Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Sunday said that President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be “afraid” of where the investigation into possible collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials will lead.
“Do you believe the President fired Comey to interfere with the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the election and a possible link to the Trump campaign?” Chris Wallace asked Warner on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to former FBI Director James Comey, who Trump abruptly fired on Tuesday.
“The President’s actions and his statement lends to that appearance,” Warner said. “The President and this administration, who said there’s no ‘there’ there, continues through their actions to indicate that they are afraid of where this investigation may head.”
Warner said “the dots seem to be fairly obviously connected” to indicate “a lot more than smoke.”
“But I’m trying to give the President the benefit of the doubt until we finish this investigation and reach conclusions,” he said.
Asked to respond to Trump’s suggestion that he has “tapes” of his conversations with Comey, Warner said that if such recordings exist, he wants to make sure they are “not mysteriously destroyed in the coming days.”
“I am by no means a legal expert, but this sure seems to have reverberations of past history,” Warner said. “When we’ve seen presidents who secretly tape, that usually does not end up being a good outcome for a president.”
