Two Republican lawmakers – and no Democrats – are expected to attend a meeting on Thursday to allow them to review classified information relating to claims the FBI used an informant to gather information on Trump’s presidential campaign, the White House said on Tuesday.
Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, and the House oversight committee chairman Trey Gowdy, both Republicans, are expected to attend, according to the White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, and the acting principal associate deputy attorney general, Ed O’Callaghan are also expected to attend, she said at the daily White House press briefing.
No White House staff will attend and no Democrats were invited.
The White House announced on Monday that the Department of Justice would “expand its investigation” of the 2016 election to include “any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s or the Department of Justice’s tactics concerning the Trump campaign”.
The statement had come shortly after Donald Trump finished a meeting with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, Wray and Coats.
The meeting, which was not on the White House’s public schedule, occurred the day after Trump demanded an investigation over a government informant’s meeting with several people connected with his campaign in 2016.
On Sunday, Trump posted on Twitter: “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!”
Sanders said on Tuesday that no Democrats were attending the meeting because they had not asked to attend. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, on Monday had called for any meeting on documents related to the confidential source to be bipartisan.
But Sanders insisted that Democrats were cut out because they had not requested the same materials that their Republican colleagues had.
“To my knowledge, the Democrats have not requested that information,” she said. “So I would refer you back to them on why they would consider themselves randomly invited to see something they’ve never asked to.”
The meeting on Thursday is the latest development in the escalating row between Trump, the DoJ and Republicans over the FBI’s use of a confidential source to make contact with Trump campaign advisers during the presidential election.
The use of someone in the role of informant came amid concerns in 2016 that there were inappropriate links between the Trump team and Russian operatives. These concerns sowed the seeds of an investigation that eventually became the investigation now being led on behalf of the DoJ by the special counsel Robert Mueller.
The confidential intelligence source met in 2016 with Carter Page, who has long been under scrutiny for his Russia links, and George Papadopoulos, who is cooperating with Mueller under a plea agreement. The source has been named by numerous media outlets in recent days as Stefan Halper, a London-based American academic and consultant who is a former Cambridge University professor and previously worked for US Republican administrations in Washington.
“A lot of people are saying they had spies in my campaign,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
“If they had spies in my campaign, that would be a disgrace to this country,” Trump said, adding: “That would be one of the biggest insults anyone has ever seen ... it would make probably every political event ever look like small potatoes.”
