President Trump may be interested in hearing information from foreign sources on his opponents, but at least one Republican thinks all candidates should reject such offers and contact the FBI.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also made it clear Thursday he believed that Democrats had received improper foreign help in 2016 themselves.
Graham, in a long tweet thread, said, “I believe that it should be practice for all public officials who are contacted by a foreign government with an offer of assistance to their campaign — either directly or indirectly — to inform the FBI and reject the offer.”
But Graham also called Trump’s critics hypocrites, saying Democrats were more than willing to accept outside help in the last presidential election. “During that race, we had a major American political party hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on an American presidential candidate,” Graham pointed out. “As if that was not bad enough, the foreign national compiled an unverified dossier that was then used by the FBI to obtain a warrant against an American citizen and surveil an American presidential campaign.”
Steele, a British former MI6 officer, compiled his dossier after being hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself was funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Steele’s dossier, which was packed with salacious and unverified allegations about Trump and Russia, was used extensively in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications targeting former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
This debate was reignited Wednesday by remarks by Trump in an ABC interview set to air next week. When George Stephanopoulos asked whether Donald Trump Jr. should’ve gone to the FBI after receiving an email offering the Trump campaign alleged information from the Russians that would hurt Hillary Clinton, Trump said: “You don’t call the FBI.”
Stephanopoulos pressed Trump, saying, “Your campaign, this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?”
Trump replied, “I think maybe you do both … There’s nothing wrong with listening.”
“They have information and I think I’d take it,” Trump said.
Democrats roundly condemned Trump’s remarks, which he expounded on in tweets Thursday morning, pointing to all the meetings with foreign leaders he has as president.
“Should I immediately call the FBI about these calls and meetings?” Trump asked. “How ridiculous!”
But Graham stressed that “foreign influence is a problem” and pointed to an exchange he and FBI Director Christopher Wray had during Wray’s confirmation hearing in 2017 where Wray said the FBI should be alerted to any such outreach efforts.
Wray made the same point in Senate testimony as recently as May. “My view is that, if any public official or member of any campaign is contacted by any nation-state or anybody acting on behalf of a nation-state about influencing or interfering with our election, then that is something that the FBI would want to know about,” he said.
Trump said in the interview that “the FBI director is wrong.”
Graham also said that “the outrage some of my Democratic colleagues are raising about President Trump’s comments will hopefully be met with equal outrage that their own party hired a foreign national to do opposition research on President Trump’s campaign and that information, unverified, was apparently used by the FBI to obtain a warrant against an American citizen.
At a House Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said “the Democrats spread a hoax claiming Trump is a Russian agent, but it was later discovered that the only people who colluded with Russians were the Democrats, who paid for the Steele dossier, which relied on Russian sources.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, but did not establish that Trump, or any Americans, had criminally conspired with the Russians in these efforts.
Also at yesterday’s hearing, former assistant U.S. attorney Andy McCarthy, who has been critical of the way the FBI used the Steele dossier, said that the Trump campaign should have contacted the FBI about any Russian outreach. McCarthy, who was asked to testify by Nunes, said, “There’s no question — and my colleagues here who worked counterintelligence I’m certain would tell you — we always want information, any information, that would be helpful to us in apprising what the likely intentions of potentially hostile powers are.”
“I think that anybody who thinks that they’ve been approached by a Russian asset should notify the FBI,” McCarthy said.
