Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and friend to ex-FBI Director James Comey, said Sunday he expects both FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to resign before they comply with President Trump’s push for a Justice Department investigation into whether there was FBI “infiltration” into his 2016 campaign for political purposes.
“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump tweeted.
Such an inquiry, Wittes wrote in reply, would be a “nakedly corrupt attempt … to derail an investigation of himself at the expense of a human source to whose protection the FBI and DOJ are committed.”
“So if the President really gives Rod Rosenstein or Chris Wray an order (as opposed to Twitter bluster) demanding a particular investigation not properly predicated under FBI/DOJ guidelines for this overtly political purpose, I believe both men will resign rather than comply,” he added.
The president was seizing on reports of an FBI informant linked to his campaign after his allies in Congress and the conservative media rang the alarm about possible ploy to undermine his presidential campaign.
Capping a week’s worth of speculation, two reports published Friday evening, one by the New York Times and the other by the Washington Post, described the informant in question as 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. 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 Mueller’s 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 his his or her sources would be placed in danger. However, subsequent reporting indicated the informant was a Cambridge University professor.
As congressional investigators, particularly House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, have pressured a resistant DOJ to submit documents related to the genesis of Russia investigation, both Wray and Rosenstein have signaled that they don’t plan to be bullied.
“The Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said at a D.C. event earlier this month, when asked about his critics clamoring for articles of impeachment against him. Rosenstein has come under fire rather than his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as Sessions recused himself from any election-related matters.
Wray, during congressional testimony last week, spoke of the importance of protecting confidential sources.
“The day that we can’t protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe,” Wray told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Human sources in particular who put themselves at great risk to work with us and with our foreign partners have to be able to trust that we’re going to protect their identities and in many cases their lives and the lives of their families.”
Ultimately, Wittes predicted that Trump might back down from an official announcement Monday because he “is a wuss.”
“He was going to fire Rosenstein, and he wussed out. He was going to fire Mueller and he wussed out. So I don’t want to overstate this. There’s lots of ways this could peter out,” he said, adding, “But this tweet is no joke.”
Hours after Wittes sent out his flurry of tweets, Rosenstein asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to review whether there was improper politically motivated surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016.
Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare, wrote in a piece Saturday how they suspect but couldn’t prove Trump and Nunes are attempting to “burn” an informant. Their piece quotes a conservative lawyer, “who at one point considered taking a job in the administration and still has close ties to it.” This source said, “All this man [the source] wanted to do was to help our country. And this was a legitimate counterintelligence inquiry with more than an adequate foundation and a perfectly appropriate method. Trump and Nunes have defiled the oaths they took. It’s just obscene.” Nunes, for his part, denies that he is after an informant in his documents request related to the Russia probe.
Wittes’ Lawfare has become a bastion of resistance, of sorts, for those in the intelligence community targeted by Trump and his allies.
Comey, during a talk with Wittes earlier this month, warned that Nunes, who is closely alligned with Trump, is demonstrating dangerous behavior with his campaign to obtain classified information.
Meanwhile, Lawfare has reportedly taken on James Baker, a former adviser to Comey, who recently left the FBI. He is being looked at for possibly disclosing classified information with journalists about the so-called Trump dossier, though he has not been charged.
