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GOP keeps its distance from ‘Spygate’
Oversight chairman rebuts Trump’s conspiracy theory
GOP moves away from Spygate Republicans have challenged the president since receiving classified briefings.
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WASHINGTON — While President Donald Trump still touts the unfounded claim that the Obama administration improperly spied on his 2016 campaign, senior Republican lawmakers have steered clear of the conspiracy theory since they received classified briefings last week on the role of an FBI confidential informant in an investigation aimed at unmasking Russian interference in the election.
That silence broke when Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., one of the few who got the Justice Department briefing, said he believes the FBI acted appropriately when the informant, a retired American academic living in England, met with three of Trump’s campaign aides.
“When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out,” Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, said Wednesday on CBS News.
“I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard,” Gowdy, who is not running for re-election, said a day earlier on Fox News, Trump’s favorite cable news network.
The pushback was noteworthy because Gowdy, who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, earned a reputation among Democrats as a partisan attack dog for leading the pursuit of Hillary Clinton after a terrorist attack in 2012 killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of state.
He also has worked closely with Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and has spearheaded Republican inquiries into the Russia investigation and spread still unproven allegations of improper surveillance of the Trump campaign.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that Trump would not back down from his claims about what he has called “Spygate.”
“The president still has concerns,” she said.
Trump also took another public swipe at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he nominated last year to lead the Justice Department but has bitterly criticized for his decision to step aside from overseeing the Russia investigation because he had served as a senior Trump campaign aide.
Ironically, Trump quoted Gowdy to issue his latest condemnation on Twitter, noting that the congressman had acknowledged the president’s frustration at discovering that Sessions had recused himself from a politically charged investigation aimed directly at the White House.
“‘There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!’ And I wish I did!” Trump tweeted.
The tweet followed a New York Times report that Trump had demanded Sessions reverse his recusal in March 2017 but that the attorney general had refused. The episode could factor into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump sought to obstruct justice by interfering with the Russia investigation.
Trump also responded Wednesday to ABC’s decision to cancel the hit show “Roseanne” because the show’s star sent a racist tweet comparing an African-American official in the Obama administration to an ape. While much of the nation condemned Rosanne Barr’s tweet, Trump used the incident to complain about his own treatment by ABC.
In his tweet, Trump criticized the network, not Barr, whose revived sitcom depicted a blue-collar Midwestern family that voted for the president.
Trump’s tweet contradicted statements by his press secretary, who repeatedly told reporters Tuesday that the president had more important concerns than the cancellation of a TV sitcom.
At the White House on Wednesday, Sanders redirected a question about Trump’s tweet into an extended protest about what she called bias against the president.
“The president’s simply calling out the media bias,” she said. “No one’s defending what (Barr) said.” Sanders underlined her point by asking, “Where was the apology?” after various attacks on Trump.
Trump is notorious for his own refusal to apologize after generating controversy or for comments that were viewed as offensive.
His videotaped expression of regret in October 2016 for his lewd and predatory comments about women in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” segment is an outlier, and he later suggested those remarks might have been faked.
As a businessman, then a candidate and now president, Trump has stoked public outrage for his attacks on Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for having been shot down and captured during the Vietnam War, callous remarks to a Gold Star family and sometimes profane name-calling of his political opponents, journalists and athletes.
In most cases, Trump has answered calls for an apology with claims that he is being unfairly attacked.
But in the case of the FBI informant, few Republican leaders are defending his assertion that his political opponents “spied” on his campaign. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who participated in the Justice Department briefings, haven’t backed up Trump’s claims of wrongdoing.
The caution from Republican leaders stands in stark contrast to Trump’s claims at a rally in Nashville on Tuesday night.
“How do you like the fact they had people infiltrating our campaign?” he bellowed as the crowd booed. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?”
Nunes has not spoken publicly about the FBI informant since the May 24 briefings. The apparent collapse of the “Spygate” theory, at least in Congress, is the third allegation from Nunes related to the Russia inquiry to sputter out under scrutiny.
He told reporters outside the White House in March 2017 that the Obama administration may have improperly eavesdropped on Trump’s team in New York during the transition. A House ethics investigation later cleared Nunes of having improperly disclosed classified information, and no evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign has surfaced.