YES, OBAMA WEAPONIZED THE FBI TO SPY ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

There was never very much doubt that the Obama administration, freed of constraints by a fawning, look-the-other-way media, used agencies such as the FBI and DOJ to spy on the Trump campaign throughout the 2016 election cycle.

Now, almost three years later, we get a grudging acknowledgement from, of all places, the emphatically Trump-hating New York Times.

From Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and Mark Mazzetti’s article:

The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?

The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called it Spygate.

The decision to use Ms. Turk in the operation aimed at a presidential campaign official shows the level of alarm inside the F.B.I. during a frantic period when the bureau was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, but could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their spying claims.

 The article goes on to implicate another spy, Stefan Halper, as well.

With that in mind, don’t you love the way The Times spins this?

See, it wasn’t a spying operation under the auspices of the opposition party, it was just a sincere effort “to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election” Nothing to see here at all…

…but, unfortunately a consequence of this sincere effort “could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their spying claims.”  How sad that a sincere effort can be used this way.

Do you believe the Times’ spin?  If so, then please explain why “during a frantic period when the bureau was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election” it wasn’t planting spies in the Clinton campaign as well for exactly the same reason.

And explain why, if this was just a sincere effort “to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election”, not a covert operation to prevent the Republican candidate from winning, the FBI did not inform Donald Trump and his people of the possibility that Russia was infiltrating its campaign and that it was attempting to prevent this from happening.

The New York Times, as is its wont these days, can mangle and contort the facts all it wants.  But reality is not going to change.  And the reality is that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign for the purposes of keeping a democrat, Hillary Clinton, in the White House.

The sooner Attorney General William Barr appoints a special counsel to investigate this assault on our electoral process, the better.