Last week, White House aides originally tried to dismiss the conversation in which Donald Trump urged former FBI director James Comey to end his Michael Flynn probe as simply Trump being Trump—that's just the way he speaks, one senior official said. But with Monday's Washington Post report that Trump also tried to separately persuade two senior intelligence officials to publicly deny the links between his campaign and Russia, what we have now is a broad and targeted campaign by Trump to halt the investigation into his campaign accompanied by an effort to sow doubt in the minds of Americans.
In response to that effort, intelligence officials—including Comey, director of national intelligence Daniel Coats, and director of the National Security Agency Adm. Michael Rogers—are diligently and loudly ringing alarm bells for all of us to hear. Trump may be one of the most impulsive presidents in our history, but he is laser focused on executing his disinformation campaign both behind closed doors and in his public tweets. As the Post reported:
Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.
A senior intelligence official said Trump’s goal was to “muddy the waters” about the scope of the FBI probe at a time when Democrats were ramping up their calls for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, a step announced last week. [...]
“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.
But it wasn't just Trump himself—officials around Trump were equally as invested. Ostensibly, when Trump's one-on-ones with Comey failed to stem the FBI inquiry, Trump officials tried to influence the agency by other means.
In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. The officials said the White House appeared uncertain about its power to influence the FBI.
“Can we ask him to shut down the investigation? Are you able to assist in this matter?” one official said of the line of questioning from the White House.
These revelations provide further and even more disturbing evidence of the lengths Trump's White House went to shut down the FBI investigation, push back on media reports, and prejudice the American public against the Trump-Russia connections.
One of the first indications that the White House was headed down this path came in February with news that Trump aides had tried to enlist both intelligence officials and congressional Republicans in their public relations effort to throw cold water on links between Trump and Russia.
Acting at the behest of the White House, the officials made calls to news organizations last week in attempts to challenge stories about alleged contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, U.S. officials said.
Given what we now know about how extensive those contacts were, the latest reports really tease out actions taken by Trump and his administration to impede both the investigation and media inquiries about the probe. As Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA, told the Washington Post, the efforts amount to "an appalling abuse of power.”