Speaker Ryan Dismisses Trump’s Charges of a Spy in His Campaign

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan agreed Wednesday that the FBI did nothing wrong by using a confidential informant to contact members of the Trump campaign as it investigated its ties to Russia, contradicting President Donald Trump’s assertions of a broad conspiracy by federal law enforcement.

And he warned that Trump should not try to pardon himself, despite Trump’s assertion two days earlier that the president has the power to take such a step.

“I don’t know the technical answer to that question, but I think obviously the answer is he shouldn’t,” Ryan told reporters. “And no one is above the law.”

Trump has seized on the disclosure of the use of an informant to claim, without evidence, that federal law enforcement officials had improperly placed a spy in his campaign. He demanded a Justice Department inquiry of the matter and dubbed the matter “SPYGATE” in repeated posts on Twitter.

Ryan became the highest-ranking Republican to throw cold water on that interpretation, which Democrats and former high-level law enforcement officials have claimed was an effort to discredit the ongoing investigation into Trump and his campaign. Ryan backed Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who pursued Hillary Clinton as the chairman of a special select committee on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, but infuriated some Republican partisans by rebuffing Trump on “Spygate.”

“Chairman Gowdy’s initial assessment is accurate, but we have more digging to do,” Ryan told reporters at a news conference Wednesday.

Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and one of House Republicans’ most experienced investigators.

Gowdy and Ryan were among a small group of congressional leaders briefed on the informant late last month by top officials from the FBI, Justice Department and the office of the director of national intelligence. The unusual meeting came as a result of repeated demands by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the Intelligence Committee chairman, for information related to the informant, a U.S. academic and veteran of Republican administrations.

Democrats emerged from the highly secretive briefing saying that they had seen “no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.” But Gowdy was the first Republican to break ranks a few days later, when he said on Fox News that the agency had acted properly.

“I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard,” Gowdy said.

He added: “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Ryan’s warning on a “self-pardon” reflected other Republican concerns. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, cast the issue of Trump pardoning himself in similar terms Tuesday.

“He obviously knows that would not be something that he would or should do,” McConnell said.