The FBI director, James Comey, has confirmed for the first time that the agency is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
Comey had previously refused to comment on the existence of any such investigation but addressing the House intelligence committee, Comey reversed course and said he had been authorised to depart from that policy.
“In unusual circumstances where it is in the public interest it may be appropriate to do so,” the FBI director said. “This is one of those occasions. I have been authorised by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counter-intelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
Comey said that the investigation included the possibility that criminal acts had been committed.
“I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining,” Comey said, adding that he would provide more details to the committee behind closed doors.
Comey confirmed that the FBI began the counter-intelligence investigation in late July 2016, remarking that for such an inquiry that was “a relatively short period of time”. He said it was “impossible to say” when it would end.
He urged Congress and the public not to draw comparisons between his extensive public comments on the Clinton inquiry, arguing that they concerned “details of a completed investigation”, although in the days before the election Comey publicly stated newly inquired information from an ongoing inquiry might affect the Clinton investigation – something that ultimately did not happen.
Comey was appearing alongside the director of the National Security Agency, Adm Michael Rogers, in a congressional investigation into the extent and purpose of Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
Splits between the Republican and Democratic membership were evident from the very start of the hearing. Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican and a member of Trump’s transition team, sought to put the emphasis on leaks from the intelligence agencies about the investigation, and particularly in the contacts between the former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, used his 15-minute opening statement to outline a prosecutorial case laying out all the known or reported contacts between members of the Trump campaign team and Russian officials, most of which had been denied by the Trump camp.
“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?” Schiff asked. “Yes, it is possible. But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt US persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”
If Trump or his people cooperated with Russia’s so-called “active measures”, Schiff said, “It would represent one of the most shocking betrayals of democracy in history … The stakes are nothing less than the future of our democracy, and of liberal democracy.”
They agreed on one topic: calling Trump’s accusation that Obama had Trump Tower surveilled baseless. Schiff said there is “no evidence whatsoever to support that slanderous accusation”, and Nunes – who suggested other “improper” surveillance on Trump may have occured – said: “We know there was not a physical wiretap of Trump Tower.”
Later, Comey said that neither the FBI nor the justice department had any information to support those tweeted allegations by Trump.
“I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside; the DoJ has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the DoJ in all its components.”
As for the president’s claim that he was a victim of McCarthyism, the FBI director said: “I try very hard not to engage in any -isms of any kind, including McCarthyism.”
Rogers said that the NSA also had no information about any such surveillance, and said it was illegal for the NSA to ask its British counterpart, GCHQ, to carry out that spying on its behalf.
The White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, caused consternation in the GCHQ and in Downing Street last week by reading aloud a claim by a Fox television commentator that GCHQ had carried out surveillance of the Trump campaign for the Obama administration. Rogers said he agreed with the rejection of the claim and said it “frustrates a key ally”.
(TheGuardian US)
