Amid all the other news of the minute, President Donald Trump continues to push ahead with the claim that the FBI spied on his campaign with paid informants. To top it all off, this would have been done with the approval of the Obama Administration, if not Obama himself.
Scores of journalists and liberal activists have and will continue to blow off the charges, and accuse Trump of spreading more conspiracy theories, lying to the American public the whole way through.
But, let’s stop and think for a moment: Is it so unbelievable?
I’m not saying I 100% believe this. It is a sensational story, with all the earmarks of being something that would fit to confirm a bias I would have against the Obama Administration and the Democrats’ love of using government to punish people (hello, IRS!). Still, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is true, or at the very least close to true?
The fact that the New York Times released a story admitting the FBI was actively investigating the Trump campaign, and that the FBI did have informants, is already fairly damning. It is unprecedented behavior, though not entirely unwarranted given some of the shady people and practices Trump has and continues to employ.
However, add to that bit of data with the fact that James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan, as well as many others in the intelligence community, have actively gone out to trash Trump, showing a hostility for the Trump Administration that, historically, you don’t see during times of presidential transition.
Sure, Trump has attacked the very institutions, policies, and leadership of the intelligence community since he started running for president, but that is politics. This behavior seems new and different. It seems downright scary.
And where would it stop? It’s okay to have informants inside one campaign, apparently, so what’s the logical progression here? Next, it’ll be okay to wiretap campaigns and transition teams? Get a warrant for their email servers mid-campaign? Where exactly would it end?
This is not the behavior you want the top law enforcement officials in the nation, as well as the intelligence community, to actively be taking part in. If they could be weaponized like this now, then think of what could happen should Trump or someone else who fell victim to this want revenge on their way out? It’s a bad precedent.
If this happened, then Trump needs to declassify the material. It’s either a conspiracy theory or a real problem, but just tweeting about it and mentioning it in press conferences does nothing to fix the problem. It’s not impossible to believe it could happen, but it is impossible to know for sure when the president making the accusations is just sitting on his hands.
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