The House and Senate GOP appear to be pushing back against the White House’s allegations that the Obama Administration wiretapped Trump Tower—and they’re asking key figures, like FBI Director James Comey, to testify before both houses of Congress on the issue.
The President, meanwhile, appears to be trying to distract from the matter, taking a road trip across the Midwest with stops in southeast Michigan and at President Andrew Jackson’s grave site in Nashville, Tennessee.
As Trump announced a rollback of fuel efficiency regulations and talked about tariffs in Ypsilanti, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. David Nunes told a press conference that, if you took the President’s Tweets about wiretapping literally, Trump was wrong.
“President Obama wouldn’t physically go over and wiretap Trump Tower. So now you have to decide, as I mentioned to you last week, are you going to take the tweets literally? And if you are then clearly the president was wrong,” Nunes told media.
Nunes did say, however, that he’s taking the allegations seriously and doing a thorough investigation.
“But if you’re not going to take the tweets literally and there is a concern that the president has about other people, other surveillance activities looking at him and his associates,” he added.
So far, though, there’s no evidence to indicate an investigation was even taking place. Nunes says that both Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers will testify before his committee on March 20th—oddly enough, the same day the Senate will take up the President’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch.
High-profile Republicans in the Senate seem to be following the House’s lead, also asking for definitive proof that an investigation into the Trump team’s ties to Russian power players existed.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is leading a Senate committee looking into Russia’s activities during the Presidential election announced today that he, too, would seek Comey and Rogers’s testimony—even threatening to hold up the nomination of Trump’s Deputy Attorney General—unless Comey responded to a series of questions Graham mailed to his office last week.
If Comey doesn’t send back his own love note in the next several days, Graham says he’ll seek a subpoena, and he’s not playing around.
Comey, for his part, says the FBI hasn’t been part of an investigation into whether Donald Trump’s associates coordinated with Russian officials to disrupt the Presidential election—or, at least, they haven’t asked the FISA courts for any wiretap warrants.
Last week, he pleaded with the Department of Justice to say they were also clean, but since AG Jeff Sessions has recused himself, the DOJ has yet to issue any response, positive or negative.
The President, meanwhile, will continue his national tour, likely timing his speeches perfectly to compete with developments in the investigation.