“Bigger than Watergate.”
That’s what President Trump thinks of new reports that say President Obama’s FBI had an informant embedded into Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
In a tweet on Thursday morning, Trump cited an article by Andrew McCarthy, an editor at the conservative National Review. In the piece, McCarthy said a co-founder of an intelligence firm Fusion GPS — which compiled the “dirty dossier” on Trump for the Hillary Clinton campaign — has testified before the Senate that the FBI had a “human source” within Trump’s team.
“Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT,’” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’”
The story isn’t entirely new — but Trump’s embrace of it is. Meanwhile, top mouthpieces for the president, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are pushing the theory, too.
“In more than 300 pages of testimony released unilaterally on Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson told investigators that the former spy who compiled the dossier told him that the FBI had an informant in the Trump campaign,” The Hill reported in January.
“Essentially what [former MI6 agent Christopher Steele] told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that — that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,” Simpson said.
Still, as some news organizations seek to dispel the notion that the Obama FBI embedded an informant in the Trump campaign, The New York Times bolstered the notion.
“At least one government informant met several times with Mr. [Carter] Page and Mr. [George] Papadopoulos, current and former officials said,” the Times reports. “That has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also weighed in on the reports, saying on Fox News Channel: “It looks like the Trump campaign may have been surveilled.”
As Greg Gutfeld says, this story is unraveling faster than a mummy on a merry-go-round.