The New York Times reported this morning that White House Officials Say Trump Isn’t Target of Any Investigation: “After first refusing to disavow Mr. Trump’s allegations [that President Obama wiretapped him], made in a series of Twitter posts, and instead calling for Congress to investigate them, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters, “There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”
But this afternoon the New York Times posted that ‘No Comment,’ Justice Dept. Says, Asked About a Trump Inquiry:
[T]he Justice Department on Thursday declined to confirm statements a day earlier from the White House that Mr. Trump was not the target of a counterintelligence investigation.
Officials also said the White House had not relied on any information from the Justice Department in offering a statement denying the existence of an investigation.
The White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, told reporters on Wednesday that “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice” or “ that the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”
But a Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that there was no indication that anyone at the Justice Department had given the White House that assurance.
Asked whether Mr. Trump was in fact the target of an investigation, the official offered a “no comment.”
* * *
James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department after Mr. Trump’s posts to publicly refute the notion that Trump Tower or Mr. Trump had been wiretapped. But the Justice Department has declined to do so.
In other developments, Martin Longman at the Political Animal blog connects the dots between longtime GOP ratfucker Roger Stone, British white nationalist Nigel Farange, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Did Nigel Farage Serve as Roger Stone’s Intermediary?
Yesterday, The Smoking Gun wrote up an extensive article on their contacts with Guccifer 2.0, the “online persona that U.S. officials say was created by Russian government officials to distribute and publicize material stolen during hacks of the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Gmail accounts used by Clinton staffers like John Podesta, the campaign’s chairman.”
The main focus of their article was Roger Stone, however, who had significant online contacts with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, called him a hero, and defended him extensively against accusations that he wasn’t who or what he claimed to be. It’s a fascinating article, and it just became much more urgently interesting this morning after BuzzFeed News reported that they essentially busted Nigel Farage coming out of a meeting with Julian Assange today in Ecuador’s London embassy.
Read more
“We have not seen any evidence that there was a wiretap or a (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court order against Trump Tower or somebody in Trump Tower,” Speaker Paul Ryan said in an interview Thursday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer.
