White House press secretary Sean Spicer dodged questions on Monday about the need for a special prosecutor to probe Russia’s cyber activity, saying the issue has already been investigated “up and down.”
“A special prosecutor for what?” Spicer responded when asked if Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the Trump campaign’s most popular surrogates, should recuse himself from an investigation into Russia.
“We have now for six months heard story after story come out about unnamed sources saying the same thing over and over again. We’ve heard the same people, the same anecdotes. So at one point, you have to ask yourself what are you investigating?” he said.
Reporters have spent months peppering President Trump and his team with questions about their alleged ties to Russia, a topic that reached a boiling point earlier this month when Trump asked White House national security adviser Mike Flynn to resign because he failed to disclose details about his correspondence with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kisylak.
Monday’s White House briefing was no different.
Several reporters asked Spicer to respond to Russia-related questions, including whether he pointed various news organizations to sources in the intelligence community who could refute a New York Times report about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.
“I will say I think we did our job very effectively by making sure that reporters who had questions about the accuracy and claims in The New York Times, we were pointing them to experts who understood whether or not that story was accurate or not,” he said.
The administration’s top spokesman also said that Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential race “has been investigated up and down” and no tangible evidence has emerged to bolster claims that Moscow helped toss the election to Trump.
“The reporting that I’m seeing in different organizations suggests that there is nothing new being reported,” he charged. “So the question becomes at some point, what do you have to further investigate when nothing has come out?”
“You had the intelligence community look at Russia’s involvement in the election. You had the House and Senate do the same, and so what I’m saying is: How many people have to say there’s nothing there for you to realize there’s nothing there?” he added.
