Spygate (conspiracy theory)
It primarily centered around the idea that a spy was planted by the Obama administration to conduct espionage on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for political purposes.
[10][11] In the middle and second half of 2016, Halper, a longtime confidential source for U.S. intelligence, began working as a secret informant for the FBI, targeting three Trump campaign advisers separately in a covert effort to investigate suspected Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
[16][22] In April 2018, the House Intelligence Committee, then in Republican control, released a final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which stated that the House Intelligence Committee found that "in late July 2016, the FBI opened an enterprise CI [counterintelligence] investigation into the Trump campaign following the receipt of derogatory information about foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos".
[26] Stefan Halper, an FBI informant, spoke separately to three Trump campaign advisers – Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos – in 2016 in an effort to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
[27] A former federal law enforcement official told The New York Times that the initial encounter between Halper and Page at a London symposium on July 11–12, 2016 was a coincidence, rather than at the direction of the FBI.
"[36] On May 17, 2018, The Daily Caller reported that Stefan Halper, a professor at Cambridge known for his work for the CIA, had met Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
If so, this is bigger than Watergate!On May 18, Trump made the following statement on Twitter:[9][42] Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president.
[50] In the May 22 tweets, Trump wrote that Halper, a longtime FBI informant, was paid a "massive amount of money" and concluded that he thus must be a spy implanted for "political purposes".
NBC News reported in December 2017 that on July 19, 2016, after Trump won the Republican nomination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned him that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably attempt to spy on and infiltrate his campaign.
[58] This particular conspiracy theory promoted by Trump was traced by media outlets to originate from a Twitter user called @Nick_Falco, who on June 4 posted about the words "oconus lures" in December 2015 texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
[13][59] However, according to the United States Department of Justice, "lures" refer to "subterfuge to entice a criminal defendant to leave a foreign country so that he or she can be arrested".
[58] Also on June 4, Falco's tweet spread to the r/conspiracy forum on Reddit, and also The Gateway Pundit, a far-right, pro-Trump website which has published multiple false conspiracy theories.
[13][59] The Gateway Pundit wrote an article entitled: "Breaking: Senate releases unredacted texts showing FBI initiated MULTIPLE SPIES in Trump campaign in December 2015".
Dobbs's interviewee on the show, Chris Farrell of the conservative group Judicial Watch, agreed that the existence of an "intelligence operation directed against then-candidate Trump" was "indisputable".
Republican Representative Ron DeSantis, a panelist on Ingraham's show, agreed that it was "clear" that the FBI investigation into Trump started earlier than July 2016.
After a four-hour session reviewing documents at the Department of Justice, Gowdy said that was the first time he saw that Peter Strzok had actually initiated and approved Crossfire Hurricane, the exculpatory information on George Papadopoulos, and also the first time he saw, despite the testimonial denials of the FBI that "Trump’s not the target, the campaign’s not the target" of the Crossfire Hurricane, the Trump campaign mentioned in the predicate document.
[70] Senior Republicans including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, supported Gowdy's initial assessment of the situation.
[74] Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has said that Spygate is "lie-gate", a "piece of propaganda the president wants to put out and repeat".
[74] Haaretz, Chris Megerian and Eli Stokols of Los Angeles Times, and Kyle Cheney of Politico have labelled Spygate as a conspiracy theory by President Trump.
[8][7][6] Washington Post columnist Max Boot described Spygate as the latest example in a "nonstop" series of Trump's "nonsensical" allegations of a "Deep State" conspiracy against him.
[82] Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, has said, in regard to Spygate: "The effect on the life of the nation of a president inventing conspiracy theories in order to distract attention from legitimate investigations or other things he dislikes is corrosive.
"[2] Aaron Blake, writing for The Washington Post, wrote that the "central problem" of the Spygate conspiracy theory is the "fact that these people who supposedly would do anything to stop Trump ... didn't".
In the period before the election, the FBI "didn't use the information it had collected to actually prevent Trump from becoming president", as it did not publicly reveal it was already investigating links between George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Russia.
[3] Steven Poole, writing for The Guardian, wrote that the real scandal was Trump using the "-gate" suffix for the issue, as the Spygate allegations are about "purely imaginary things".
No, it's not political spying on the Trump campaign or anything like that.... Rather, the problem is a far more general one: It appears that the facts presented in a lot of FISA applications are not reliably accurate.
agent working as part of an Obama administration plot" to contact and entrap Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos in order to establish a false predicate to justify opening Crossfire Hurricane.
[97] Christina Zhao of Newsweek wrote in April 2019 that Spygate was a term that Trump "apparently coined to refer to allegations that the FBI had spied on his" 2016 presidential campaign.
[99] Zachary Basu of Axios wrote in April 2019 that the uncorroborated and "so-called 'spygate' scandal ... relates to alleged FISA abuses by the intelligence community", and "has been frequently promoted by defenders of President Trump".
