Trump says he's under investigation. His lawyer says he's not.
"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!" President Trump tweeted Friday. The natural interpretation of that statement is that the president is, in fact, under investigation — but Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said Sunday that is not the case.
"If the president is innocent, why is he afraid of this investigation?" asked NBC's Chuck Todd in a Meet the Press interview. "He's not afraid of this investigation. There is no investigation," Sekulow replied, adding, "There is not an investigation of the president of the United States, period."
And as for those tweets? Trump is just "responding to what he's seeing the media in a way that he thinks is appropriate to talk to those people that put him in office," Sekulow said, denying that Twitter consumes any significant portion of Trump's time.
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Sekulow made similar arguments in another Sunday interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. "So here's what you have," he told a skeptical Tapper. "The president issued that tweet, that social media statement, based on a fake report, a report with no documented sources, from The Washington Post."
Sekulow may be referring to this Wednesday Post article which cites five unnamed sources to report that the "special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice" — a story with which Trump's post seemed to concur.
Watch an excerpt of Sekulow's NBC interview below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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