President Trump’s top spokesperson on Tuesday dismissed a sweeping federal subpoena of the president’s inaugural committee as unrelated to the White House and blamed the reaction to it on “hysteria” over the fact Trump won the 2016 election.
“This has nothing to do with the White House,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on CNN.
{mosads}Sanders pushed back when pressed by anchor John Berman, who said the investigation was part of an array of criminal inquiries into Trump’s administration and campaign.
“Actually, I think the common thread is hysteria over the fact that this president became president,” she said. “The common thread is that there is so much hatred out there that they will look for anything to try to create and tie problems to this president.”
Federal prosecutors in New York on Monday ordered Trump’s inaugural committee to turn over documents related to its fundraising and activities as part of a long-running probe into how it raised and spent the record $107 million it received, mostly from large donors and corporations.
A spokesperson for the committee told news outlets it was reviewing the subpoena and that it intends to cooperate with the investigation.
The investigation has compounded the legal and political problems facing Trump, who is already grappling with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and a separate federal probe tied to the president’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.