Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trump urges more scrutiny of former foe
Amid Russia investigation, GOP fighting back, he says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed frustration that his campaign is under investigation over possible ties to Russia’s plot to influence the 2016 election but that his former opponent Hillary Clinton is not facing the same level of scrutiny.
In tweets to his more than 40 million followers, Trump offered a litany of accusations against Clinton and seemed to praise Republicans for starting new congressional investigations.
“Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?), the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more,” Trump wrote. “Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist.
“The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”
Trump was apparently referring to reports last week that Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had paid for research that was included in a salacious dossier made public in January by BuzzFeed. The dossier contained claims about connections between Trump, his associates and Russia.
The president was also reviving unproved allegations that Clinton was part of a quid pro quo in which the Clinton Foundation received donations in exchange for her support as secretary of state for a business deal that gave Russia control over a large share of uranium production in the United States.
And he was returning to questions about Clinton’s use of a private email server and how former FBI Director James Comey handled an investigation into the matter, which was closed with no charges being filed. Trump initially cited the email case as the reason for firing Comey, before saying that the Russia inquiry was also a factor.
The tweets came as CNN, citing “sources briefed on the matter,” has continued to report that a federal grand jury in Washington on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. The charges are sealed, and it’s unclear who could be charged and for what.
Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Trump had been “too defen- sive” about Mueller’s inquiry. “We ought to instead focus on the outrage that the Russians meddled in our elections,” said Portman, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, spoke on Fox News Sunday and urged his fellow Republicans to give Mueller “a chance to do his job.” But a Trump ally, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on ABC’s This Week that if unspecified “new facts” put Mueller in a “compromised position,” he must recuse himself.
“He has to be very, very careful about making sure that the public believes that he has no conflicts and that his integrity is unquestioned,” Christie said. The president isn’t under investigation, Christie said.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling the response to the Russia investigation, said the president’s tweets were “unrelated to the activities of the special counsel, with whom he continues to cooperate.”
Minutes before the president began posting his tweets Sunday, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said on CNN’s State of the Union that people should watch Trump’s reaction to any charges that might emerge.
“I would look for a couple of things: one, whether or not Donald Trump has some reaction and talks in a way that could be used against him in the future, because Bob Mueller would do that,” Bharara said.
“The second thing I would look at is to see if the president of the United States is sending some kind of message to the potential defendant or other witnesses,” he said. Whether the president plans to pardon people facing charges should be watched “very, very closely,” Bharara said.
Christie and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., downplayed Trump’s ability to pardon defendants before a criminal case is completed, the way he did for former Phoenix-area Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Aug. 25. While Schiff called Trump’s pardon of Arpaio “a horrible precedent,” he said the president’s power is not unlimited and can’t be used to obstruct justice.
Looking at possible criminal charges, Gowdy said it would be “important whether or not this indictment involves 15-year-old business transactions or 15-day-old conversations with Russia.”
“It’s really important what the charge is. It’s really important who the person being charged is,” said Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor.
Gowdy said he’s “in an increasingly small group of Republicans” not calling for Mueller’s dismissal. “Give the guy a chance to do his job,” he said.
Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat who was a federal and state prosecutor before becoming the governor of Michigan, said on CNN that the reaction by Republicans and Trump to pivot back to Clinton, the uranium deal and other issues were an effort to distract from Mueller’s probe.
“If someone was doing consistently things to throw people off the trail, if they were attacking, of course, the investigator, it’s all evidence of a state of mind — a guilty state of mind,” Granholm said.
The history of the dossier Trump referenced is a complicated one. During the 2016 Republican primaries, the conservative Washington Free Beacon paid the Washington, D.C., firm Fusion GPS to investigate Trump’s background and, eventually, his business ties to Russia, The Washington Post reported Friday. The publication receives financial support from billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer, according to two people familiar with Singer, whose firm did not respond to requests seeking comment.
After the Free Beacon stopped paying Fusion GPS, the research firm offered in April 2016 to continue researching Trump for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, The Post reported last week. According to that reporting, Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, who compiled a dossier on Trump. Clinton
and others working on her campaign have said that they didn’t know anything about the dossier until the 35-page document was posted online by BuzzFeed in January.
It’s unclear how much the Clinton campaign and DNC paid for the information. The Clinton campaign paid $5.6 million in legal fees to Perkins Coie, which brokered funding to Fusion GPS, from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records cited by The Post.
The DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting” since November 2015 — though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS. It’s unclear how Trump arrived at the $12 million figure used in his tweets.
Republican Susan Collins of Maine, a Senate Intelligence Committee member, said Clinton’s campaign chairman and the former Democratic Party head need to explain what they knew about the dossier.
Collins said the committee should further question John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz after the disclosures about the dossier’s funding.
Collins said on CBS’ Face the Nation that “it’s difficult to imagine” that Podesta didn’t know about the funding.
Podesta and Wasserman Schultz last month denied knowledge about payments when interviewed by congressional investigators. Sitting next to Podesta was his attorney Marc Elias, who worked for Perkins Coie, CNN reported.
Collins said Elias should also be questioned.
When it comes to the “Uranium to Russia deal” that Trump referenced in his tweet, House and Senate Republican leaders have already announced two investigations into decisions made during the Barack Obama administration, when Clinton was secretary of state, involving a uranium deal that increased Russia’s share of the U.S. nuclear market.
At the same time, the House Oversight Committee has launched a probe into the Clinton email investigation that will examine, among other things, why
Comey publicly announced that the bureau was investigating Clinton but then waited months before making a similar announcement about its inquiries into the Trump campaign.
Democrats have argued that these investigations are intended to distract from the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.