And on Sunday, in tweets to his more than 40 million followers, he offered a litany of accusations against Mrs. Clinton and seemed to praise Republicans for starting the new congressional investigations.
“Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?), the Uranium to Russia deal, the 33,000 plus deleted Emails, the Comey fix and so much more,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist.”
“The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s,” he added, “are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”
Mr. Trump was apparently referring to reports last week that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had paid for research that was included in a salacious dossier made public in January by BuzzFeed. The dossier contained claims about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
The president was also reviving unproved allegations that Mrs. Clinton was part of a quid pro quo in which the Clinton Foundation received donations in exchange for her support as secretary of state for a business deal that gave Russia control over a large share of uranium production in the United States.
And he was returning to questions about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server and how James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, handled an investigation into the matter, which was closed with no charges being filed. Mr. Trump initially cited the email case as a reason for firing Mr. Comey, before conceding that it was because of the Russia inquiry.
VideoTrump Team Has Frequently Claimed ‘No Contact’ With Russia
Trump advisers have often insisted that the campaign had no contact with various Russian insiders — claims that were later proved false.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date July 12, 2017. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »The president’s Twitter fusillade came as he and his advisers braced for the first public action by Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor named after Mr. Comey’s ouster to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election. As part of his inquiry, Mr. Mueller is believed to be examining whether there was collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Moscow, and whether the president obstructed justice when he fired Mr. Comey.
CNN reported on Friday that a federal grand jury in Washington had approved the first charges in Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and that plans had been made for anyone charged to be taken into custody as early as Monday. CNN said the target of the charges was unclear. The New York Times has not confirmed that charges have been approved.
Multiple congressional committees have undertaken their own investigations into Russian meddling in the elections, following up on the conclusion of United States intelligence agencies that Moscow sought to sway the contest in favor of Mr. Trump — an idea that he has frequently dismissed as a hoax.
Some Republicans have been reluctant to embrace Mr. Trump’s efforts to shift the spotlight away from Russia’s interference, arguing that the episode should be scrutinized as a foreign policy and national security issue, not a matter of personal grievance for the president.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said that Mr. Trump had been “too defensive” about Mr. Mueller’s inquiry. “We ought to instead focus on the outrage that the Russians meddled in our elections,” said Mr. Portman, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, urged his fellow Republicans on “Fox News Sunday” to give Mr. Mueller “a chance to do his job.” But a Trump ally, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on ABC’s “This Week” that if unspecified “new facts” put Mr. Mueller in a “compromised position,” he must recuse himself.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling the response to the Russia investigation, said that the president’s tweets were “unrelated to the activities of the special counsel, with whom he continues to cooperate.”
But they reflected a habit of Mr. Trump’s in which he seeks to tar an opponent with the same accusations leveled at him. He did so last year during a presidential debate when Mrs. Clinton called him “Putin’s puppet,” responding: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet.”
The tweets came days after House Republicans announced that they were opening new investigations into two of Mr. Trump’s most frequently cited grievances: the Obama Justice Department’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails and the uranium deal.
Mr. Trump is working to fuel those inquiries. The White House acknowledged on Friday that the president had urged the Justice Department to release the informant in the uranium investigation from his confidentiality agreement so he could speak to Congress. Critics called the move improper presidential interference in a federal criminal inquiry, but Mr. Trump’s advisers said he was merely encouraging transparency.
In recent days Mr. Trump has suggested that he believes that the questions he has been raising about Mrs. Clinton’s conduct should put to rest any allegations about his own actions, and end the scrutiny of Russia’s meddling in the election.
“This was the Democrats coming up with an excuse for losing an election,” Mr. Trump told reporters last week. “They lost it by a lot. They didn’t know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax. Now it’s turning out that the hoax has turned around, and you look at what’s happened with Russia, and you look at the uranium deal, and you look at the fake dossier. So that’s all turned around.”
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that while she had yet to encounter “any definitive evidence of collusion,” she had seen “lots of evidence that the Russians were very active in trying to influence the elections.”
Continue reading the main story Source: http://ift.tt/2iIKKL6
0 comments:
Post a Comment