It’s game over and lights out for Trump’s enemies in the deep state. Look, the media mocked Trump for saying he was spied on.
The Democrats mocked Trump over his claims and of course guys like James Clapper and other Obama appointees took great offense to the insinuation that they spied on Trump.
But then The New York Times broke a story about how the FBI sent a spy to get close to some Trump campaign officials and now Clapper is singing a different tune.
Look, Bill Barr will get to the bottom of this soon and then we will have a day of reckoning.
From The Washington Examiner: Following revelations that the FBI sent an undercover agent to meet with George Papadopoulos in London in 2016, James Clapper was forced to backtrack on his prior comments and admit that this was “spying.”
Earlier in April, Attorney General William Barr had told Congress that “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal”, and Clapper had immediately slammed the suggestion that the Trump campaign may have been spied on as “stunning and scary.” But last Friday, Clapper, who’d been the director of national intelligence under President Obama, conceded that what the FBI had been doing “meets the dictionary definition” of “spying.”
Speaking in front of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on April 10, Barr told the Department of Justice oversight panel that “for the same reason we’re worried about foreign influence in elections, I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” Barr also said he was “not suggesting those rules were violated” but that he does believe “it’s important to look at.”
“I think it’s my obligation,” Barr said.
That same night, Clapper went on CNN to speak with Anderson Cooper and blasted Barr, calling his comments “both stunning and scary.”
“I was amazed at that and rather disappointed that the attorney general would say such a thing,” Clapper said. “The term ‘spying’ has all kinds of negative connotations and I have to believe he chose that term deliberately.”
But in a widely-overlooked interview on CNN on May 3, Clapper admitted that spying had occurred. When asked by Wolf Blitzer whether spying had occurred, Clapper said that “it’s not a term of art used by intelligence people“ but admitted that “I guess it meets the dictionary definition of surveillance or spying, a term I don’t particularly like.”
Clapper conceded this point following a May 2 story in the New York Times that revealed that a woman who had been posing as the assistant of Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who himself had worked as a Trump campaign informant on behalf of the FBI, was herself working undercover for the FBI. Going by the alias Azra Turk, this yet-unknown woman was reportedly sent to meet with Papadopoulos by one of the FBI agents who had previously spoken at Halper’s Cambridge Intelligence Seminars.
Barr himself has refused to back down from the use of the word “spying” and, responding to questioning in front of the Senate on May 1, Barr said, “I’m not going to abjure the use of the word ‘spying.’ I don’t think — you know, my first job was in the CIA — I don’t think the word ‘spying’ has any pejorative connotation at all.”
“To me, the question is always whether or not it is authorized and adequately predicated spying,” Barr said. “I think ‘spying’ is a good English word that, in fact, doesn’t have synonyms because it is the broadest word incorporating all forms of covert intelligence collections. So I’m not going to back off of the word ‘spying’ and I use it frequently as the media.”
I missed this from last Friday —
Clapper on whether the FBI spied on the Trump campaign: “Well, yeah, I guess it meets the dictionary definition of spying." pic.twitter.com/vNK6HpgTIe
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 7, 2019
