US President Donald Trump on Tuesday turned up the rhetoric another notch as he demanded the FBI verify claims found in the dossier claiming to reveal collusion with Russia amid the 2016 presidential election.
"WOW, @foxandfriends 'Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.' And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!" the US leader tweeted.
In October, the Washington Post reported that lawyer Marc Elias, representing Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, retained Fusion GPS in April 2016 to research Trump's background.
However, a major conflict of interest appeared when it was revealed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC helped fund Fusion's work through the end of October 2016, just days before Election Day, according to the Washington Post.
The flawed nature of the report – first published by BuzzFeed in January despite a paucity of evidence – has done little to tamp down claims that Trump somehow colluded with Russia to win the White House.
At the weekend, at the start of his winter break in Florida, Trump took direct aim at the FBI leadership in yet another Twitter barrage.
"How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leakin’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation," Trump wrote from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
Trump was talking about Andrew McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, who accepted $450,000 in campaign donations from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and more than $207,000 from the state Democratic Party when she ran for the Virginia state senate.
"In addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign," Trump tweeted. “You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.”
Last month, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained documents from the FBI that included a March 2015 email Jill McCabe sent to her husband's FBI account.
The documents contained a draft press release announcing McCabe’s candidacy in the state Senate race. Another email, dated August 2015, appeared to show Andrew McCabe encouraging an individual – whose name was redacted – to visit his wife's campaign website.