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‘No Comment,’ Justice Dept. Says, Asked About a Trump Inquiry Is Trump Being Investigated? ‘No Comment,’ Justice Dept. Says
(about 9 hours later)
WASHINGTON — With questions still swirling over President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that he was wiretapped on orders of President Barack Obama, the 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. WASHINGTON — President Trump’s weekend Twitter message asserting that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones forced the White House into ever more verbal contortions on Thursday as aides struggled to defend the president’s charge.
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. In the latest iteration, the Justice Department declined to comment on whether Mr. Trump is — or is not — the subject of an investigation. “No comment,” a department official said.
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.” In normal circumstances, a “no comment” from the Justice Department on the status of any investigation would be standard practice. And certainly there has never been any indication that Mr. Trump himself was the target of inquiries by the department and congressional intelligence committees into possible contacts between his associates and members of the Russian government.
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. But by venting his ire against Mr. Obama in a series of Twitter messages at dawn on Saturday, Mr. Trump awkwardly raised that possibility himself, since any wiretapping could have been the direct result of an investigation targeting him. One presidential tweet in particular — “how low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process” — clearly portrayed Mr. Trump as the victim of surveillance.
Asked whether Mr. Trump was in fact the target of an investigation, the official offered a “no comment.” Thursday’s verbal gymnastics actually started on Wednesday when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, insisted to reporters that the president is not the target of a counterintelligence investigation involving contacts with Russia. He said, flatly, that “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice.”
In normal circumstances, a “no comment” from the Justice Department on the status of any investigation would be standard practice. But the controversy generated by Mr. Trump’s posts on Twitter last weekend about being wiretapped — which Mr. Obama and others have strongly denied — has generated intense scrutiny of every word on the matter. That prompted Thursday’s comments from a Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. The official said that Mr. Spicer had not relied on any information from the department in denying the existence of an investigation targeting the president.
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. Which led a few hours later to an about-face by Mr. Spicer, who was asked how he knew, definitively, that the president was not a target. Mr. Spicer conceded that the White House does not know whether the Justice Department has targeted the president in a Russia-related investigation.
“I said I’m not aware and we’re not aware and that’s why we want the House and Senate to do what the president has asked of them, to look into this,” Mr. Spicer said. “But no, we’re not aware.”
When reporters asked him to reconcile the difference between his statements, Mr. Spicer insisted that there was none.
“Right, I mean I don’t know that they’re not interchangeable,” Mr. Spicer told reporters. “I’m not aware, I don’t believe. Look up in a thesaurus and find some other ways, but I don’t know that there’s a distinction there that’s noteworthy. But we’re not aware, I don’t believe that that exists.”
In his tweets, Mr. Trump appeared to be lashing out at what he views as a politically motivated effort to uncover the facts about Russia’s activities in the presidential election, including contacts between people linked to his campaign and Russian officials.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting a wide-ranging counterintelligence investigation into Russian campaign interference, and into the question of whether anyone in the Trump administration may have had knowledge of it.
While investigators have found multiple contacts between Russia and people involved in the Trump campaign, no clear evidence of collusion has emerged publicly. But the White House’s frequent denials of any contact — followed by its public reversals — have only fueled questions in Congress and elsewhere.
Committees in both the Senate and the House are examining Russia’s election-meddling and possible ties to the Trump campaign, but House Democrats pushed Thursday to go further. They introduced a bill — almost certain to die in the face of Republican opposition — requiring the Trump administration to turn over all documents on Russian campaign contacts.
“There must be a full accounting of any and all ties between Russia, President Trump, his administration and his associates,” said Representative Ted Lieu of California, one of the Democratic sponsors.
After Mr. Trump’s Twitter messages on Saturday morning alleging wiretapping, a spokesman for Mr. Obama vigorously denied the charge, saying in a statement that any suggestion that the former president ordered wiretaps on an American are “simply false.”
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, urged counterparts at the Justice Department to publicly refute Mr. Trump’s charge, officials said. Department officials have declined to do so, and Mr. Comey has remained silent on the issue publicly.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from investigations involving Mr. Trump’s campaign after it was disclosed he met twice with the Russian ambassador. The man who would oversee any such investigations, Rod J. Rosenstein, is still awaiting Senate confirmation as deputy attorney general.
At a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Rosenstein repeatedly declined to say whether he would appoint a special counsel to handle the Russia investigation.
“I am simply not in a position to answer the question because I don’t know the information,” he said.