A key Republican senator has said that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who now oversees a probe of whether President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, told him he had no concerns about the special counsel leading the investigation.
Senator Lindsey Graham, after a meeting with Whitaker, said he is confident there would be no interference in the probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“He’s seen nothing out of bounds or no concerns at all about Mr Mueller,” Graham, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a close ally of Trump, said in comments confirmed by his spokesman.
He said he saw no need for Whitaker to recuse himself as critics have demanded, the spokesman confirmed.
Democrats and others fear Whitaker’s appointment could jeopardise Mueller’s probe of Russia’s role in the 2016 US election.
Whitaker, a Trump loyalist and a former US attorney in Iowa, had criticised the Mueller probe as too far-reaching before he was appointed by Trump last week to run the Justice Department.
Trump has denied that his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia, and calls the Mueller probe a witch hunt.
US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump by undermining Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Russia has denied any meddling in the election.
Congressional Democrats have dismissed as “fatally flawed” a Justice Department legal opinion defending Trump’s decision to appoint Whitaker as acting attorney general to replace ousted Jeff Sessions.
The top Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and the House Intelligence Committee said in a joint statement that the opinion released on Wednesday twists the language of the US Constitution and ignores an existing law governing succession at the Justice Department.
In a preview of the opposition Trump can expect in January, when a new Democratic majority takes control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats said that Whitaker should not have been appointed because he has not been confirmed by the Senate.
“This will embolden the future use of temporary appointments for illegitimate purposes ... this can’t be allowed to stand,” said the statement from House Judiciary Committee Democrat Jerrold Nadler, House Intelligence Committee Democrat Adam Schiff and Senate Judiciary Committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein.
Nadler and Schiff are expected to become chairmen of their committees in the next Congress.
Trump has repeatedly attacked the investigation.
“The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts,” the president said in a tweet on Thursday. “They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t ... care how many lives they ruin.”
The Mueller investigation has led to criminal charges against several former Trump aides.
The Justice Department’s opinion concluded that Whitaker’s appointment was allowed under a 1998 law called the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
It rejected views that the move ran afoul of the US Constitution’s requirement for “principal officers” to be confirmed by the Senate.
The Justice Department also cited an 1866 example of an acting attorney general being appointed without Senate confirmation, which Democrats pounced on.
“That was for six days in 1866 – the year after the Civil War ended, four years before the Justice Department’s founding and a century before the (Justice Department) succession law was enacted,” the Democrats said.
Meanwhile, Trump said yesterday that he had personally written – though not yet submitted – answers to the questions put to the White House by Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“I answered the questions very easily,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I haven’t submitted them yet. I just finished them. As you know, I’ve been a bit busy.”
“The questions were very routinely answered by me,” Trump added. “I don’t need lawyers to do them. You need lawyers to go over some of the answers. They were not very difficult questions.”
Trump went on to dismiss the investigation, which he has repeatedly called illegal and threatened to shut down, attacking it this week as a national “disgrace”.
“There should have never been any Mueller investigation because there was never anything done wrong. There was no collusion,” he said. “The witch hunt, as I call it, should never have taken place. It continues to go on. I imagine it’s ending now.”
Mueller’s team of investigators submitted a long list of questions to the White House early this year that indicated interest in both the allegations of collusion and obstruction.
Since then the two sides have reportedly jousted over whether the president had to answer and how he would do so – including the possibility that he would submit to a face-to-face interview with prosecutors.
Trump: has repeatedly attacked the Mueller investigation.
