Spicer on Trump and Russia: 'There's nothing there'

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Monday questioned the need for a special prosecutor to investigate possible contact between President Donald Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence officials, also telling the press corps that they’re wasting their time exploring the subject.

“How many people have to say that there’s nothing there before you realize there’s nothing there?” Spicer rhetorically asked reporters at the daily press briefing. “At some point, you do have to ask yourself what are you actually looking for. How many times do you have to come to the same conclusion before you take the answer?”


The answer, according to Spicer, is that there’s nothing there — although he conceded that he couldn’t say so unequivocally.

“All I’m saying is the people who’ve done the investigating about Russia overall and its activities in the United States — specifically now with respect to our election — haven’t provided anything that lead me to believe or should lead you to believe” otherwise, he said.

Spicer recounted to reporters the White House’s sequence of events that led to chief of staff Reince Priebus asking the FBI to refute media reports of alleged contact between Trump associates and Russian officials during the presidential campaign. As Spicer told it, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was at the White House the same morning The New York Times reported the alleged contact and wanted to make clear to Priebus that the report was “BS” — “For viewers at home, I think you can pretty much figure out what that means, but I’ll leave it at that,” Spicer said.

In Spicer’s retelling, Priebus asked McCabe if the FBI’s view could be shared publicly, but the bureau didn’t want to get into the habit of knocking down every media report it has issues with.

“When the reporters contacted us and we said, ‘No, to the best of our knowledge that’s not true,’ they were asking us, ‘Can you point to anybody else that can substantiate this?’” Spicer recalled. “And I think we did a good job of saying, ‘Sure, we will share with reporters other people who have come to the same conclusion.”

“I think we did our job very effectively by making sure that reporters who had had questions about the accuracy and the claims made in The New York Times, that we were pointing them to subject matter experts who understood whether or not that story was accurate or not,” he added.

Spicer declined to say whether he had personally reached out to CIA Director Mike Pompeo to knock down the media reports, but he suggested there’s no need for a special prosecutor to lead an investigation because House and Senate panels, as well as the intelligence community, have already looked into Russia’s interference during the presidential election.

“I think that Russia’s involvement and activity has been investigated up and down,” Spicer said. “So the question becomes at some point: If there’s nothing further to investigate, what are you asking people to investigate?”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) last week called for a special prosecutor to oversee an investigation into alleged contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, questioning Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ impartiality, given that the former Alabama senator was a prominent and early backer of Trump’s White House bid.

On Monday, Spicer cited House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ (R-Calif.) comments to the media. Nunes told reporters he has seen no evidence of alleged contacts and cautioned against going on what he called “a witch hunt.”

“Chairman Nunes spoke very clearly today when asked over and over and over again about all of this and said that he has seen nothing that leads him to believe that there’s there,” Spicer said. “The president has spoken forcefully time and time again, that he has no interest in Russia, he hasn’t talked to people in Russia in years, and yet you keep asking — and I say ‘you’ collectively — to try to find something that’s seemingly, at least the reporting that I’m seeing in different organizations, suggests that there’s nothing new that’s being reported.”

“It’s the same stuff over and over again that we’ve heard for literally six months,” he continued. “And so the question becomes at some point: What do you need to further investigate if there is nothing that has come out?”