FBI Investigated if Trump Worked in Favor of Russia

Washington, Jan 12 (Prensa Latina) The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) opened a probe in 2017 to determine if U.S. President Donald Trump worked secretly in benefit of Russia, U.S. media publish today.

Dailies, TV networks and digital websites echo a report published by The New York Times, which says that after Trump dismissed former FBI director James Comey in May that year, officials in charge of enforcing the law were concerned about the president's behavior.

Based on that concern, they began investigating Trump to see if he had worked in favor of Russia and against U.S. interests in a probe of explosive implications, said the NYT.

According to the paper, counterintelligence officials should consider if the president's actions represented a threat to national security and they also attempted to determine if he acted knowingly or not for the Euroasian nation.

The inquiry of the Federal agency also focused in a criminal aspect already known for a long time: if the dismissal of Comey obstructed justice on the part of the head of the White House.

After leaving his post, many attributed the fact that Comey was the person heading the probe about a supposed Russian interference in the 2016 elections and a supposed complicity with the Trump campaign.

Although at first the administration attributed the dismissal to the handling carried out by the former director of the investigation on the private e-mail server of democrat former candidate Hillary Clinton, the president himself let it be known later that the dismissal was related to the Russia issue.

According to the newspaper, agents and high officials of the FBI suspected the connection of Trump with Russia during the 2016 campaign, but they abstained from opening a query on that issue, partly because they were not sure of how to pursue a probe of such sensitivity and magnitude.

But the activities of the president before and after the dismissal of Comey helped to boost the aspect of counterintelligence of the investigation, indicated the daily that quoted sources familiar with the issue.

The special prosecutor Robert Mueller took charge after the investigation on the 2016 elections, as part of which have been accused on different charges previous Trump collaborators, but the daily sustained it is not clear if at this time the process of counterintelligence begun in 2017 is still going on.