FORMER TRUMP
aide offers to testify.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, a key figure in investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, has volunteered to be interviewed by lawmakers as part of an increasingly partisan House probe into the Kremlin’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, on Friday announced the prospect of an interview with Paul Manafort, and Nunes canceled a previously scheduled public hearing in which officials in former President Barack Obama’s administration had agreed to testify about the Russia investigation. Manafort also volunteered to be interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation.
It was not clear whether Manafort had offered to testify under oath or in a public hearing.
Manafort volunteered to be interviewed the same week that FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of an ongoing counterintelligence investigation into possible Trump associates’ coordination with Russia and just days after an Associated Press report revealed that Manafort worked a decade ago with a Russian billionaire with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The confirmation of an ongoing FBI investigation was a blow to the White House, which has described the Russia probe as a ruse. And the new details about Manafort’s ties to a close Putin ally appear to contradict what Trump has previously said about Manafort’s connections.
In February, Manafort said he was never involved with “anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration.” Trump has used the denials to assert that “to the best of his knowledge” none of his associates has anything to do with Russia. But documents obtained by the AP reveal Manafort had sought work from a Putin ally and proposed a campaign that he said could “greatly benefit the Putin government.”
Nunes, a former dairy farmer from California and member of the Trump transition team, told reporters Wednesday that an undisclosed source had shown him intelligence reports revealing that the communications of Trump transition officials were scooped up through routine surveillance and improperly spread through intelligence agencies during the final days of the Obama administration. After he briefed reporters, Nunes met with the president.
Democrats said Nunes’ loyalties to Trump appeared to outweigh his commitment to an independent, bipartisan investigation when he rushed to the White House to deliver the president information that Trump said vindicated him for his claims that Obama had wiretapped him. Comey, Nunes and other intelligence officials have refuted Trump’s claim, and the president has offered no evidence to back it.
“To take evidence that may or may not be related to the investigation to the White House was wholly inappropriate, and, of course, cast grave doubts into the ability to run a credible investigation and the integrity of that investigation,” the committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said Friday.
Previously, Nunes and Schiff had held joint news conferences. Now, what are becoming daily briefings are being done separately. Nunes apologized to Democrats on his committee on Thursday and promised to share the information he had with them. As of Friday, Schiff said the information had not been provided.
Daniel Jones, the former chief investigator for the Senate Intelligence Comittee who now runs his own investigative advisory firm, said Nunes’ handling of the investigation has been “bizarre.”
“One of the key priorities of any investigation is to maintain its legitimacy and integrity,” Jones said. “You simply can’t have the chairman of the investigation reporting to one of the possible targets of the investigation.”
Schiff said canceling Tuesday’s hearing was a “serious mistake,” especially, he said, after Americans benefited so much from the committee’s hearing on Monday.
That hearing, Schiff said, “gave the public a real glimpse at why this is so significant, but we also heard for the first time that the FBI is doing a counterintelligence investigation that involves associates of the Trump campaign.”
Nunes’ office said the White House had “no input in the decision” to cancel Tuesday’s hearing in which the former directors of national intelligence and the CIA and the former acting attorney general had already agreed to publicly testify. Nunes’ spokesman, Jack Langer, said the cancellation was more of a postponement and was done because “we have additional questions arising from Monday’s hearing” that lawmakers wanted to ask in a classified setting. A new date has not been set.
In a statement released Friday, Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni, said Manafort had agreed to talk with House committee members to specifically “provide information voluntarily regarding recent allegations about Russian interference in the election.” When asked whether Manafort would agree to be interviewed about his past work as a political consultant in eastern Europe, Maloni said the interview would be about Russian interference in the election.
Manafort is one of several Trump associates who investigators are looking at for possible coordination with the Russians during the campaign. On Thursday and Friday, Trump adviser Carter Page and Trump associate Roger Stone volunteered to speak to the committee as well.