Donald Trump is up to some old tricks after his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to felony crimes and agreed to cooperate in the ongoing investigation against the Trump campaign and its alleged collusion with Kremlin-linked government operatives. He made the announcement on Monday that he would be declassifying the FISA warrant against one of his former campaign staffers, Dr. Carter Page, as well as tweets between those that he has repeatedly maligned as being biased against him, such as James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and others.
In his Tuesday morning tweets, Trump gave some spoiler alerts as to what strategy he has in mind for the warrant’s declassification. Somehow, he believes he’s going to show that the FISA court was duped into approving the warrant without knowledge that its basis was the Christopher Steel dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and that it was used to spy on his campaign.
There are several problems with this. The warrant was applied for in October 2016 and was not in effect throughout Trump’s campaign, only in its final weeks. Nothing that was learned from the government’s ability to monitor Page was used against Trump in the presidential elections, which he won anyway. The original complaints by Republicans that the courts weren’t informed that some of the basis was the Steel dossier were debunked, and will be again.
Trump’s willingness to compromise national security by releasing classified documents will be what resonates after the release of the documents. He’ll prove nothing shady about the government tracking a man who was actively working as a foreign agent to a country committing cyberattacks against the U.S., and Trump had previously said that Page never worked on his campaign anyway.
How do you spy on a campaign by tracking someone who isn’t involved in the campaign?
Twitter was not impressed with Trump’s rant, either. See some of their responses below.
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
