Trump: 'Historic' Durham Investigation Will Implicate Obama in Spygate
Former
U.S. President Barack Obama waves prior to delivering his speech during
the 4th Congress of Indonesian Diaspora Network in Jakarta, Indonesia,
Saturday, July 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)
On Friday morning, President Donald Trump told Fox & Friends that
spygate — the Obama administration's surveillance on the Trump campaign
during the 2016 election based on the false pretense of Trump being in
league with Russia — will be "perhaps the biggest scandal in the history
of our country." He said Attorney General Bill Barr's investigation of
FISA abuses and U.S. Attorney John Durham's criminal investigation will
prove "historic," and he predicted that the investigations will
implicate former President Barack Obama himself.
"Now,
what you’re going to see, I predict, will be perhaps the biggest
scandal in the history of our country, political scandal," Trump said.
"You have a FISA report coming out which the word is, it’s historic,
that is what the word is. That’s what I hear. And if it’s historic, you
will see something. And then perhaps even more importantly you have
Durham coming out shortly thereafter. He is the U.S. Attorney and he is
already announced it’s criminal."
"You
know, a lot of people say deep state. I don’t like to use the word
‘deep state.’ I just say they’re really bad and sick people," the
president added.
Peter Doocy
noted that Trump had previously suggested "that this might go much
higher than the Department of Justice or the FBI during the Obama
Administration." He asked the president if spygate "could actually go up
into the West Wing of the Obama administration."
Trump said it traces back to "the highest levels of government. They were spying on my campaign. That is my opinion."
"How high did it go, Mr. President? How high did it go?" Doocy pressed.
"I think personally, I think it goes all the way," Trump responded.
"I
hate to say it. I think it’s a disgrace. They thought I was going to
win and they said, 'How can we stop him?' They wrote up the phony, fake
dossier, the disgusting fake dossier, and they tried to have it put out
prior to the election just to show you how incompetent they were," he
said. "They spent millions and millions of dollars, Hillary Clinton paid
for it, and the Democrats."
Trump
went on to suggest that Ukraine has a Democratic National Committee
server that CrowdStrike refused to hand over to the FBI, but he did not
name a source for that disputed information. Many have denounced as a
conspiracy theory the president's claim that the server is in Ukraine.
Whatever the merits of his claim, the Barr and Durham investigations
indeed seem likely to be historic.
During the interview, the president also hit on the texts between former FBI staffers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
"I
can only say that we have a lot of information that a lot of bad things
happened. And when you look at Strzok and Page with the insurance
policy where, you know, the two lovers, the two great lovers from the
FBI, where he is saying, 'Oh, she is going to win 100 million to
nothing, but just in case she loses we have an insurance policy,'" Trump
said. "That means, you know, we’re going to take him down, we’ll take
down the president. You wouldn’t even believe this is possible. But the
insurance policy, that was a very big find."
As Andrew McCarthy explains in his book Ball of Collusion,
it was patently absurd to think Trump was in league with Russia during
the 2016 election, because the only evidence showed a meeting between
Carter Page — a very marginal Trump figure — and a very marginal Russian
figure. Yet the Obama administration launched a counter-intelligence
investigation without notifying Trump or alerting him to the danger of
Russian efforts in his campaign.
Furthermore,
Obama rightly insisted that Russia could not undermine the legitimacy
of the 2016 election — right up until the point when Trump won. Before
that, Obama thought Clinton was going to win, and he didn't want to
undermine her legitimacy. There is good reason to suggest spygate traces
all the way to the top.
