Questions about ties between President Donald Trump’s team and Russian intelligence agents deepened Wednesday after new reports of extensive contacts between the two, which are sure to fuel Republican calls for a deeper look at Trump’s links to the country.
The New York Times reported that Trump campaign aides and associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before” the November 2016 election, citing four current and former U.S. officials the newspaper didn’t identify. But it’s unclear whether the talks pertained to Trump personally.
The report comes as top Republicans say Congress needs to take a hard look at Trump’s ties to Russia after his ousting of national security adviser Michael Flynn, who the administration says may have misled the president and vice-president about his communications with a Russian envoy.
The Trump administration was preparing to replace Flynn as early as last week, a senior administration official said, after a warning from the Justice Department that he may have misled the president and vice-president about his conversations.
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White House officials spoke with Robert Harward, a potential replacement for Flynn, last week and again on Monday, the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss a personnel issue. Flynn submitted his resignation at Trump’s request late Monday.
The White House and official Washington continue to reel from the chaos in Trump’s national security council after Flynn’s abrupt ouster. An administration official said the FBI interviewed Flynn about his pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, after Trump took office. The Department of Justice warned the White House counsel, Don McGahn, on Jan. 26 that Flynn may have misled officials about whether he and Kislyak discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump was briefed “immediately” after McGahn received that warning. But Vice-President Mike Pence — who had defended Flynn in a Jan. 15 appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, asserting that the national security adviser hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak — didn’t learn of the Justice Department’s warning until Feb. 9, his spokesman Marc Lotter said.
Several congressional Republicans called for expanded probes of the administration’s relations with Russia and of Moscow’s alleged interference in U.S. politics.
“I think there needs to be fulsome investigation on all angles relative to nefarious activities that were taking place with Russia, beginning in March but even going back before that time,” said Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He said Flynn’s resignation “heightens” the need for GOP leaders to conduct an expanded probe, although he stopped short of endorsing an independent commission as Democrats have demanded.
Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, also said that more needs to be learned about Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak and Russia’s involvement in U.S. politics.
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, meanwhile, called for a look at Mar-a-Lago security, and the Office of Government Ethics said that top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway probably violated ethics rules by promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line in a television interview inside the White House.
The developments contributed to a sense of an administration back on its heels amid questions about its handling of a range of issues, including high-level diplomatic contacts with Russia and a North Korean missile launch.
Democrats, too, stepped up their attacks, eager to turn the questions from Flynn to Trump himself, over what he knew and when about his national security adviser’s contacts with the Russians.
Spicer defended the administration’s actions, saying that Flynn hadn’t violated any laws.
“The issue pure and simple came down to a matter of trust,” Spicer said at a news briefing Tuesday. “That’s why the president asked for his resignation, and he got it.”
But the timeline leading up to Flynn’s departure is muddy.
Spicer said the White House had been “reviewing and evaluating” Flynn’s situation “for a few weeks trying to ascertain the truth,” the first time the administration had made any such admission. Trump told reporters on board Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of a Washington Post report that the Department of Justice had warned the White House about Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak and that he would “look into that.”
And Trump’s public surrogates, led by his counsellor, Conway, have repeatedly maintained since last week that Flynn retained the president’s confidence.
The Justice Department informed the White House last month that Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian envoy and misled officials about the conversation, according to a U.S. law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter. That warning was delivered to the White House Counsel’s Office by Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, the official said.
Spicer questioned why the Justice Department waited to provide the information 11 days after Pence’s televised defence of Flynn. “Where was the Department of Justice?” Spicer said.
Trump fired Yates on Jan. 30 after she said she wouldn’t defend his executive order barring entry to the U.S. by people from seven predominantly Muslim nations.
Pence learned of the Justice Department’s warning “based on media accounts,” Lotter said. It isn’t clear on what day last week that White House officials first spoke to Harward about potentially replacing Flynn.
Pence has “tremendous respect” both for Flynn’s decision to resign and Trump’s decision to accept the resignation, and the vice president is “grateful” for Flynn’s service, Lotter said.
A number of other Republicans, including the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, are still downplaying the need to investigate Flynn and said any probe should instead be focused on news leaks about Flynn’s phone call.
Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said the leaks are “absolutely” the most troubling part of the episode, adding, “We want to get to the bottom of it.”
But McCain said in a statement that Flynn’s White House exit “raises further questions about the Trump administration’s intentions toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, including statements by the president suggesting moral equivalence between the United States and Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, threats to our NATO allies, and attempted interference in American elections.”
Michael Bahar, minority staff director and general counsel for the House Select Intelligence Committee, told reporters in San Francisco Tuesday that Flynn’s resignation will impact the committee’s investigation already under way on Russian interference in the elections.
“That leads to a whole series of future questions,” he said. “Why cover it up? Why not just say if it was perfectly fine ‘hey, I spoke to the Russians, this was part of an incoming transition, this is what we do, we talk to foreign diplomats’? Why not say that? What was the point of covering it up? That’s what we need to get to.”
Read more:
Trump renews media attacks as controversy over Russia deepens
Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence
Trump knew for weeks that Flynn was not telling the truth on Russia, White House says
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the intelligence panel is already looking at questions of Russian involvement in the U.S. election and added that it’s “highly likely that they would want to look at this episode as well.”
House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah rejected the idea of an independent investigation or a probe by his panel. “That situation is taking care of itself,” he told reporters.
Chaffetz also released a letter asking White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to tell the committee whether Trump and other officials viewed or discussed any classified information while hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the dining room of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida Saturday night following news of a missile launch by North Korea.
Democrats in both chambers said the matter underscores the need for a broader investigation of Russia’s activities that would be akin to the outside bipartisan commission that examined the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
“If the speaker is unwilling to support a full congressional investigation, then he should get out of the way and allow an independent commission to look into the matter,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “Russia is a large and growing threat to the United States and liberal democracy around the world.”
So far, GOP leaders have said that the Senate Intelligence Committee will continue to lead the main probe into any contacts between presidential campaigns and Russian officials. The panel announced its probe weeks ago, backed by subpoena power. Panel Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said Tuesday that the panel will conduct “active oversight” on the Flynn issue and that he’s inquiring about any transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.
“I can’t verify the facts in the stories but I’ll go where intelligence and the agencies lead us,” Burr said.
Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican who sits on the panel, said “it’s likely” that Flynn will be asked to testify before it.
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