Following revelations that the FBI sent an undercover agent to meet with George Papadopoulos in London in 2016, James Clapper was forced to backtrack on his prior comments and admit that this was “spying.”

Earlier in April, Attorney General William Barr had told Congress that “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal”, and Clapper had immediately slammed the suggestion that the Trump campaign may have been spied on as “stunning and scary.” But last Friday, Clapper, who’d been the director of national intelligence under President Obama, conceded that what the FBI had been doing “meets the dictionary definition of spying.”