Offensive loses steam

Trump ‘spygate’ offensive loses steam

Legal experts and Trump critics say the defections have exposed cracks in the president’s narrative.

By KYLE CHENEY

President Donald Trump’s claim that the FBI embedded a spy in his campaign for political purposes began to crumble Wednesday after a prominent Republican, as well as defenders of the president, said he might have the story wrong.

In less than 24 hours, Trump’s allegations were publicly refuted by House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), one of just nine lawmakers briefed on highly classified details of the FBI’s operation; Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a Trump favorite; and prominent legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, a vocal Trump ally who has advised the president on legal strategy.

Legal experts and Trump critics say the defections have exposed cracks in the president’s narrative and undermine his attempts to discredit the FBI investigation into Russian contacts with his campaign as a partisan, “deep state” attack on his presidential bid.

And notably, a slew of Trump's congressional allies who have been active purveyors of what the president dubbed “spygate” — including Reps. Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Lee Zeldin — were silent Wednesday. POLITICO reached out to a handful of these lawmakers and did not hear back. Only Rep. Mark Meadows had weighed in by late afternoon, suggesting the Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to explain away the controversy.

“My concerns remain unchanged,” he told POLITICO. “There is a substantial amount of information to suggest that the FBI did not follow protocol protecting civil liberties, and to this point, the DOJ has still failed to turn over the relevant documents we’ve requested to prove their case.”

The White House declined to directly rebut Gowdy on Wednesday, but made clear the president hasn’t backed off his concern. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “clearly, there’s still cause for concern” about the president’s “spy allegations.”

“We’re going to continue to follow the issue,” she added.

The blowback began Tuesday night when Gowdy, pressed during a Fox News interview, insisted that the FBI acted appropriately when it deployed an informant to collect information during the 2016 presidential election from Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Both men had been suspected of having questionable Russian contacts and the FBI’s attempt to follow the lead was appropriate and necessary, Gowdy said.

“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,” said Gowdy, one of just five Republicans in a classified DOJ briefing last week for congressional leaders about the issue.

Wednesday morning, Gowdy doubled down on CBS.

“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,” he said.

The lawmaker’s comments were echoed by Napolitano, who said Trump’s “spy” claim seemed to be “baseless” and that the use of an informant on the periphery of the campaign is “standard operating procedure” in the FBI’s counterintelligence operations.

“If they were there for some nefarious reason … to gather data from the campaign and pass it to the West Wing and pass it to Mrs. Clinton, I’d want to see evidence of that before I made an allegation that outrageous,” Napolitano said.

Dershowitz joined in Wednesday morning by conceding that he was “on the way to being persuaded” that the FBI’s use of an informant was proper.

The confluence of conservative defenses of the FBI undercuts Trump’s aggressive PR strategy to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russian election meddling and whether there was any coordination with the Trump campaign. That investigation has edged deeper inside Trump’s inner circle and spurred Trump to lash out against the “witch hunt” against him.

Until recently, Trump’s spygate claim had served as a rallying cry for his supporters. During a Wednesday night campaign rally in Nashville, Trump sarcastically urged attendees to raise their hands if they were secretly FBI informants.

But on Wednesday, many of Trump's top Capitol Hill allies remained silent on the issue.

Zeldin — the New York Republican who filed a resolution last week laying out a litany of allegations of misconduct by the FBI, including a claim that top officials “appear to have planted at least one person into Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign to infiltrate and surveil the campaign” — did not respond to a request for comment on Gowdy’s assertions.

Jordan, of Ohio, and Gaetz, of Florida, who have also vocally excoriated the FBI and the ustice Department, were also not immediately available to comment.

The other Republicans who attended last Thursday’s briefing — House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes — have also declined to publicly comment on how the meeting affected their opinion of the issue.

Still, Meadows stood firm on Wednesday, insisting DOJ officials “need to give us the documents” about the informant.

“I am anxious to see what documents Chairman Gowdy has reviewed that would lead him to believe that the FBI did everything above board,” he wrote via email. “Certainly their document production to date has not met that standard. The only documents I am aware of indicated confidential human sources were used before and after the FBI officially opened their investigation.”

“To my knowledge,” he added, “there have been no documents reviewed by Democrats or Republicans that would answer the questions surrounding the use of confidential human sources.”

And many of Trump’s allies in conservative media were quick to turn on Gowdy, accusing him of swallowing Justice Department spin.

“Someone should ask Trey Gowdy why the FBI hid their investigative witch hunt into the Trump team from congressional oversight for eight months while leaking to the press if, as Gowdy said, the FBI ‘was doing what we would want them to do,’” said Dan Bongino, a Fox News personality Trump has cited. “Don’t be fooled,folks.”

Late Wednesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted a lengthy segment on the matter featuring appearances by two Trump campaign aides who allegedlycame into contact with the informant — Carter Page and Sam Clovis. But despite Hannity’s protestations, neither affirmatively said a spy had infiltrated the campaign.

“Were you spied upon. Did a spy approach you?” Hannity asked Page.

“I’m not sure, Sean,” Page replied.

Clovis, who oversaw the campaign’s foreign policy team, told Hannity that the informant contacted him, but didn’t pump him for information.

“He wants information from you, fair statement?” Hannity asked.

“No, he didn’t try to get any information,” Clovis said.

Rather, Clovis said, the informant “used” him to contact George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy adviser. Clovis did say he believed, however, that the informant wanted to “create a scandal” by connecting Papadopoulos to Russia’s efforts to hack and disseminate internal emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

According to a New York Times report, the FBI grew suspicious of Papadopoulos after hearing that he had told an Australian diplomat in May 2016 that Moscow was sitting on a cache of messages that would embarrass Clinton.

Still, Clovis said his meeting with the informant, on Sept. 1, 2016, was “totally innocuous.”

“It was so innocuous that I didn’t report it up the chain of command at all,and I didn’t think anything of it,” he said.

Still, it doesn’t appear the White House is ready to back down.

“The president still has concerns about whether or not the FBI acted inappropriately having people in his campaign,” Sanders told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “And certainly, the president has concerns about the overall conduct of the FBI when it comes to this process.”