President Trump claimed on Thursday that people working at the FBI were starting to speak out against former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
It wasn’t completely clear from Trump’s tweet what he was referring to, though the Daily Caller reported on Tuesday that various FBI agents wanted Congress to subpoena them so they could talk about problems at the bureau under Comey and McCabe.
However, other members of the intelligence community have hit back against Trump’s claims, including his argument that the FBI had a spy embedded in his campaign for political purposes.
Several media reports have zeroed in on a Cambridge professor who acted as an informant in contacting three of Trump’s campaign advisers to look into possible ties with Russia.
But there has been no evidence that someone was working on Trump’s campaign as an FBI spy, and James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence has criticized Trump’s description of the activities as spying.
Comey responded to Trump’s claim that he had lied in a tweet, saying he would lie about anything.
Clapper also responded to Trump’s declaration that Clapper misled Congress when he testified on the spying activities of the National Security Agency in 2013, saying he had simply “made a mistake” when responding to a question.
“The president’s calling me a lying machine,” Clapper said. “Well, okay. What that stems from is an exchange I had with Sen. [Ron] Wyden [D-Ore.] five years ago in March of 2013 about a surveillance program, and he was asking me about one, and I was thinking about another. So I made a mistake. I didn’t lie.”