New DOJ Notes Reveal FBI Panic After Trump Tweeted He Knew He Was Being Spied On
What the notes reveal is that in response to the tweet, they tried to cover their tracks.
By March 2017, FBI leadership already knew with near-certainty that the Trump–Russia collusion claims were a hoax. They knew that Clinton’s campaign had a plan to vilify Trump by portraying him as a puppet of Putin. The FBI also knew that not a single claim in the so-called Steele dossier—which was the primary source of allegations of Trump–Russia collusion—had checked out.
FBI agent Peter Strzok during testimony before Congress on July 12, 2018. Strzok oversaw both the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
In fact, at that point, the FBI had already spent three days interviewing Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, who disavowed pretty much every claim in Steele’s dossier. The FBI also knew that the Alfa Bank story, which claimed that a Trump server was communicating with a Russian bank—information that had been brought to them by Sussmann—was bogus.
In short, the FBI knew that all the claims of Trump-Russia collusion had proven to be fake.
But things took a sudden and dramatic turn on March 4, 2017, when Trump said on Twitter that he knew that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, a very public claim of spying that set off alarm bells with both FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump’s tweet so alarmed these DOJ and FBI officials that the topic dominated a meeting two days later that included FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the acting U.S. attorney general, Dana Boente.
The problem for the FBI was this: They didn’t know how much Trump actually knew about their actions. Just a day earlier, on March 3, 2017, radio host Mark Levin had reported that the Obama administration had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that involved Trump and several of his campaign advisers. Levin also reported that Trump’s off-the-cuff joke in July 2016—“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”—had become the basis for the Russia collusion accusations.
But as we now know, the FISA warrants weren’t the only thing that the FBI leadership was involved with. The FBI was actively spying on the Trump campaign and the incoming Trump administration’s transition communications, a fact that also was revealed in the new notes. The FBI had not only spied on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but also on another aide, George Papadopoulos, going so far as to lure him to London, where they tried to set him up in a clumsy but elaborate sting. |
