The Hill posted an article yesterday with the following heading, “A convenient omission? Trump campaign adviser denied collusion to FBI source early on.” Somehow that fact got left out of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) request.
The article reports:
Just weeks after the FBI opened a dramatic counterintelligence probe into President Trump and Russia, one of his presidential campaign advisers emphatically told an undercover bureau source there was no election collusion occurring because such activity would be treasonous.
George Papadopoulos says his spontaneous admission to London-based professor Stefan Halper occurred in mid-September 2016 — well before FBI agents and the Obama Justice Department sought a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to collect Trump campaign communications in the final days before the election.
“He was there to probe me on the behest of somebody else,” Papadopoulos told me in an interview this week, recalling the Halper meeting. “He said something along the lines of, ‘Oh, it’s great that Russia is helping you and your campaign, right George?’ ”
Papadopoulos said Halper also suggested the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails that summer. “I think I told him something along the lines of, ‘I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What you are talking about is treason. And I have nothing to do with that, so stop bothering me about it,’ ” Papadopoulos recalled.
The former campaign aide is set to testify behind closed doors Thursday before two House panels.
Sources who saw the FISA warrant and its three renewals tell me there is no mention of Papadopoulos’s denial, an omission of exculpatory evidence that GOP critics in Congress are likely to cite as having misled the court.
It is becoming more and more obvious that President Obama’s administration used the power of the federal government to spy on the Trump campaign and later to work against the Trump administration. Whether or not we will ever learn the full extent of the misuse of government agencies will depend largely on the results of the mid-term election. If the Democrats take over the House of Representatives, it is fairly certain that all investigations regarding misuse of government agencies will cease. That will send a clear message to those in power in Washington that it is okay to misuse the powers of government as long as you continue to hold power over the oversight committees that would investigate those abuses. That is not a county that we all want to live in.