Over the weekend former House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who aggressively investigated the Obama administration on a number of issues, called for a special prosecutor to look into alleged ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
“You cannot have somebody — a friend of mine, Jeff Sessions, who was on the campaign and who is an appointee,” Issa said. “You’re going to need to use the special prosecutor’s statute and office — not just to recuse, you can’t just give it to your deputy, that’s another political appointee — you do have to do that.”
“There may or may not be fault,” Issa said. “But the American people are beginning to understand that Putin murders his enemies, sometimes right in front of the Kremlin, and then suddenly the cameras don’t work there. He’s murdered people and taken down using cyber warfare in Georgia and Ukraine. This is a bad guy who murders people who runs a gas station with an economy the size of Italy but is screwing up things all over the world that we’ve been doing ‘working with.’ Now we have to work with them. We don’t have to trust them, and we need to investigate their activities, and we need to do it because they are bad people.”
Monday the White House hit back on that assertion, saying months of media reports have turned up nothing substantial and therefore an outside investigation in unnecessary.
"A special prosecutor for what? We have now for six months seen story after story about unnamed sources syaing the same thing over and over again and nothing's come of it," Spicer said. "At what point, you have to ask yourself 'what are you investigating?'"
"If there's nothing further to investigate, what are you asking people to investigate?" Spicer continued. "At some point you have to ask, what are you looking for?...How many people have to say there's nothing there before you realize there's nothing there?"
Spicer also argued the FBI, intelligence agency leaders and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes have repeatedly said there is no evidence of wrongdoing.
"We still have not seen any evidence of anyone that's from the Trump campaign or any other campaign for that matter, that's communicated with the Russian government," Nunes told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday. "I want to be very careful that we can't just go on a witch hunt against Americans because they appear in a news story somewhere."
During a meeting with governors at the White House Monday, President Trump said he hasn't "called Russia in 10 years," after a pool reporter asked question about a special prosecutor.