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ANALYSIS

Sean Spicer orders leak crackdown in search of Trump's 'fake news'

Paul McGeough

Washington: Key Republicans, including Trump allies, are talking up the gravity of the US President's Russia crisis amidst signs of heightened paranoia at the White House.

Trump keeps blaming Democrats for breathing life into the Russia affair – he tweeted another lash at them on Sunday. But it was a procession of his allies and others in the GOP who added to an air of foreboding on the weekend, undermining a fraught administration campaign to make the mess go away.

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But first, to the leaks about stopping leaks from the Trump White House.

Fearless in the face of what some have described as expletive-laden attacks on them by press secretary Sean Spicer, White House staffers dutifully lined up to give Politico magazine unattributed​ accounts of Spicer's latest crackdown.

Having consulted White House Counsel Don McGahn, and accompanied by another lawyer, Spicer reportedly summoned a dozen of his communications staff to an "emergency" meeting late last week at which they were ordered to surrender mobile phones and other devices, private and government-issued, for a "phone check" that might reveal who was leaking.

After warning them that the use of encrypted apps, some of which delete a text after it has been sent, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, Spicer sent the staffers packing – with a final warning that accounts of the meeting were not to be leaked.

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Over the weekend, a senior Republican congressman urged an independent inquiry into the Russian connections; a former Bush security appointee seemed to imply that Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had lied about an FBI investigation; and New Jersey Governor and Trump ally Chris Christie rated the crisis as one of "a lot of important problems" for the country.

Meanwhile, Trump did not have Twitter to himself – as he issued rebukes, others rebuked him with disturbing references to Watergate relived.

Here's neoconservative​ political analyst Bill Kristol​: "Every time you think the Trump administration could be semi-normal, there's something like this, and it feels like Nixon '73 all over again".

And here's former Nixon attorney-general and Watergate accomplice John Dean: "I have expertise on this matter. Push-back on an FBI investigation of the White House is better known as a COVER-UP."

Calling for Trump Attorney-General Jeff Sessions to step away from any Justice Department investigations of the Russia allegations, GOP congressman Darrell Issa told Bill Maher on HBO: You're going to need to use the [independent] special prosecutor's statute and office".

Explaining that Sessions deferring to his deputy would be less than independent, Issa said: "you can't have somebody – a friend of mine, Jeff Sessions – who was on the campaign and who is a [Trump] appointee… you're going to need to use the special prosecutor's statute and office. You can't just give it to your deputy. That's another political appointee".

Despite Priebus' claims last week that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had described as "BS" a report by The New York Times, which revealed extensive communications between people in the Trump campaign and figures in Russia, former CIA director John Brennan told CBS' Face the Nation that various investigations were in their early stages and that no one yet knew where the facts would lead.

Brennan, a George W. Bush security appointee who later became director of the CIA under Barack Obama, implicitly challenged the veracity of the Priebus claim that apart from meeting McCabe, he also had discussed the investigation with FBI director James Comey.

Saying he doubted Comey would have talked to the White House chief of staff about an ongoing investigation, Brennan argued: "It's been my experience, working with [Comey], that he wouldn't do anything to compromise the integrity of an ongoing investigation".

Brennan then made an observation that likely caused tremors in the White House: "Anybody who claims that the facts are already known in terms of what did or didn't happen between Russian officials and US persons during the election, I think, is speaking very prematurely.

"And the White House needs to understand that the interaction with the FBI on criminal investigations is something that really they need to steer clear of."

Arguing against the appointment of a special prosecutor, Christie's push-back seemed rooted more in anxiety about the administration losing political control of the investigations than in his faith in the existing investigations.

A former federal prosecutor, Christie told CNN's State of the Union: "The Justice Department, over the course of time, has shown itself, with the professionals that are there, to have the ability to investigate these type of things, [and] when a special prosecutor gets involved, the thing gets completely out of control. And I think that doesn't serve anybody's purposes".

Warning the administration that it had to remain at arm's length from the FBI inquiry "because perceptions matter", Christie also said: "We have a lot of important problems to deal with in this country. And this is – I'm not saying that is not one of them, but I believe the Justice Department can handle it".

White House deputy spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders used an appearance on ABC's This Week to double down on the Trump denials – and to use Priebus' unsupported claim that the FBI had dismissed one NYT report to imply that the entirety of the matters under investigation are without foundation.

"The FBI has already said this story is BS," she said. "Those were their words, so I apologise to my mum. But literally those are the words of the FBI, that the story is BS."

Sanders insisted that the various congressional and security agency investigations would come up empty-handed – "we're extremely confident that, whatever review, they're all going to come to the same conclusion: that we had no involvement in this."

One observation she made was telling – "just because reporters say something over and over and over again doesn't start to make it true".

It was telling because the converse, as Brennan implied on CBS' Face the Nation, is equally valid – just because Trump and his surrogates issue denials over and over, doesn't make it false.

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