President Trump urged Republican lawmakers to take a tougher approach to the onslaught of attacks against his presidency, citing newly declassified documents that suggest the Obama administration began targeting him before he took office.
“He just said our opponents are ruthless, and we need to fight back,” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said after a closed-door lunch with the president in the Capitol Tuesday. “He was encouraging us to do that.”
Recommended Stories
Trump told the GOP he had been under attack by Democrats, beginning with the “Crossfire Hurricane” inquiry launched to investigate alleged Russian collusion with his 2016 campaign, the subsequent Mueller probe, and the Democratic impeachment effort.
Newly declassified documents released last week and again on Tuesday show top Obama officials and FBI Director James Comey targeting Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick to serve as national security adviser.
“I think he feels he was targeted by the Obama administration, and it’s just been relentless, starting with the Flynn stuff and going into the Comey and Mueller investigations and then impeachment,” Cornyn said, recounting Trump’s one-hour talk with Republicans. “It’s been sort of one thing after another.”
Trump talked about a wide range of topics at the meeting, Republicans said, including the administration’s response to the coronavirus, which Trump said had successfully ramped up production of tests and ventilators.
Trump briefly criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the slow rollout of adequate testing but also touted the increased production of testing that is now widely available, according to Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican.
Trump “covered lots of topics,” and “one half of one line” was about the initial CDC coronavirus tests that failed in February. “I would not call that as quite critical, I would call that a kind of observation that everybody else has made. But then he spoke about how many tests we have now.”
Governors have criticized Trump over a lack of available testing, which critics say helped contribute to the spread of the deadly virus.
