President Donald Trump on Sunday asked the Justice Department to investigate if his 2016 presidential campaign was infiltrated or surveilled by the agency or the FBI under the Obama administration, Reuters reported.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe was criticized be a series of tweets by President Trump, saying that the investigation was politically motivated and had its roots in the administration of his Democratic predecessor, former President Barack Obama.
The Special Counsel’s team is looking into whether Russia tried to sway the election and if it worked with the Trump campaign in order to do so. Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion, calling the investigation a “witch hunt.”
“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!” Trump tweeted.
According to Reuters, Trump suggested that the FBI and the DOJ may have planted or recruited an informant in his 2016 presidential campaign, citing unidentified reports that at least one FBI representative was “implanted” for political purposes into his campaign.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s newest lawyer, didn’t provide any evidence of government infiltration into Trump’s presidential campaign, acknowledging in a CNN interview on Friday that neither he nor the president really knew if such action took place.
Giuliani was also quoted by The New York Times on Sunday as saying that Mueller had said the investigation would end by September 1. A source familiar with the probe said that the September 1 deadline is “entirely made-up” and “another apparent effort to pressure the special counsel to hasten the end of his work.”
“He’ll wrap it up when he thinks he’s turned over every rock, and when that is will depend on how cooperative witnesses, persons of interest and maybe even some targets are, if any of those emerge, and on what new evidence he finds, not on some arbitrary, first-of-the-month deadline one of the president’s attorneys cooks up,” said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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