Trump is not being targeted by probe
He raised prospect with wiretap claim
WASHINGTON — White House officials declared on Wednesday that President Donald Trump was not the target of an investigation, five days after Mr. Trump himself raised the prospect with an unsubstantiated claim that his predecessor ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower.
After first refusing to disavow Mr. Trump’s allegations, made in a series of Twitter posts, and instead calling for Congress to investigate them, press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters, “There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”
Mr. Spicer’s statement, which he read from a sheet of paper that was handed to him at the end of his briefing, reinforced the apparent conundrum Mr. Trump’s Saturday tweets have created for the White House: Either the president’s assertions are baseless, or he may have implicated himself in a government investigation of contacts between his presidential campaign and Russia. Until Wednesday, Mr. Spicer declined to discuss Mr. Trump’s assertion that former President Barack Obama ordered wiretap surveillance of Trump Tower.
After an aide slipped Mr. Spicer a note during Wednesday’s briefing, he said that “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice.”
The press secretary insisted he was not disavowing the president.
“The tweet dealt with wiretaps,” Mr. Spicer said. “The other is an investigation. They are two separate issues.”
While the FBI is conducting a wide-ranging counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, there is no public evidence that Mr. Trump is a target.
Also, Bloomberg News reported that Mr. Trump met last April with the Russian ambassador at the center of the pair of controversies over engagement between Trump allies and the Kremlin, despite claims by his spokeswoman that he had “zero” involvement with Russian officials during the campaign.
Meanwhile, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism — Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. — asked the FBI and the Justice Department for evidence that the government had sought legal permission to tap Mr. Trump’s phones.
At the same time, senators visited the CIA’s headquarters to start digging through a trove of classified intelligence reports detailing Russian attempts to influence the election, and the House Intelligence Committee was nearing a deal with the nation’s intelligence agencies for full access to similar information.
Amid all this, it was a busy day for Mr. Trump. The president reportedly offered former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman the position as U.S. ambassador to Russia, nominated D.C. lawyer Noel Francisco as the next solicitor general and picked former U.S. spokesman at the United Nations Richard Grenell to be his ambassador to NATO.