WASHINGTON �� One of Donald Trump's lawyers said Sunday that a Twitter post in which the president wrote of "being investigated" did not confirm that he is, as senators of both parties suggested an investigation will run for many more months whether Trump is unhappy about it or not.
Trump's intemperate Twitter posts are common, but few have been as revealing as last week's statements expressing outrage at the government's investigation of Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Casting aspersions on the Justice Department and its inquiry, Trump Friday seemed to confirm that he was under investigation for possible obstruction of justice by the special counsel looking into Russia's actions.
"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt!" Trump wrote.
On Sunday, however, Jay Sekulow, one of Trump's lawyers, said the president's statement did not amount to an acknowledgment that he was under investigation.
Trump's Twitter post was "in response" to a Washington Post story Wednesday indicating that the special counsel's investigation included the president, Sekulow said in television interviews. Trump was merely restating what the Post and other media had reported, Sekulow said.
"Let me be very clear here, as it has been since the beginning, the president is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction," Sekulow said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Sekulow did not provide much evidence for that statement, which he repeated on other shows Sunday.
He said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that there has been no notice from the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Trump is under investigation.
The FBI and federal prosecutors, however, do not routinely send such notifications. They are often provided if a person has become a "target," meaning that charges could be imminent, but generally not in the early stages of an investigation.
Sekulow also cited the recent congressional testimony of former FBI Director James Comey, who said he told Trump on several occasions that he was not being personally investigated. Those conversations, however, took place before Trump fired Comey _ one of the acts that could be interpreted as part of an effort to obstruct the case _ and before the Justice Department appointed Mueller.
Trump's Twitter activity has have exasperated some of his aides and many of his supporters, even as they defend him against what they see as a partisan investigation.
"Trump has a compulsion to counterattack. And he is very pugnacious," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "I don't think it serves him well. I don't think that tweet helped him.
"But it's almost like it's who he has been his whole life," Gingrich said. "I mean, he's been a fighter his whole life. He is infuriated, and legitimately, in my judgment, by this whole Russian baloney."
Other prominent Republicans expressed more support for the investigation and defended Mueller's integrity.
"The president's pretty fired up about this," Sen. Marco Rubio, R- Fla, said on NBC. "He, from every pronouncement we have seen, feels very strongly that he did nothing wrong, and he wants people to say that, because he feels very strongly about it. I don't think that's a mystery. And he's expressing himself in that way," Rubio said.
"That said," Rubio added, Trump's displeasure "in no way is going to impede any of this work from continuing. It's going to happen. This is going to move forward. We're going to get the full truth out there."
Asked if he believed that Russian agents had tried to influence the election, Rubio said he did.
"Not only do I believe it, I know it. Almost everybody else does" other than Trump, he said. "Ultimately, whether he believes it or not, the work's going to move forward."
That work still has a long way to go, said Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. King and Rubio are both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is running an investigation that partially parallels the Justice Department probe being run by Mueller.
"I can say categorically that the collusion, the cooperation, aspect of the investigation is not over. And as far as that goes, I'd say we're 20 percent into it," King said. A lot of people have said, 'When do you think you'll be done?' Maybe the end of the year. This is a very complex matter, involving thousands of pages of intelligence documents, lots of witnesses. There's a lot of information yet to go."
Sekulow suggested that Trump had taken to Twitter because the president wanted to fight back against news organizations that Trump and his supporters have repeatedly accused of using leaks and anonymous sources to undermine the president.
"So his legal team and the president responds," Sekulow said on NBC.
