It's "bigger than Watergate," but it's not this administration that's in trouble; it's the previous one.
Here's the big story at WaPo, "
'Bigger than Watergate': Trump joins push by allies to expose role of an FBI source."
And also, from yesterday at NYT, "
A Secret Mission, a Code Name and Anxiety: Inside the Early Days of the F.B.I.'s Trump Investigation." (Also at
Memeorandum.)
Still more, from Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist, "
10 Key Takeaways From the New York Times’ Error-Ridden Defense of FBI Spying on Trump Campaign." Still more, at NRO, "
Spinning a Crossfire Hurricane: The Times on the FBI’s Trump Investigation."
And most of all, see Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "
Was Trump’s Campaign ‘Set Up’?":
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what’s driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Trump-Russia probe. “If the campaign was somehow set up,” he told the hosts, “I think that would be a problem.”
Or an understatement. Mr. Nunes is still getting stiff-armed by the Justice Department over his subpoena, but this week his efforts did force the stunning admission that the FBI had indeed spied on the Trump campaign. This came in the form of a Thursday New York Times apologia in which government “officials” acknowledged that the bureau had used “at least one” human “informant” to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The Times slipped this mind-bending fact into the middle of an otherwise glowing profile of the noble bureau—and dismissed it as no big deal.
But there’s more to be revealed here, and Mr. Nunes’s “set up” comment points in a certain direction. Getting to the conclusion requires thinking more broadly about events beyond the FBI’s actions.
Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands—one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials—all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI—and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected—and one crucial question is how early that happened...
Keep reading.
