
Trump fired Flynn 25 days into this administration for misrepresenting the nature of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador, to Vice-President Mike Pence and other administration officials.
Comey has alleged that the day after that, Trump urged him to be lenient with Flynn, producing notes that said Trump told him, “I hope you can let this go.”
Trump stoked the controversy with one of his Saturday tweets in which he said part of the rationale for firing Flynn was that he had lied to the FBI.
“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” Trump wrote in that tweet.
But critics pounced Saturday on Trump, arguing that if he knew at the time of his conversation with Comey that Flynn had lied to the FBI and was under investigation, it may constitute an attempt to obstruct that investigation.
“Are you ADMITTING you knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when you asked Comey to back off Flynn?” Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, asked in a tweet Saturday afternoon.
On Sunday, Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump should have taken action against Flynn sooner if he already knew Flynn had lied to the FBI.
“Well, if he knew that then, why didn’t he act on it earlier?” Warner said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Warner also told CNN that Flynn being charged with only one count of lying to the FBI suggests that there are “many more stories that General Flynn will have to tell about his time during the campaign and during the transition.”
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Trump attorney John Dowd had drafted the president’s tweet, according to two people familiar with the message. Dowd confirmed that Sunday, saying he had passed along a draft to Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director.
Two people close to the administration described the tweet simply as sloppy and unfortunate.
As Flynn pleaded guilty Friday, he made clear that he is now co-operating with Mueller as he probes Russian meddling in last year’s election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Flynn’s decision to cooperate with Mueller was widely seen as a sign of increasing legal peril for other White House aides and perhaps Trump himself, as the investigation has expanded beyond potential collusion with Russia to include obstruction of justice and financial crimes.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., said it looked to her that “what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice.”