Two much anticipated congressional briefings on the FBI’s use of an informant in the investigation into potential Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016 featured an unusual guest on Thursday: Donald Trump’s lawyer Emmet Flood.
Flood, along with the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, attended two separate briefings. The first was held at the Department of Justice initially for two top Republicans, Devin Nunes, the chair of the House intelligence committee, and Trey Gowdy, the chair of the House government oversight and reform committee.
However, Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, eventually joined them after an outcry that the meeting would be partisan. In particular, the presence of Nunes, who was forced to step aside from oversight of the Russia investigation for much of 2017 after an ethics complaint over disclosure of classified information, raised concern from Democrats.
In addition to Schiff being invited to the first meeting, a second meeting was held in the Capitol for the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group that includes party leaders in each chamber of Congress and on both the House and Senate intelligence committees.
However, the presence of Flood, Trump’s White House lawyer for the Russia investigation raised eyebrows.
“Emmet Flood’s presence and statement at the outset of both meetings today was completely inappropriate … his involvement – in any capacity – was entirely improper, and I made this clear to him,” Schiff said.
In a statement, the White House said that Flood and Kelly went to the Department of Justice and Capitol Hill “to facilitate meetings between Members of Congress, DOJ, FBI, and DNI. Neither Chief Kelly nor Mr Flood actually attended the meetings but did make brief remarks before the meetings started to relay the President’s desire for as much openness as possible under the law.”
The statement from the White House added: “They also conveyed the President’s understanding of the need to protect human intelligence services and the importance of communication between the branches of government. After making their brief comments they departed before the meetings officially started.”
In an interview with Politico, the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is also representing Trump, said that information from the meeting could help accelerate the investigation.
“We want to see how the briefing went today and how much we learned from it,” said Giuliani. “If we learned a good deal from it, it will shorten that whole process considerably.”
The FBI director, Christopher Wray, deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, conducted the briefing about the informant’s contacts with the Trump campaign. Trump has seized on the FBI’s use of an informant to accuse what he calls the “criminal deep state” of spying on his campaign. Through tweets and media surrogates he has alleged that the Mueller investigation is on a “witch-hunt”.
Trump escalated his offensive against the inquiry on Sunday when he tweeted: “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!” That tweet was followed on Monday by a White House meeting with Wray, Rosenstein and Coats where they agreed to allow Kelly to arrange Thursday’s meetings with congressional leaders.
Democrats left the meeting unimpressed. In a joint statement, the four who attended the second briefing said: “Today’s Gang of Eight briefing was conducted to ensure protection of sources and methods. Nothing we heard today has changed our view that there is no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.”
The House speaker, Paul Ryan, who attended the first meeting after a scheduling conflict meant he could not go to the second one, defended it in a statement. “As always, I cannot and will not comment on a classified session. I look forward to the prompt completion of the intelligence committee’s oversight work in this area now that they are getting the cooperation necessary for them to complete their work while protecting sources and methods,” said the Wisconsin Republican.
