President Trump should learn more information about the mission of an FBI informant who reportedly spoke with members of his 2016 campaign before sitting down for a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, said his lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, Giuliani talked about setting up a sit-down with Mueller and suggested that Trump could be “walking into a trap” depending on whether this individual has collected “incriminating information” about his associates.
Just this past week was the one-year anniversary of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel to oversee the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign has any inappropriate contact with the Russians during that time.
The FBI informant is an American academic who teaches in the United Kingdom and met with up to three members of the Trump campaign to look into their ties to Russia, according to two reports published Friday evening, one by the New York Times and the other by the Washington Post. These include campaign advisers Carter Page, who was surveilled by the government via Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, and George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The FBI reportedly launched its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election after it got word that Papadopoulos learned that the Russians obtained thousands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails months before WikiLeaks published them.
Both the Times and the Post said they identified the informant, but declined to identify the person heeding concerns of national security officials that the individual’s life and the lives of his or her sources would be placed in danger.
However, Trump, heeding the call of his allies in Congress and the conservative media, has expressed his furor about a possible effort to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign, which could favor his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, and on Saturday called on the Justice Department and FBI to submit to congressional pressure for documents about the Russia investigation that he has long called a “witch hunt.”
“If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal. Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee (also, Senate Judiciary) is asking for can give the conclusive answers,” Trump tweeted Saturday.
If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal. Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee (also, Senate Judiciary) is asking for can give the conclusive answers. Drain the Swamp!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 19, 2018
