FBI was right to deploy informant

FBI was right to deploy informant, senior GOP lawmaker says

By KYLE CHENEY

A senior House Republican who was part of a highly classified Justice Department briefing last week said on Tuesday that the FBI acted properly when it deployed an informant to gather information from advisers to President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said last week’s briefing, convened by the Justice Department under pressure from Trump, convinced him even further that the FBI’s information-gathering steps were appropriate.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got,” he said in an interview on Fox News. He added that the information also suggested that the effort had “nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Recent reports have suggested that an FBI informant — a former academic who worked in several presidential administrations — approached multiple members of Trump's foreign policy team, including advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Trump has seized on that news to suggest nefarious surveillance, but Justice Department officials say informants are a staple of counterintelligence investigations like the one the FBI had launched to investigate Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.

Gowdy said he understood Trump‘s frustration about public rhetoric on the Russia investigation by Democrats and intelligence officials, like former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan. But he noted that the current top officials at the agencies, including FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, “now are all Trump appointees.“

Gowdy’s comments are a significant pushback against the president and his allies who have contended that the FBI’s use of an informant amounted to explosive political proof that the Obama administration embedded a spy in his campaign — an accusation that hasn’t been backed up by any available evidence.

According to Gowdy, the classified details also cut against the theory. In fact, he said, the FBI’s actions appeared to support what Trump himself has at times demanded: that investigators pursue any attempts by Russia to infiltrate his campaign and efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in the election.

“It looks to me like the FBI was doing what President Trump said: ‘I want you to do, find it out,’” Gowdy said. He added: “President Trump himself in the Comey memos said, ‘If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it.’ Sounds to me like that was exactly what the FBI did.”

Moments after Gowdy’s interview, Trump took the stage at a rally in Nashville, Tennessee, and insisted that his campaign had been “infiltrated” by political opponents, reiterating the allegation that he has leveled in recent weeks as part of an effort to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been a key House point man on the most sensitive aspects of the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — and he has been an envoy for the committee and House leadership in meetings between senior Justice Department officials about allegations by Trump and allies of misconduct by the FBI in the 2016 election.

Gowdy also urged Trump to testify before Mueller, noting that all of the information he’s seen so far suggests that, so far, the president is not a target of the inquiry.

“If he were my client … I would say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you need to sit down with Mueller,” he said.

Gowdy said that Trump's repeated statements about a “spy” in his campaign was creating another opportunity for Mueller to question his facts.

“The president should have access to the best legal minds in the country,” he said. “I think he should take advantage of those.”

Two of the Trump campaign officials who were approached by the FBI informant — Page and Sam Clovis — appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night. When pressed by host Sean Hannity about whether he had been approached by a “spy,” Page replied, “I’m not sure, Sean.”

Clovis recounted receiving outreach from the informant on Sept. 1, 2016, but said the informant didn’t pump him for information. He said, instead, that the informant seemed to want to connect with Papadopoulos, whose interactions are believed to have led to the opening of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

Papadopoulos reportedly told an Australian diplomat in April 2016 that Russians had derogatory material on Trump’s Democratic opponent in the election, Hillary Clinton, a tip that was relayed to the FBI two months later. That tip was the basis for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump campaign associates’ contacts with Russia.