Trump lashes out after House committee launches vast probe into president’s tax and financial affairs

President tweets ‘the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY’ after new sweeping probe is launched against him

Donald Trump has launched an angry Twitter tirade directed at Democrats after the House judiciary committee announced a wide-ranging investigation into the president.

“Now that they realize the only Collusion with Russia was done by Crooked Hillary Clinton & the Democrats, Nadler, Schiff and the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY,” the president tweeted on Tuesday morning. “81 letter sent to innocent people to harass them.”

He added, “They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country!”

The president’s comments on Twitter arrived after the White House slammed the House Democrats’ newly launched probe as “a disgraceful and abusive investigation into tired, false allegations”.

“Chairman Nadler and his fellow Democrats have embarked on this fishing expedition because they are terrified that their two-year false narrative of ‘Russia collusion’ is crumbling,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement on Monday night.

“Their intimidation and abuse of American citizens is shameful,” she added. “Democrats are harassing the president to distract from their radical agenda of making America a socialist country, killing babies after they’re born, and pushing a ‘green new deal’ that would destroy jobs and bankrupt America.”

Now under Democratic control, House committees have intensified their probes into the president’s alleged criminal conduct both in the office and during his rise to prominence as a New York real estate mogul.

Three House committees are asking the White House and the State Department for any information on private conversations between Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin, including an interview with an interpreter who sat in on their one-on-one meeting in Helsinki last summer.

The broad requests from the House intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform committees ask for the substance of Mr Trump and the Russian president’s conversations in person and by phone and for information on whether those conversations had any impact on US foreign policy. They are also asking whether Trump tried to conceal any conversations.

When a reporter asked him on Monday if he was going to cooperate with the investigation led by committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, Mr Trump replied: “I cooperate all the time with everybody. You know, the beautiful thing, no collusion. It’s all a hoax.”

Mr Nadler’s committee has sent requests to 81 people linked to the president and his associates. The lawmaker said on Monday the investigation will be focused on possible obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power.

“Over the last several years, President Trump has evaded accountability for his near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical, and constitutional rules and norms,” Mr Nadler said in a statement. “Investigating these threats to the rule of law is an obligation of congress and a core function of the House Judiciary Committee.”

The president continued to tweet about the new investigations on Monday morning, writing: “The greatest overreach in the history of our Country. The Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!”

He added, “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”

Additional reporting by AP