Four years after the FBI sent “Confidential Human Sources” secretly to gather information on Donald Trump’s team, the president’s opponents in politics and the media continue to deny that the bureau spied on his 2016 campaign. They are now using that denial to dismiss questions of voting irregularities in the 2020 election by arguing that Trump and his allies traffic in outrageous falsehoods for partisan purposes.
During the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence said, “When Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, the FBI actually spied on President Trump and my campaign.” The response from NBC “fact checkers” was to declare that “Pence repeated a false claim that Trump made during the first presidential debate – accusing the Obama administration of spying on their 2016 campaign.”
At Politico, Kyle Cheney and Andrew Desiderio caricatured the accusation of spying as alleging “Biden was a mastermind of an effort to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign,” saying it was a story “riddled with falsehoods, exaggerations and assumptions.” By pressing accusations of spying, the president has politicized “institutions in a way that will leave lasting damage,” Politico quoted Democrats saying. The outlet warned, “Trump may exacerbate that strain in the coming weeks.”
Last week, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Kristine Phillips described as “debunked allegations” claims that Trump’s team had been spied on, while reporting that Attorney General William Barr, a prominent leveler of the charge last year, was now opening the Justice Department to “claims of partisan interference” with a new directive to investigate credible claims of voting irregularities.
Lesley Stahl, in her “60 Minutes” interview with President Trump ahead of the election, refused to even discuss the spying charge, rejecting it as unverified and untrue.
“The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign,” Trump told Stahl. “They spied on my campaign, Lesley.”
“Well, there’s no real evidence of that,” Stahl objected.
“Of course there is. It’s all over the place.”
“No.”
“Lesley, they –”
“Sir –”
“– spied on my campaign and they got caught.”
“Can I — can I say something?” Stahl said. “You know, this is ’60 Minutes.’ And we can’t put on things we can’t verify –”
“No,” Trump said, “you won’t put it on because it’s bad for Biden. Look, let me tell you –”
“We can’t put on things we can’t verify.”
Sen. Charles Grassley says Stahl and other media are denying the facts – facts that have not only been verified but proven: “The FBI ran confidential informants against multiple Trump campaign aides in the lead-up to the 2016 election,” the Iowa Republican told RealClearInvestigations. “They aggressively sought and received secret warrants to eavesdrop on Carter Page’s communications – warrants that were repeatedly renewed despite many critical flaws and omissions of exculpatory evidence. These facts are indisputable,” Grassley said. “Call it whatever you want to call it, but if this isn’t spying, I don’t know what is.”…
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