Top Obama officials to ‘testify’

WASHINGTON: The scandal over Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election returns to the forefront of Washington politics after weeks of quiet on Monday, when two top officials from the Obama administration are set to testify in Congress.

Sally Yates -- acting attorney general in the Trump administration for 10 days before being fired -- could bring new pressure on the White House over what it knew about former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian officials.

Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper is also set to testify, after repeatedly warning of the need to get to the bottom of how the Russians interfered in the election, and whether anyone on President Donald Trump’s team colluded with Moscow.

The case has simmered for weeks as attention focused elsewhere on what keynote legislation the president could push through in his first 100 days, reached on Sunday.

Congressional investigations into the matter have also been held up by infighting between Democrats and Republicans over how aggressively to pursue a matter that continues to cast a cloud over Trump’s election win.

Trump this week repeated his dismissal of US intelligence chiefs’ conclusion that Moscow had sought to boost his campaign over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s in an effort overseen by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” programme marking his 100 days, Trump again rejected the official view that Russians hacked Democratic Party computers and communications.

“It could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups,” he said.

On Tuesday, he again branded the whole story as fake. “The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election,” he said on Twitter.

Trump’s dismissals notwithstanding, the Senate Judiciary Committee -- where Yates and Clapper appear on Monday -- and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are stepping up their probes, calling numerous current and former government witnesses to testify, mostly behind closed doors.