The FBI warned Donald Trump in a high-level counterintelligence briefing soon after he became the Republican nominee in the summer of 2016 that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to infiltrate his campaign, NBC News reported on Monday.
In the briefing, which is commonly given to presidential nominees and was also provided to Democrat Hillary Clinton, the candidates were urged to tell the FBI about any suspicious overtures to their campaigns, according to multiple government officials familiar with the matter.
By the time of the warning, at least seven Trump campaign officials had been in contact with Russians or people linked to the country, according to public reports, but there is no public evidence that the campaign reported any of that to the FBI.
One such encounter was in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. held a meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin, and a Russian-American lobbyist. Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner were also there.
An email to Trump Jr. setting up the meeting promised incriminating information about Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help the Trump campaign.
Former head of FBI counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi, who is an NBC News analyst, said counterintelligence briefings "provide an opportunity for investigative subjects to be transparent with the bureau and to come back if such contacts are occurring because of admonishments by the bureau."
If they do not do that, he said, "a couple of factors could be at play: They didn't spread the message to the rest of the team or there is some form of guilty conscience that prohibits them."
The White House downplayed the report, with spokesman Raj Shah saying "That the Republican and Democrat nominee for president received a standardized briefing on counter-intelligence is hardly a news story. That NBC News hears about the contents of this classified conversation due to an inappropriate leak is a news story."
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