https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ll-comey-trump-russia-investigation/99411214/
WASHINGTON — Not since Watergate.
FBI Director James Comey delivered more than one bombshell at a rare public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee Monday. He said there was no evidence to back up President Trump's accusation that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, joining congressional leaders and intelligence officials in discounting Trump's unsubstantiated claims.
What was more explosive, though, was Comey's matter-of-fact confirmation that the FBI is investigating whether Trump associates colluded with Russia in the effort by one of the United States' leading global adversaries to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign.
To be sure, the FBI in recent years has been drawn into investigations involving the top ranks of the White House, from Scooter Libby's leaking of a CIA operative's name during the George W. Bush administration to President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But not since the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign more than a half-century ago has there been an official investigation of such potential consequence.
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The charges involved are more serious than anything we’ve seen in recent decades," says political historian Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University and author of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security. "That is far from a lone instance of an illegal leak or a president fudging the truth under oath about sex with a White House intern. While we obviously don’t know what evidence the FBI has assembled and whether anybody will ever be charged with a crime, the scope of the investigation appears to encompass at least several of Trump’s chief advisers and perhaps Trump himself."
