Trump derides meddling ‘hoax’
Didn’t tape Comey, he says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday called Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election “all a big Dem HOAX” and accused former President Barack Obama and his administration of not doing enough last year to “stop” Russian interference.
Trump also acknowledged Thursday that he had not recorded his conversations with James Comey, the FBI director he fired amid the Justice Department’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia.
“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information,” Trump said in a pair of tweets, “I have no idea … whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”
In Thursday morning’s tweets, Trump opined on
the Russia probe and sought to assert his innocence, even as special counsel Robert Mueller expands the investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to look at possible obstruction of justice by the president.
Trump tweeted, “Why did Democratic National Committee turn down the DHS offer to protect against hacks (long prior to election). It’s all a big Dem HOAX!”
The president appeared to be referring to Wednesday’s congressional testimony by Jeh Johnson, Obama’s former homeland security secretary, who said that after the Democratic National Committee’s email servers were hacked, it the party committee declined an offer by the Department of Homeland Security to help it identify intruders and patch vulnerabilities. , The committee also had been in touch with the FBI,
Committee officials said the DNC did not hear from the Department of Homeland Security until months after the hack had been made public and after the FBI had worked to close the intrusion, and that the committee provided the agency a detailed report on the incident.
“The DNC has and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement on Russia’s interference in our election,” committee spokesman Adrienne Watson said in a statement responding to Trump’s tweet. “The DNC has been in regular contact with the FBI for many months and the FBI confirmed the DNC has provided all the information it needed to make its assessment.”
On Comey, Trump’s tweet about the lack of tapes brings to an end speculation that began shortly after accounts emerged about the president’s exchanges with the former FBI director — speculation the president himself began with a post on Twitter that warned Comey that there might have been tapes of their conversations.
Trump appeared at the time to be referring to reports that he had asked Comey to pledge loyalty during a dinner at the White House shortly after the inauguration, only to be rebuffed by the FBI director, who considered the request inappropriate.
Thursday’s revelation came a day ahead of a deadline to turn over any tapes to the House Intelligence Committee.
The president’s tweets on Thursday left open the possibility that the conversations may have been taped without his knowledge. But they largely confirmed the suspicions of outsiders that Trump had been leveling a baseless threat at Comey on May 12, when he wrote, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
This month, Comey testified in detail about those conversations, saying the president had appealed to him on multiple occasions not to pursue an investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his alleged links to Russian officials.
Asked during the Senate hearing whether he worried about the existence of tapes, Comey replied, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
OBAMA OFFICIALS
In another Thursday tweet, Trump wrote, “If Russia was working so hard on the 2016 Election, it all took place during the Obama Admin. Why didn’t they stop them?”
Josh Earnest, Obama’s former White House spokesman, responded to Trump’s tweet in an appearance on MSNBC. Noting that Russia’s overall goal was to shake confidence in the United States’ ability to have an election, Earnest said it would have been “irresponsible” for the administration to have taken more active public steps expressing worry about Russia’s actions.
“We wanted to make sure that we were instilling confidence in people that we could conduct a free and fair election,” Earnest said.
Johnson also addressed the Obama administration’s political sensitivity when it came to warning of the Russian meddling, and alluded to problems created at the time by Trump’s own statements.
“One of the candidates, as you’ll recall, was predicting that the election was going to be rigged in some way. And so we were concerned that, by making the statement, we might in and of itself be challenging the integrity of the — of the election process itself,” Johnson said.
Trump used the caveat of “if Russia was working so hard,” making clear that he is not yet convinced that Russia interfered in the election with its cyberattacks and other activities.
Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia did in fact meddle in the election, through cyberattacks and other activities, with the explicit aim of influencing the outcome. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday
that he did not know whether the president believed the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies.
White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that while the president doesn’t think the election results were influenced by Russia, he has “made it clear that we have to protect the integrity of the electoral process.”
Sanders pointed to comments Trump made at a January news conference, underscoring that he has not dismissed the idea that Russia hacked the U.S. election but that he also believes “we also get hacked by other countries and other people.”
In a third tweet Thursday, Trump sought to use Johnson’s testimony as proof of his vindication in the Russia investigation. “Former Homeland Security Advisor Jeh Johnson is latest top intelligence official to state there was no grand scheme between Trump & Russia,” the president tweeted.
But Johnson didn’t say that Wednesday. He said he wasn’t aware of efforts by Trump or his campaign to collude with Russia beyond what the intelligence community already knows. Johnson also said Russian hacking didn’t change election totals, but added that he can’t be sure other meddling didn’t influence public opinion.
“It is not for me to know to what extent the Russian hacks influenced public opinion and thereby influence the outcome of the election,” he said.
Johnson is not involved in Mueller’s expanding federal investigation into Russian interference and therefore would not have the knowledge or authority to exonerate Trump. It was reported last week that Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, as well as probing Russia’s activities to influence the election and whether there was any collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
In testimony Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Johnson said that Russia’s meddling, directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was “unprecedented” in scale and scope.
POWER GRID WORRIES
Separately, 19 Democratic senators on Thursday sent the president a letter urging him to direct the Energy Department to conduct an analysis of Russia’s capability to hack into and disrupt the U.S. electric grid.
The senators, led by Maria Cantwell of Washington, say the Trump administration did not respond to a request in March for such a study.
In April, Energy Secretary Rick Perry directed his department to conduct a wide-ranging study of U.S. electricity use. But that forthcoming analysis will focus on the degree to which tax and subsidy policies, including those that benefit wind and solar power, “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants” such as coal-fired or nuclear plants, according to the memo asking for the study.
In their letter, Cantwell and the other Democrats asked the president to shift priorities.
“We are deeply concerned that your administration has not backed up a verbal commitment prioritizing cybersecurity of energy networks and fighting cyber aggression with any meaningful action,” the senators wrote.
Recent research from the cybersecurity firm Dragos revealed that Russian-allied hackers have created a cyberweapon, dubbed CrashOverride, capable of disrupting electric systems. That malware, researchers said, was used against Ukraine in December.
The Democrats wrote that the Dragos report made the vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid to foreign cyberattack “increasingly clear.” They asked the White House to instruct the Energy Department, along with other relevant agencies, to report on the extent to which Russia is capable of damaging U.S. infrastructure and to which the Russians may have already tried to do so. Information for this article was contributed by Philip Rucker, Dino Grandoni of The Washington Post; by Vivian Salama and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Mark Landler of The New York Times.