Legal experts and Trump critics say the defections have exposed cracks in the president’s narrative.
President Donald Trump’s claim that the FBI embedded a spy in his campaign for political purposes began to crumble Wednesday after a prominent Republican, as well as defenders of the president, said he might have the story wrong.
In less than 24 hours, Trump’s allegations were publicly refuted by House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), one of just nine lawmakers briefed on highly classified details of the FBI’s operation; Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a Trump favorite; and prominent legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, a vocal Trump ally who has advised the president on legal strategy.
Legal experts and Trump critics say the defections have exposed cracks in the president’s narrative and undermine his attempts to discredit the FBI investigation into Russian contacts with his campaign as a partisan, “deep state” attack on his presidential bid.
And notably, a slew of Trump’s congressional allies who have been active purveyors of what the president dubbed “spygate” — including Reps. Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Lee Zeldin — were silent Wednesday. POLITICO reached out to a handful of these lawmakers and did not hear back. Only Rep. Mark Meadows had weighed in by late afternoon, suggesting the Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to explain away the controversy.
“My concerns remain unchanged,” he told POLITICO. “There is a substantial amount of information to suggest that the FBI did not follow protocol protecting civil liberties, and to this point, the DOJ has still failed to turn over the relevant documents we’ve requested to prove their case.”
The White House declined to directly rebut Gowdy on Wednesday, but made clear the president hasn’t backed off his concern. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “clearly, there’s still cause for concern” about the president’s “spy allegations.”
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Trump ‘spygate’ offensive loses steam https://t.co/3RSNyhPsrJ
— POLITICO (@politico) May 31, 2018
When Nunes got the same briefing as Gowdy and didn’t run to the cameras every day demanding more investigations into the Illuminati Deep State, that says it all.
— Quade Lo (@ToddShamTodd) May 31, 2018
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