Analysis: There’s far more gray area on 'campaign spying' than Trump and his supporters present
President Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the Oval Office of the White House on April 11. By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow April 11 at 2:46 PM President Trump was asked on Thursday how he felt about Attorney General William P. Barr’s assertion before the Senate Appropriations Committee that the government had “spied” on Trump’s campaign.
Barr’s comments kicked up a lot of dust in the world of political punditry, dust that Trump is happy to keep aloft. Conservatives and Trump supporters have seized on the semantic question of what constitutes “spying” as a rationale for demonstrating that the Trump-Barr presentation of what happened is accurate. Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs even went so far on Wednesday night as to suggest that Trump’s March 2017 tweet about Trump Tower being wiretapped was accurate.
The surveillance that’s attracted the most attention was a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant the FBI obtained to monitor Page’s communications in October, shortly before the election. Page, Papadopoulos and the manager of the campaign’s foreign policy team, Sam Clovis, were also contacted by a London-based FBI informant named Stefan Halper over the course of the campaign. Page met Halper in July, shortly after Page got back from a trip to Moscow.
Whether these acts constitute “spying” is the less interesting part of the question. It’s worth noting that Trump understood the potency of the term “spy” as it applied to Halper in particular. An AP report from last May suggested that Trump preferred that term to “informant” because it sounded more ominous, which he hoped would resonate with the public.
The FBI was running counterintelligence operations focused on several individuals who were, at various points, working for the campaign. They were investigating Page, Papadopoulos and Manafort as individuals and seeking to determine if any of them were working with Russia.Both Manafort and Page had interactions with the FBI before joining the campaign. Page was interviewed back in March 2013, when an alleged Russian agent mentioned Page as a possible target for recruitment.
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