Trump and his campaign are seeking to amplify allegations that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign, casting the president as the victim to energize his base for the election.
By Toluse Olorunnipa Toluse Olorunnipa White House reporter Email Bio Follow May 4 at 4:15 PM For President Trump’s reelection effort, “Investigate the investigators!” is becoming the new “Lock her up!”
Murtaugh highlighted a Thursday article from the New York Times describing how the FBI sent an investigator posing as a research assistant to meet with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in 2016 — a covert effort to better understand the campaign’s links to Russia. Murtaugh said it was “astounding” that the story had not received as much media coverage as some Russia-related episodes unearthed by Mueller.
Republicans have long claimed that the FBI’s actions targeting Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser whose communications were secretly surveilled in late 2016 and early 2017 under a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, amounted to political spying. Surveillance of Page took place after he left the Trump campaign and was authorized by several judges.
Trump’s focus on re-litigating the origins of the Russia probe serves a purpose beyond ginning up his political base, campaign aides and allies said. “When the Mueller report is put to bed, and it soon will be, this committee is going to look long and hard at how this all started,” he said Wednesday during a hearing with Barr.The Mueller report documented that the FBI’s counterintelligence probe began after a foreign government alerted U.S. officials that Papadopoulos claimed in 2016 that he had heard about a Russian effort to help the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Clinton.
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