Committee to look at report of FBI probe
WASHINGTON: A US House of Representatives committee will look into a newspaper report that the FBI investigated whether President Donald Trump has been working on behalf of Russia, against US interests, the panel’s Democratic chairman said yesterday.
The New York Times reported the probe began in the days after Trump fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May 2017 and said the agency’s counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether Trump’s actions constituted a possible threat to national security.
Trump rejected the Times piece in a late Saturday night interview on Fox News as ‘‘the most insulting article I’ve ever had written’’, and lashed out at Comey and the FBI in half a dozen tweets.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler said his panel ‘‘will take steps to better understand both the president’s actions and the FBI’s response to that behaviour’’ in coming weeks. He also said lawmakers would seek to protect investigators from the president’s ‘‘increasingly unhinged attacks’’.
‘‘There is no reason to doubt the seriousness or professionalism of the FBI, as the president did in reaction to this story,’’ Nadler, a New York Democrat, said.
‘‘We have learned from this reporting that, even in the earliest days of the Trump Administration, the president’s behaviour was so erratic and so concerning that the FBI felt compelled to do the unprecedented — open a counterintelligence investigation into a sitting president,’’ he said.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said he could not comment on the specifics of the report, but said his committee would press ahead with its probe of Trump’s contacts with Russia.
‘‘Counterintelligence concerns about those associated with the Trump campaign, including the president himself, have been at the heart of our investigation since the beginning,’’ Schiff, a California Democrat, said.
Schiff said meetings, contacts and communications between Trump associates and Russians, as well as ‘‘the web of lies about those interactions, and the president’s own statements and actions’’, had heightened the need to follow the evidence.
Trump took notes from his interpreter made during a 2017 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, and took other steps to conceal details of their conversations, a report in the Washington Post said yesterday.
Trump denied on Fox News that he was keeping anything under wraps on his facetoface meetings with Putin.
The New York said FBI officials became suspicious of Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, but held off on opening an investigation until Trump tied his dismissal of Comey to a probe into allegations of election meddling by Russia. The FBI also considered whether Trump’s firing of Comey amounted to obstruction of justice.
Trump lashed out at the Times and former FBI leaders, and criticised the agency’s earlier probe of Hillary Clinton, his rival in the 2016 election.
‘‘Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!,’’ Trump tweeted. — Reuters