President Trump and his allies are pushing back against the notion that “Spygate” — their preferred framing of a key moment in the Trump-Russia investigation — is fading in importance after some frequent defenders of the president cast doubt on the story.
Sources close to the White House contend that surveillance of the Trump campaign remains a legitimate issue and the president was right to demand the Justice Department’s inspector general investigate.
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“As is often the case, the mainstream media wants to pretend the president peddles in paranoia, but any honest observer will realize that the campaign was spied on through both electronic and human means,” said Steve Cortes, a former 2016 Trump campaign aide. “Sending a person who’s worked for decades for U.S. and British intelligence to make contacts and build relationships within the Trump campaign, under false pretense, cannot honestly be described as anything other than spying.”
Spygate is Trump’s name for the FBI’s use of at least one confidential informant to make contact with members of his campaign during the 2016 presidential election. “The corrupt Mainstream Media is working overtime not to mention the infiltration of people, Spies (Informants), into my campaign!” Trump tweeted last week. “Surveillance much?”
But several relatively pro-Trump voices said last week that the FBI acted without political motivation to combat Russian electoral interference. Alan Dershowitz, the former Harvard law professor who has backed the president in a number of legal scuffles, said he was “on the way to being persuaded” that it was appropriate though he still wanted to “see the facts.” Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano called the spy claims “baseless.”
The biggest development was House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., one of the nine lawmakers and five Republicans briefed on the issue by the Justice Department at the White House, defending the FBI in an apparent break with GOP legislators who had been raising questions about the Russia probe.
“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got,” Gowdy told Fox News. He later said on CBS, “When the FBI comes into contact with information about what a foreign government may be doing in our election cycle, I think they have an obligation to run it out.”
Gowdy won praise from Democrats and typically anti-Trump editorial boards. The Washington Post called him “one senior Republican with enough decency to admit the obvious.” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said there was “still cause for concern” and her deputy Hogan Gidley told reporters aboard Air Force One that Gowdy and Trump agreed “there’s still not one shred of information that has anything to do with Russia collusion, obstruction of any kind.”
“Just because one influential Capitol Hill Republican who is about to retire says the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign was kosher, doesn’t make it so,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “There are simply too many outstanding questions, ranging from who ordered it to when it was ordered to why it was ordered to why Donald Trump wasn’t briefed about it for Gowdy’s assertions to be accepted as gospel.”
Trump has long complained that his campaign was improperly surveilled, with the Obama administration’s knowledge, and that the Russia investigation has been conducted in a politically biased manner. He seized on the revelations about FBI informant Stefan Halper’s contacts with campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos as proof of both contentions.
“To rationalize such a dramatic tactic, the Obama FBI and DOJ should be able to produce powerful evidence validating this infiltration,” Cortes said. “If they cannot, and I do not believe they can, then the real scandal regarding interference in the 2016 campaign is not about a few Russians messing around on social media, but rather about the Swamp abusing our processes under the false guise of national security.”
“Sadly, it is unsurprising that some Republicans on the Hill and elsewhere don’t see the danger here,” he added.
“Let’s also not forget Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, was fired for misconduct,” O’Connell said. “So, the Spygate drumbeat marches on until further notice.”
What impact it has on Congress or public opinion is less clear. “To be honest with you, I don’t think anybody cares about any of this stuff. It’s all noise,” said Republican strategist John Feehrey. “Gowdy, who is a nice guy, is retiring. So most people look at his comments through that lens.”
