WASHINGTON -- There is no evidence that the FBI planted a "spy" on President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, a senior House Republican said Wednesday, despite Trump's insistence that such spying occurred.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and a longtime Trump supporter, was briefed last week by the Justice Department and FBI after reports that investigators relied on a U.S. government informant in their probe of Russian election meddling.
"I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump," Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, told Fox News on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Gowdy said he had "never heard the term 'spy' used" and did not see evidence of it.
"Informants are used all day, every day by law enforcement," he told CBS This Morning.
Asked about Gowdy's comments, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president "still has concerns about whether or not the FBI acted inappropriately having people in his campaign."
Sanders declined to say who in the campaign the president might suspect of providing information to the FBI. She said Trump also has concerns in general about the conduct of the FBI, citing the firing of former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
"There are a number of things that have been reported on and that show, I think not just for the president, but for a number of Americans, a large cause for concern, and we'd like to see this fully looked into," Sanders said.
Gowdy's comments are particularly striking given his role as a powerful GOP watchdog who took on Democrat Hillary Clinton in his committee's investigation into the 2012 attack on an American mission in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of state. The investigation unearthed the existence of Clinton's private email server, which triggered an FBI inquiry and became a key issue in her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump.
Trump has repeatedly pointed to, and at times embellished, reports that a longtime U.S. government informant approached members of his team during the 2016 campaign in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway the election.
He has tweeted that it was "starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history." He has also rejected conclusions by America's intelligence agencies that the Russian government was trying to help him beat Clinton.
Several news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, have identified an FBI confidential source as Stefan Halper, an academic at the University of Cambridge.
Halper, who served in past Republican administrations, was not a part of Trump's campaign. Rather, the news outlets have reported, Halper reached out to some Trump advisers to gather information as part of the Russia investigation.
Trump's legal team has expressed interest in seeing classified information about the origins of the FBI investigation to prepare the president for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the federal investigation into possible ties between Trump's campaign and Russia.
"The folks who have seen the information have the same perspective," Gowdy said. "The folks who have not seen the information, I don't know what informs their perspective."
Gowdy was not the only conservative to cast doubt on Trump's claim.
Asked to respond to Gowdy's remarks, Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator known for defending the president, said claims that the FBI placed an undercover spy on Trump's campaign "seem to be baseless."
"There is no evidence for that whatsoever," Napolitano said. The fact that the FBI source spoke with "people on the periphery of the campaign," he said, "is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations."
Trump is known to watch Napolitano on Fox News -- the president has even quoted the legal analyst in tweets.
Just last week, Trump tweeted a quote from Napolitano apparently delivered on Fox News: "It's clear that they had eyes and ears all over the Trump Campaign," Trump quoted Napolitano as saying.
Trump doubled down on his spy theory as recently as Tuesday night, at a rally in Tennessee.
At one point, he asked the crowd, "So how do you like the fact that they had people infiltrating our campaign? Can you imagine?"
CRITICISM OF SESSIONS
Gowdy, who plans to retire from Congress at the end of the current term, did express support for Trump's "frustration" with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself in March 2017 from the Russia probe based on a possible conflict of interest.
The recusal of Sessions, an early backer of Trump's presidential bid, followed the revelation that he had two previously undisclosed interactions during the 2016 campaign with the Russian ambassador.
Gowdy told CBS that Trump is just "expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward."
Trump tweeted out Gowdy's comments on Sessions, including his saying that "there are lots of really good lawyers in the country" and that the president "could have picked someone else" for the top Justice Department job.
"And I wish I did!" Trump wrote.
The president did not, however, make mention of Gowdy's comments that there was no evidence of the FBI planting a spy in his campaign.
After Sessions recused himself, Trump asked his attorney general to reverse his decision, The New York Times reported Tuesday. That request that has raised the interest of Mueller's investigators, who are also probing whether Trump has sought to obstruct justice.
Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for Trump, said Wednesday that he had repeatedly counseled the president not to fire Sessions.
Trump has asked the former New York City mayor multiple times, before and after he joined the president's legal team last month, about whether Sessions should have been fired, Giuliani said.
"I don't think the president should do it, and I've told him so," Giuliani said.
More recently, he said, Trump has not actively considered firing Sessions but has wondered whether he made the right decision in not doing so previously.
Giuliani, referring to Trump's Wednesday tweet about Sessions, stressed that Trump had every right -- whether in person or on social media -- to "express how he feels" about the attorney general, but he suggested it was a distraction to the legal team's efforts to fight back against the ongoing investigation.
"Instead of talking about Sessions, we want to be talking about Comey and Mueller," said Giuliani, invoking the former FBI director, James Comey, and the special counsel. "Public opinion is turning our way; we've had a great turnaround on this. We should be focused on that."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who golfed over the holiday weekend with the president, said he has reinforced to Trump that "the best thing for the Republican Party right now is to keep focused on good governance in the midterms."
Graham said that while he shares some of Trump's frustrations with the situation -- particularly the Justice Department's resistance to appointing a second special counsel to investigate the handling of the Clinton email probe -- he doesn't expect Sessions will depart "anytime soon."
But, Graham added, these are "not lifetime appointments." At some point, he said, Sessions will "have to make a decision" that if "you don't have the confidence" of the president, "that will affect your ability to be effective."
McCABE MEMO
McCabe, the Times reported Wednesday evening, wrote a confidential memo last spring recounting a conversation that offered significant behind-the-scenes details on the firing of Comey, his predecessor.
Comey's firing is a central focus of the special counsel's investigation into whether Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry into whether his campaign had ties to Russia.
McCabe has turned over his memo to the special counsel.
In the document, people familiar with the matter said, McCabe described a conversation at the Justice Department with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, in the days after Comey's firing last May. Rosenstein played a key role in the dismissal, writing a memo that rebuked Comey over his handling of the Clinton email investigation.
But in the meeting at the Justice Department, Rosenstein added a new detail, saying the president had originally asked him to mention Russia in his memo, the people said. Rosenstein did not elaborate on what Trump had wanted him to say.
To McCabe, that seemed like possible evidence that Comey's firing was actually related to the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling -- and that Rosenstein helped provide a cover story by writing about the Clinton investigation, the people said.
One person who was briefed on Rosenstein's conversation with the president said Trump had simply wanted Rosenstein to mention that he was not personally under investigation in the Russia inquiry. Rosenstein said it was unnecessary and did not include such a reference. Trump ultimately said it himself when announcing the firing.
McCabe was fired in March after a finding that he was not candid in an internal investigation. He has said the firing was a politically motivated effort to discredit him as a witness in the special counsel investigation.
The people who discussed the meeting and the memo did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matters.
A spokesman for McCabe declined to comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Anne Flaherty, Ken Thomas, Zeke Miller, Chad Day, Jonathan Lemire and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press; by Samantha Schmidt of The Washington Post; and by Eileen Sullivan, Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times.
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