he is not my president... the fucker needs to be in Jail for treason!
Analysis: Reality catching up with Trump on Russia
Julie Pace, AP White House Correspondent,Associated Press
Hours after Trump dismissed reports that his campaign associates were being scrutinized for colluding with Russia as "fake news," FBI Director James Comey confirmed the investigation is real.
The FBI chief also repeatedly insisted there was no evidence to back up Trump's explosive claim that his predecessor wiretapped his New York skyscraper.
And Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, knocked down a report about Britain helping President Barack Obama with the alleged surveillance, although the White House had pointed to the report to try to boost Trump's case.
Taken together, the disclosures in Monday's lengthy House intelligence committee hearing amounted to an extraordinary undercutting of a president, whose headline-grabbing accusations and Twitter-friendly attacks crumbled quickly under the weight of sworn congressional testimony from some of the nation's top security officials.
Many of Trump's most ardent supporters are unlikely to be swayed by Monday's spectacle. Still, Trump's credibility and his standing as a reliable ally for his fellow Republicans in Congress are less assured. Even if his advisers are ultimately cleared in the Russia probe, as the White House insists they will be, the investigation could loom over Trump's presidency for months or even years, distracting from the ambitious domestic agenda he's vowed to enact.
That reality was abundantly clear Monday. Most cable news channels carried Comey and Rogers' five hours of testimony live instead of the first congressional hearing for Neil Gorsuch, Trump's widely praised nominee for the Supreme Court. The Russia hearings came as Trump tried to give a hard sell to Republicans wary of his health care package, a legislative gamble with long-lasting implications for Trump's relationship with his own party.
The president's political position was already shaky heading into Monday's hearing, the first of several public sessions the House and Senate intelligence committees are expected to hold. His approval rating has tumbled to 37 percent, according to a new Gallup poll, down 8 points from a week earlier.
Trump has long been shadowed by questions about his ties to Russia, given his friendly posture toward Moscow and his advisers' curious web of ties to Russia. The White House insists the campaign did not coordinate with Russia on the hacking of Democratic groups during the election and dismisses the swirling controversy as little more than a political witch hunt.
Yet Monday's hearings left the White House scrambling for cover, though there was little to be found.
Spokesman Sean Spicer launched into a series of confounding arguments during his daily briefing. He touted statements from lawmakers and former Obama administration officials saying they had seen no evidence of collusion between Trump associates and Russia. But he dismissed nearly identical statements from some of those same officials about Trump's wiretapping allegations, saying it was too early in the investigations to draw any conclusions.
In one particularly eyebrow-raising moment, Spicer resorted to claiming one associate, Paul Manafort, had a "very limited role" in the 2016 election. In fact, Manafort was hired in March as Trump's convention manager and promoted to campaign chairman in May. Spicer also described foreign policy adviser Michael Flynn as simply a "volunteer." Flynn traveled frequently with the president, delivered a high-profile speech at the Republican National Convention and served as his first National Security Adviser.
Both Manafort and Flynn were fired by Trump after revelations about their connections to Russia.
Manafort left the campaign in August, when news reports about his business ties to pro-Moscow Ukrainian oligarchs became a political liability. Flynn was fired in February for misleading top officials about his contacts with Russia's ambassador to the United States.
Both Manafort and Flynn are among the Trump associates under scrutiny for possible contacts with Russia during the election. The Senate intelligence committee has also asked Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, and Carter Page, an investment banker who briefly advised the campaign on foreign policy, to retain documents related to its inquiry.
The White House, with the backing of some Republican lawmakers, says the real controversy is how the investigation into Trump's advisers became public. They argue the focus of the probe should be ferreting out who leaked classified information.
Trump tried to go on offense in the middle of the hearing, launching a series of tweets from his official White House account, including one that appeared to blame the Obama administration for leaking details of Flynn's contacts with the Russian envoy. Another tweet incorrectly said Comey and Rogers told lawmakers that Russia "did not influence" the electoral process.
In a moment of real-time fact-checking, the FBI director made clear that was not a declaration he had made.
"We don't have any information on that subject," he said.
FBI probe of Trump-Russia ties began 3 months before election
Michael Isikoff
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The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, confirmed by FBI director James Comey in congressional testimony Monday, began as early as late July — just weeks after a former British spy briefed bureau agents about evidence he had collected about such ties, sources tell Yahoo News.
Christopher Steele, a former British MI-6 intelligence officer who specialized in Russian operations, had been hired as an investigator by an opposition research firm (initially retained by Trump’s Republican primary opponents and later by supporters of Hillary Clinton). According to one of the sources, it was Steele who first alerted FBI agents on July 5 to evidence he had compiled that advisers to the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials were in contact about the 2016 election.
As first reported by Yahoo News, Steele’s information was taken seriously because he had a pre-existing relationship with the FBI, having worked as a consultant for the FBI’s Eurasian organized crime section, helping to develop information about ties between suspected Russian gangsters and FIFA, the international soccer governing body.
The early contact between Steele and the bureau now appears to have set in motion a chain of events that led to Monday’s extraordinary testimony by Comey that the bureau has been actively investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin since “late July” — or more than three months before Election Day.
“I’ve been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” Comey told members of the House Intelligence Committee in a prepared opening statement. “That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
Comey’s testimony appeared to stun Republicans on the committee, one of whom, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said the existence of the investigation means “there is now a cloud that undermines our system.”
It is not a cloud that is likely to be lifted any time soon. Comey said there was no timetable on the probe, that he couldn’t predict how long it would take, and wouldn’t commit to giving any “updates” to the Congress about the status of the probe. When asked directly by Rep. Teri Sewell, D-Ala., “Was Donald Trump under investigation during the campaign?” Comey responded: “I’m not going to answer that.” He added quickly that the members shouldn’t draw any “inferences” from his answer
The public confirmation of an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign government was only one of the many stunning moments during Comey’s testimony. Comey testified that he did not inform congressional leaders about the existence of the probe “until recently” because “of its sensitivity.” Along with NSA director Mike Rogers, who also testified, the FBI director disputed President Trump’s contention in tweets on March 4 that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had wiretapped him. Both said they had “no information” to support that.
In yet another development likely to anger the White House, a senior Justice Department official confirmed to Yahoo News that Comey received permission to publicly disclose the probe now from acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente, an Obama administration holdover.
Comey presumably made sure to leave the decision to reveal the existence of the investigation up to the Justice Department because of the intense criticism he faced last fall when, in the closing days of the presidential election, he publicly told Congress that the bureau had new evidence in the Hillary Clinton email probe. That disclosure, which some Clinton officials believe cost them the election, was made against the advice of senior Justice Department officials and has since triggered an investigation by the department’s inspector general’s office.
But President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has formally recused himself from investigations of the Trump campaign, in which he played a leading role, and did not participate in the decision about what Comey should say.
That left the call to Boente — a career federal prosecutor who served as Obama’s U.S. attorney in Louisiana and later in northern Virginia. Asked the basis for Boente’s decision, and whether he had consulted others in the department, a senior department official declined to comment about “internal” deliberations.
Comey declined to say what precipitated the probe or to identify which individuals were under investigation for possible links to Moscow. But his acknowledgment that the probe dates to late July means that it began during a hectic month in which one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, flew to Moscow and, according to Steele’s report to the bureau, allegedly met with senior Kremlin operatives close to President Vladimir Putin. It also came shortly after media reports that Trump campaign officials, during the Republican National Convention, which ended on July 20, changed the GOP platform to remove a plank calling for the U.S. government to provide weapons to Ukrainian forces resisting Russian-backed troops in that country.
Page has repeatedly derided the Steele dossier claims as “fake news,” even writing letters to Comey and the Justice Department to dispute them. Yahoo News reported that the FBI was investigating the Page allegations in September in a story that was the first to disclose the existence of a bureau investigation into any links between the campaign and the Russian government.