White House Trump can’t escape Russia woes The White House will have to cope with ‘big, gray cloud’ of Russia suspicions for the foreseeable future.

It’s the story that won’t die.

A day after the top law enforcement official in the United States confirmed an active FBI investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, lawmakers already were laying out plans to haul Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and possibly other Trump associates before committees also probing any ties.


White House officials, meanwhile, are keeping their heads down on the long-simmering issue during what should be a seminal week for Donald Trump’s young presidency, with a health care reform bill he backs coming to the House floor and his Supreme Court nominee cruising through a Senate confirmation hearing.

But the persistence of live investigations into Russia’s election meddling, and the possibility that Trump aides played a role, will be, at the least, a distraction for the president and could bog down his administration with questions of legitimacy — questions the president openly detests. Trump’s surrogates steadfastly insisted that the investigations will ultimately prove fruitless, but enough smoke has formed that even fellow Republicans have raised concerns.

“There is nothing there,” press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday, repeating a line he has deployed increasingly when confronted with questions about the Russia investigation.

He read quotes from five officials who said they had not seen evidence of collusion, and once again encouraged reporters to move on from the story. But Monday’s revelation ensured questions over Trump’s Russia ties will remain in the headlines.

“The truth always comes out,” one senior Republican close to the White House said on Monday.

In the meantime, the White House is distancing itself from such Trump associates, including Page and Manafort, while other longtime Trump allies are eagerly trying to clear their names.

Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, who worked briefly on the campaign, has drawn increasing scrutiny for his ties to WikiLeaks, and Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee raised his name again and again at Monday’s hearing. Stone on Tuesday tauntingly invited the committee to call him to testify.

“I want my opportunity to sit in the chair, so that I can answer these boobs’ questions,” Stone told Politico. “The only thing that would concern me is that they would be allowed to smear me and I’m not able to defend myself.”

Stone said he has not received a subpoena but has received a memorandum from the Senate instructing him to preserve records that could be related to the investigation.

Monday’s testimony from FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers confirming the presence of an investigation was the easy part, House Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” As that committee’s investigation continues, the congressman said the next step will be to bring in the Trump associates in question and potentially seek the president’s tax returns, documents he has thus far been unwilling to release.

Whether Republicans on the committee are willing to dig that deep into potential ties between Trump and Russia remains an open question, Swalwell said.

“We’ve heard from the easy witnesses, right? We’ve heard from the director and Adm. Rogers. The harder witnesses are going to be people like Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, bringing individuals in who were actually witnesses to what was going on,” he told “Morning Joe.” “And finding if there’s consensus there, among Republicans, to bring those individuals in as well as bringing in documents that will also help us, like the president’s tax returns.”

Swalwell’s comments come after Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) told Politico on Monday that Manafort “would certainly be at the top of my list to testify” before the intelligence panel’s ongoing investigation.

While Swalwell and others have sought to shine a brighter spotlight on those in the Trump orbit with alleged ties to Russia, the White House has moved to distance itself from them. Spicer said Monday that Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman until he resigned last August amid reports of his ties to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

“It’s almost beyond belief; he’s obviously delusional,” Stone said of Spicer’s comments.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, who became Trump’s campaign manager days before Manafort’s resignation and took over for him as the head of the operation, said on Tuesday that Page, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and J.D. Gordon, a member of the campaign’s national security advisory committee, had “very attenuated contacts to the campaign.”

The president “doesn’t know these gentlemen. He didn’t work with them,” Conway said Tuesday morning on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

“Where is the nexus? I mean, people are so quick to make that nexus,” she said. “We’ve got conclusions still in search of evidence. And that’s very dangerous, because we didn’t learn anything more yesterday to show any kind of nexus.”

But the White House could do little beyond attempting to distance itself from controversial figures and ensure updated talking points were pushed out. White House officials even declined to discuss Comey’s testimony over the phone on Tuesday.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who said last month on Fox News that he did not intend to immediately subpoena Stone or Page to testify, told reporters Monday that he had never heard of either man.

“You haven’t heard of Carter Page and all these other people?” a reporter asked Monday on Capitol Hill, to which Nunes flatly replied, “No.” In response to a follow-up question, Nunes again said he had not heard of Page or Stone but added: “I’ve heard of Manafort.”

“He meant he’d never heard of them before their names appeared in The New York Times story about them allegedly being investigated in connection with Russia,” a Nunes spokesman told Politico on Tuesday.

Inside the committee room, Nunes was direct with Comey in urging him to work expeditiously to get to the bottom of the newly disclosed investigation into the 2016 election, Russia and the Trump administration. The chairman told the FBI director: “There is a big, gray cloud that you’ve now put over people who have very important work to do to lead this country.”

“And so, the faster you can get to the bottom of this, it’s going to be better for all Americans,” he said.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), another member of the intelligence panel, expressed concern in a separate “Fox & Friends” interview Tuesday that Comey had been willing to confirm the presence of the Russia investigation but had not been similarly forthcoming about whether the bureau is looking into the source of leaks, presumably from the intelligence community, that have proved damaging to the Trump administration.

And like Nunes, Gowdy said he warned the FBI director that his testimony had left a “vacuum” that “politicians will fill.”

