“That's the president responding to a Washington Post report," Kellyanne Conway says, Conway repeats lawyer's claim: Trump didn't admit to being under investigation

When President Donald Trump wrote online last week that “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director,” it was not an admission that he is indeed being investigated, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Monday morning, but instead a Twitter-shortened reaction to media coverage of ongoing probes into his 2016 campaign.

Conway’s insistence Monday morning that Trump’s tweet last Friday was not what it seemed followed in the footsteps of the president’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, who said Sunday in an array of political talk show appearances that regardless of what he has written online, Trump is not under investigation.


The president’s statement on Friday that “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director” was simply a response to a Washington Post report that special counselor Robert Mueller had widened his investigation to include an examination of whether or not Trump committed obstruction of justice. Conway reiterated that argument Monday morning.

"That's president's personal lawyer. He's saying that nobody has ever notified the president that he's under investigation,” Conway told Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt. “That's the president responding to a Washington Post report that included five anonymous sources. And that's the president, in his 140 characters, through his significant social media platform, Ainsley, telling everybody, 'wow, look at the irony here.'”

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Sekulow, in his own "Fox & Friends" interview that followed Conway's, dismissed the report that Mueller had begun investigating the president for obstruction of justice as a "Washington Post theory" and maintained that Trump's decision to fire Comey did not represent a crime, either statutorily or constitutionally. He offered warm words for Mueller, who some in Trump's orbit have accused of building a partisan investigation staffed by attorneys with histories of making political donations to Democrats, but said the president's legal team would address issues of bias as they come up.

"Look, Bob Mueller has a sterling reputation in Washington, D.C. When it comes to the individual lawyers that he's named to his staff, if there were conflicts, we'd raise conflicts," Sekulow said. "Rather than getting into the individual lawyers, Bob Mueller has a good reputation, solid reputation, sterling reputation. But what we will do as the lawyers involved in the case is evaluate facts and issues and developments if they were to come."