Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
No sign of wiretap, says GOP’s Nunes
FBI’s silence irks lawmakers; block threatened for a Trump Justice pick
WASHINGTON — The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that he had seen no indication of President Donald Trump’s claim on Twitter that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“We don’t have any evidence that that took place,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “In fact, I don’t believe — in the last week of time, people we’ve talked to, I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower.”
If Trump’s Twitter claim is to be taken literally, Nunes said, “then clearly the president is wrong.”
Even a member of Trump’s Cabinet, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, raised questions about the claim. In Richmond, Va., he told reporters that he had never given Trump any reason to believe he had been wiretapped.
The president has asked lawmakers to investigate the claim. Lawmakers have since turned the question back toward the administration, asking the Justice Department to provide evidence of wiretapping activity.
The Justice Department missed a Monday deadline for providing the information to the House and was
given a one-week extension.
Some top Republicans were threatening to block Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general if the FBI did not provide evidence related to the possible wiretapping.
Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, said the FBI director, James Comey, would testify Monday at the committee’s first public hearing on its investigation into Russian interference in the the 2016 elections. Comey could presumably resolve the question about the wiretap.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday that the president was referring to general surveillance that may have been approved by the Obama administration. On Tuesday, he said the president was “extremely confident” the Justice Department would provide evidence vindicating him.
Schiff challenged those statements from Spicer, who also has said that while he was not aware of any investigation targeting Trump, the president spoke accurately when he said he had been wiretapped by Obama.
“Those two things cannot both be true unless he is suggesting that the FBI was engaged in a rogue operation unsupervised by a court to wiretap Trump Tower,” Schiff said. “There is absolutely no evidence of that and no suggestion of any evidence of that.”
After Trump made the claim on March 4 in a Twitter message that Obama had tapped his telephone, Comey asked the Justice Department to make a statement disputing Trump’s assertion.
So far, the Justice Department has refused to say publicly whether it went to a judge to get a secret warrant to eavesdrop on Trump, putting the department in a difficult position. Silence from the Justice Department has frustrated Comey.
If the Justice Department says there was no wiretap, it undercuts the president’s accusation. If there was a wiretap, it suggests that FBI agents and federal prosecutors had probable cause to believe that Trump the candidate was operating as an agent of a foreign power.
It is not clear why Trump thought he was wiretapped or what led him to make the claim, which was flatly rejected by James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, and by a spokesman for Obama.
Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked the FBI last week for copies of any warrant applications and court orders “related to wiretaps of President Trump, the Trump Campaign, or Trump Tower.”
On Wednesday, Graham said during an appearance on CNN that he would also subpoena the FBI to get the information if necessary.
“I want to get to the bottom of it,” Graham said. “The FBI would know if a warrant was issued. They would know if a warrant was applied for. I want to answer that question.”
THREAT OF DELAY
Nunes’ comments came as Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused federal law enforcement officials of lying to lawmakers about their willingness to share information with them as part of congressional oversight.
Grassley was responding to a question about whether Comey had provided the same information to the intelligence committees as he has to Grassley’s judiciary panel, which are probing Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 elections.
“Every time they come up here for their nomination hearing and I ask them are you going to answer phone calls and our letters and are you going to give us the documents you want? And every time we get a real positive yes! And then they end up being liars!” Grassley said, raising his voice to a shout during a phone interview. “It’s not if they’re treating us differently than another committee. It’s
if they’re responding at all.”
Grassley has been asking the FBI for a briefing into matters involving allegations of links between the Trump administration and the Kremlin for several weeks, which he said Comey promised would come during a phone call with him and Judiciary Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., last week. But it never materialized — so Grassley informed the Justice Department he would hold up further consideration of the Trump administration’s nominee for deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, until the FBI responds to the committee’s inquiries.
“That seems to have gotten their attention,” Grassley said.
A delay on Rosenstein’s appointment would create a number of problems for the Justice Department. In particular, he was expected to oversee any department investigations into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election after Sessions recused himself because Sessions was an adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.
Comey has been making regular trips to Capitol Hill to brief members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Gang of Eight — party and intelligence committee leaders who receive the highest-level intelligence briefings — on matters related to allegations Russia interfered in the 2016 elections. But the Judiciary committee has received no similar briefing, despite repeated requests.
Grassley said he’s unsure how other Republican colleagues feel about Comey’s reluctance to explain the FBI’s ongoing investigations, but he said: “I imagine a lot of them are much more frustrated than I’ve just demonstrated to you.”
Graham joined Grassley in pledging to block Rosenstein’s nomination.
“Well, I want an answer to my letter,” Graham said in an interview. “If there is a criminal investigation regarding the Trump campaign and ties to Russia, I want to know about it because we’re doing congressional investigations of all-things Russia. I don’t want to run into a criminal investigation not knowing it’s out there.”
Grassley has given Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, the reins of the full committee inquiry into allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections.
Graham argued Wednesday morning that it is vital that he know whether the FBI has an active criminal investigation surrounding Trump so that his inquiry doesn’t get in the way.
“Is there an investigation? Because I need to know before I move forward into investigating Russia from a congressional lens — I don’t want to interfere with a criminal investigation if there is one,” he said. He added, however, that he thinks “the entire country needs to know if there’s something there there.”