At CNN, black is white, up is down, and the important thing is not the political scandal of the decade, but that President Trump may be wrong about something.
“We caught Joe Biden, President Obama, the whole group,” the president told reporters this week. “You can look at Brennan and Comey and Clapper and the whole group. We caught them spying on our campaign. This was an illegal act like no other illegal act. This was treason. This was at the highest level of treason.”
He added, “And Obama and Biden got caught spying on my campaign, using intelligence agencies of the United States government to do it, both before and after the election. So, before the election, and then after I won, they continued. It’s totally illegal activity, and now, we just have to see what’s happening.”
At CNN, which has been one of the main purveyors of the anti-Trump conspiracy theories that sprung up from the Obama administration’s spying activities, some reporters were quick to defend Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s honor, accusing the Republican president of fabricating stories from thin air.
“The president [slammed] Obama, Vice President Biden, accusing them of spying on the Trump campaign,” said CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. “That is just not true. That did not happen, it has not been proven.”
But which is it? Is it not true, or is it simply unproven? Pick a lane.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who still may or may not understand what “historically low” means, added elsewhere, “No evidence Obama and Biden did anything to spy on the Trump campaign. … Copy-paste, every night at 5:30.”
Acosta and Dale are correct. It is not clear whether Obama and Biden were personally involved in the major abuses of power that occurred on their watch.
And while we are on the topic, now is a good time to remind you that the FBI under the Obama administration submitted inaccurate, incomplete, unsupported, and even intentionally falsified information to justify its surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign, according to the Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Justice. The FBI also relied on the so-called Steele dossier, a deeply flawed piece of opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to secure authorization from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
As I have written before, FBI leadership did this despite knowing that the dossier, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, was extremely dubious, if not a work of total fiction. The partisan Steele document played “a central and essential role” in the FBI’s warrant application, Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Congress, adding further that it was not until the bureau presented the dossier that the court determined there was enough “evidence” to spy on Page.
This all happened during the Obama administration. This all happened while Obama and Biden were in power. Further, everything mentioned in the above was known this week even before reports came out showing former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith plans to plead guilty to falsifying a key document in the surveillance against the 2016 Trump campaign.
The Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. That is an incontrovertible fact. Whether Obama and Biden were personally involved in the abuses that happened during their time in power is unclear. So, yes, Trump should take better care when he says Obama and Biden are responsible for the Obama administration spying on his campaign.
Fact-checking in this Golden Age of Journalism never looked so good.
