by Byron York at Washington Examiner
OF COURSE THEY SPIED ON TRUMP. One of the most contentious claims Donald Trump ever made was his insistence that he had been the target of spying. He made the charge in several different ways. For example, in March 2017, Trump, just two months in office, tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Two years later, in April 2019, he was less specific but equally adamant when he said, “There was absolutely spying into my campaign.” In August 2020, during his Republican National Committee acceptance speech, he said, “Remember this: They spied on my campaign.”
Each time, all the usual anti-Trump voices rushed to accuse the president of lying. But over the years, a series of facts emerged that, while they did not support some of Trump’s most specific charges — Obama did not wiretap Trump in Trump Tower — did support the larger idea that Trump was indeed the target of spying.
We learned that in the final days of the 2016 presidential race, when the Clinton campaign came up with the Steele dossier, a collection of sensational and unsupported allegations about Trump and Russia, the FBI used the dossier to win approval to wiretap Carter Page, a low-level former Trump campaign adviser. Then we learned that also in 2016, the FBI used a confidential informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to spy on Page and George Papadopoulos, another low-level Trump adviser. Then we learned that in 2016, the FBI sent an undercover agent — a woman who used the alias Azra Turk — to secretly record conversations with Papadopoulos…
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