WASHINGTON -- FBI Director James Comey said Monday that there is "no information" that supports President Donald Trump's claims that his predecessor ordered surveillance of Trump Tower during the election campaign.
"I have no information that supports those tweets," said Comey, testifying at the House Intelligence Committee's first public hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. "We have looked carefully inside the FBI" and agents found nothing to support those claims, he said.
The five-hour session comes more than two weeks after Trump tweeted, without providing evidence, that President Barack Obama had ordered his phones tapped at Trump Tower.
Under questioning from the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, Comey said no president could order such surveillance. He added that the Justice Department had asked him to also tell the committee that that agency has no such information, either.
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Comey also acknowledged the existence of a counterintelligence investigation into the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and said that probe extends to the nature of any links between Trump campaign associates and the Russian government.
Comey said the investigation is also exploring whether there was any coordination between the campaign and the Kremlin and "whether any crimes were committed."
The acknowledgment was an unusual move, given that the FBI's practice is not to confirm the existence of ongoing investigations. "But in unusual circumstances, where it is in the public interest," Comey said, "it may be appropriate to do so."
He said he had been authorized by the Justice Department to confirm the wide-ranging probe's existence.
Current and former officials say they have uncovered evidence that Trump's associates were in repeated contact with Russian officials -- including people tied to Russian intelligence.
Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump, has acknowledged communicating with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona believed to be a front for Russian intelligence officials involved in disseminating hacked Democratic emails. Stone has denied that there was anything improper about the contact and said he was one of many, including political operatives and journalists, to communicate with the hackers.
Last July, the month that WikiLeaks began releasing the hacked emails, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visited Moscow for a speaking engagement. Page has declined to say whom he met there, but he has said they were mostly scholars.
Michael Flynn, a Trump campaign adviser who went on to be his national security adviser, was paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia in 2015, including an American branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia's intelligence services, according to congressional investigators. Flynn was forced to resign after misrepresenting his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee listed those Russian connections and others as they painted Trump as a candidate who adopted pro-Russia views and courted Russian interests.
"Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?" Schiff said. "Yes, it is possible. But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated."
The FBI director vowed to "follow the facts wherever they lead."
Comey and National Security Agency head Michael Rogers, who also spoke at the hearing, predicted that Russian intelligence agencies will continue to seek to meddle with U.S. political campaigns, because the Russian agencies view their work in the 2016 presidential race as successful.
"They'll be back in 2020, they may be back in 2018," Comey said. "One of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful, introducing chaos and discord" into the electoral process.
"It's possible they're misreading that as 'it worked,' so we'll come back and hit them again in 2020," Comey added.
Rogers agreed: "I fully expect they will maintain this level of activity." And, he said, Moscow is conducting a similar "active measures" campaign in Europe, where France and Germany are holding elections this year.
Tweet during hearing
Trump and the committee's Republicans seemed most stirred up by leaks to the media. Information shared with the media has resulted in a series of stories over the past 1½ months about contacts Trump administration officials or close associates had with Russian officials.
One such story was The Washington Post's Feb. 9 piece on Flynn, who the Post said had discussed the subject of sanctions with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in the month before Trump took office.
The Post reported that the discussions were monitored under routine, court-approved surveillance of Kislyak's calls. Flynn denied to Vice President Mike Pence that he had spoken about sanctions, leading to his resignation.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., suggested that the leaks were political. He asked Comey if the intelligence community had shared such information with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch or Obama.
Comey, who had acknowledged that in general senior officials, including Lynch, would have access to such information, said he would not comment on his conversations with Obama or Trump.
As the hearing was going on -- in an apparent dig at Comey and carrying the suggestion that Obama administration officials were behind the leaks -- Trump's presidential Twitter account tweeted "FBI Director Comey refuses to deny he briefed President Obama on calls made by Michael Flynn to Russia."
Just hours before the start of the hearing, Trump posted a series of tweets claiming Democrats "made up" the allegations of Russian contacts in an attempt to discredit the GOP during the presidential campaign. Trump also urged federal investigators to shift their focus to probe disclosures of classified material.
"The real story that Congress, the FBI and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified information," Trump wrote early Monday. "Must find leaker now!"
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sought an admission from the officials that the leaks were illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that governs foreign intelligence-gathering on U.S. soil or of Americans overseas.
"Yes," Comey answered. "In addition to being a breach of our trust with the FISA court."
Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., pressed Rogers to clarify under what circumstances it would be legitimate for Americans caught on tape speaking with people under surveillance to have their identities disclosed publicly, and whether leaking those identities would "hurt or help" intelligence collection.
"Hurt," Rogers noted.
Rogers stressed that the identities of Americans picked up through "incidental collection" -- that being the way intelligence officials picked up on Flynn's phone calls with Kislyak -- are disclosed only on a "valid, need-to-know" basis, and usually only when there is a criminal activity or potential threat to the United States at play.
Rogers added that there are a total of 20 people in the NSA he has delegated to make decisions about when someone's identity can be unmasked.
Comey did confirm that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and others -- including personnel in the White House in some situations -- could have access to unmasked names of Americans.
But he stressed that only the collecting agency can unmask the identities of people. Others with whom the information is shared "can ask the collectors to unmask," he said -- but can't do it on their own.
Comey declined to say whether any officials had sought approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor anyone in the Trump campaign, saying he did not want to discuss the workings of the highly secretive court. Individuals familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, have said there was no such request made during the campaign.
The FBI probe combines an investigation into hacking operations by Russian spy agencies with efforts to understand how the Kremlin sought to manipulate public opinion and influence the election's outcome.
In January, the intelligence community released a report concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to not only undermine the legitimacy of the election process but also harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton and boost Trump's chances of winning.
Hackers working for Russian spy agencies penetrated the computers of the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016 as well as the email accounts of Democratic officials, intelligence officials said in the report. The material was relayed to WikiLeaks, the officials said, and the anti-secrecy group began a series of damaging email releases just before the Democratic National Convention that continued through the fall.
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Nakashima, Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post; by Matt Apuzzo, Matthew Rosenberg and Emmarie Huetteman of The New York Times; and by Eric Tucker and Eileen Sullivan of The Associated Press.
A Section on 03/21/2017