It Wasn't Spying - It Was A Legitimate Investigation

(Caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

Donald Trump first tried to claim the Mueller Report exonerated him completely, but that didn't last long because people can read -- and the portion of the report that was released was devastating. Now he is trying another lie.

He is saying that there was no need for an investigation in the first place, and that the FBI had simply spied on his campaign because the Democrats paid for the Steele Dossier which was untrue and used as a justification for the spying.

First, while not everything in the Steele Dossier has been verified, most of it has, and nothing in it has been proven to be untrue.

Second, the investigation was not started because of the Steele Dossier. It was started because a Trump campaign aide got drunk in a bar and bragged to Australian officials about all the contacts with Russia that the campaign had. The Australians reported that to the FBI, who found it credible enough to investigate.

Third, there was no spying on the Trump campaign. There was a legitimate investigation to determine if officials were conspiring with Russia to harm the United States (and it's allies) -- and nothing was done without the approval of FISA judges.

Here is some of what former federal prosecutor Liam Brennan had to say in The New York Times:

In Mr. Trump’s case, the F.B.I. started its investigation in July 2016, after Australia informed the United States that Mr. Papadopoulos claimed that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The F.B.I. used an undercover investigator — the research assistant, who went by the name Azra Turk — and Stefan Halper, a professor in Britain and longtime informant, to make contact with Mr. Papadopoulos (Mr. Halper also made contact with two other campaign officials, Sam Clovis and Carter Page).

In light of the information coming from Australia, this conduct was actually a relatively unintrusive way to start an investigation. . . .

In its investigation into Russia’s potential connection to the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. obtained warrants to surveil the communications of Mr. Page and the campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The F.B.I. sought the wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, rather than a district court, because the applications contained sensitive foreign intelligence information. Ordinarily, to get to the FISA Court, the agents prepare an application and send it for review to the supervisor, the chief division counsel, the special agent in charge and then a unit supervisor at F.B.I. headquarters. It then goes to the National Security Division at the Justice Department for a verification procedure before arriving at a FISA judge who does a review of the material to see whether surveillance is warranted. In Mr. Page’s case, most of the judges reviewing his application were actually Republican appointees.

The process of obtaining a FISA warrant to wiretap is slightly different from the process used in a district court, but the authorized surveillance technique — in other words, the “spying” — is the same. Again, this is a common investigatory method when the government can show probable cause to a court. The F.B.I. wiretapped Representative Rick Renzi in an extortion and racketeeringinvestigation. Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was wiretapped trying to sell President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat. Associates of Mayor Joe Ganim of Bridgeport, Conn., were also secretly recorded in a wide-ranging corruption investigation. . . .

The “spying” rhetoric casts a cloud of illegitimacy over the Russia probe and the F.B.I. and undermines the special counsel’s findings. This is useful misdirection: Mr. Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump “campaign anticipated receiving derogatory documents and information from official Russian sources that could assist candidate Trump’s electoral prospects” challenges Mr. Barr’s declaration that the evidence showed “no collusion.” In that light, it’s not hard to see who’s serving the truth and who’s serving the president.