WASHINGTON | Giuliani: White House wants briefing on classified info

The Robert Mueller investigation into President Trump was sold to the American public as an investigation into collusion between Candidate Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian Federation. Dowd sent Mueller’s team a 20-page letter to reject the interview and laid out the constitutional reasons Trump shouldn’t have to testify, WSJ reported. “Large dollars were paid to the Spy, far beyond normal”, he said, without citing evidence, before referring to the matter as “one of the biggest political scandals in USA history”.

It’s all of a sudden OK, at least in the eyes of The New York Times and other guardians of progressive bias, for an administration to spy on a political campaign.

A congressional source familiar with the meeting said that while present, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump defender, did not speak at all, and that other Republicans present did not aggressively push or defend Trump’s spying allegations.

In a series of tweets Saturday, the President asked why top officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Justice Department failed to contact him about the alleged Russian meddling in the election.

And DiGenova insists President Obama knew about the monitoring and infiltration of the Trump campaign since early January 2017. In her first first full-length interview since leaving government, Haines also said she had been “very concerned” in 2016 about the degree to which Russians might have gained “influence” within the Trump campaign – concerns that were fueled by Trump’s public comments about Putin that she found “wildly disconnected from reality”. That Donald Trump colluded with Russian Federation to win the presidency at this point seems fantastical.

Now, the president is publicly arguing that this informant was not an FBI asset assisting in a legitimate counterintelligence investigation – but rather, a “spy” that the Obama administration embedded in his campaign “for political purposes.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell renewed his support for the Mueller investigation, significantly, after a secret briefing Thursday.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said the meeting on the classified information had not changed his view that the FBI followed proper procedures during their investigation. The kernel of factual basis there was that some people associated with the Trump campaign had been recorded as part of routine surveillance on foreign officials, much as in this case, some campaign members were contacted pursuant to an investigation into Russian election meddling. He has not only maintained his belief in that conspiracy but amplified it over the last few days even as all available evidence continues to suggest that there is simply no “there” there. They spied on my campaign! We hope they do so with more fortitude and integrity than those who surround the president. “Russiagate is blowing up in their face and they’re somehow trying to talk their way out of the problem”, he added. And, the President of the United States doing so – repeatedly – is something that would have been hard to imagine prior to Trump’s arrival on the political scene.