President Donald Trump is having a busy, rage-filled Sunday. Mere hours after he sent a six-part tweetstorm that blasted everything from the New York Times to the Mueller probe, to Hillary Clinton’s emails, the commander in chief was back at it again a few hours later.
First, the commander in chief decided to repeat an earlier point, seemingly concerned people were going to miss his main message after the six separate tweets. “The Witch Hunt finds no Collusion with Russia - so now they’re looking at the rest of the World,” he wrote. “Oh’ great!”
With that summary out of the way, the president decided to switch gears. “I hereby demand,” he began before saying he will officially be seeking a Department of Justice investigation into whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.” Beyond that, he wants to know whether any of these “requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”
With the tweet, Trump was taking to a new level his response to reports that an FBI informant talked to two of his campaign advisers that investigators believe had suspicious contacts with people tied to the Kremlin. And it came shortly after House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes fanned the outrage flames by saying that “if they ran a spy ring or an informant ring and they were paying people within the Trump campaign—if any of that is true, that is an absolute red line.” In an interview on Fox News, Nunes said he and his fellow Republicans have not been able to confirm whether there really was an informant because they haven’t received the appropriate documents from the FBI and Justice Department. But officials warn that turning over the information that Republicans are requesting would pose a serious risk to the source’s life.
The New York Times reported that the FBI used an informant to covertly approach Trump campaign associates that had suspicious contacts with people tied to Russia, and not that it had infiltrated the informant to spy on the campaign. “No evidence has emerged that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal,” notes the Times.