President Donald Trump will ask his top Justice Department officials at a White House meeting later Monday to turn over to Congress and his own legal team all of the memos they have about an FBI informant who made contact with his 2016 campaign, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told POLITICO.
President Donald Trump will ask his top Justice Department officials at a White House meeting later Monday to turn over to Congress and his own legal team all of the memos they have about an FBI informant who made contact with his 2016 campaign, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told POLITICO.
“He wants them to turn over the information that exists about the informant to the House and Senate committees,” Giuliani said of the meeting scheduled for 3 p.m. between the president, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. “All the memos they have. That’ll indicate what the informant found. Then those should be made available to us on a confidential basis. We should be at least allowed to read them so we know this exculpatory evidence is being preserved.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the meeting and said in an email that the “focus is on the response to congressional requests.” She added that the meeting was scheduled last week.
Trump’s lawyers also want to interview the FBI officials who made the decision to put the informant into the campaign. “It’s the FBI who has the onus for having invaded the campaign,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani predicted the Justice Department would place redactions on some parts of the material. “But as long as they turn over the vast majority of it it gives you a real sense” of what the FBI was doing. “The question is what are the justifications for it? Did the justifications continue? Did they pick up anything valuable? That’s the most important thing to do. We think they didn’t.”
On Sunday, Trump demanded that the Justice Department look into whether the FBI "infiltrated or surveilled" his campaign for political reasons.
"I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!" the president wrote on Twitter.
Later on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that the DOJ had asked the department’s inspector general to expand an ongoing probe to include whether there was any "impropriety or political motivation" in the way the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation that became special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Lawmakers have been seeking information on the FBI source’s role in the probe. The Justice Department recently denied a request for details by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), saying it would threaten national security.
Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.
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