The new memos released Thursday by Director of National intelligence John Ratcliffe detail the FBI’s conduct during a mid-August 2016 counterintelligence briefing, Trump’s first as the GOP nominee, in which an agent was secretly inserted to gather evidence of later-disproven Russia collusion.
The agent’s post-briefing memo recorded near verbatim the specific questions the future president was asking intelligence officials, even comments Trump made about his youngest son, as well as sizing up national security adviser Michael Flynn’s behavior,
“Trump asked the following question, ‘Joe, are the Russians bad? Because they have more numbers are they worse than the Chinese?’” Agent Joseph Pientka wrote in his summary memo of the briefing with then-candidate Trump. “Writer responded by saying both countries are bad. The numbers of IOs present in the U.S. is not an indicator of the severity of the threat. Writer reminded Trump the Chinese asymmetrical presence in the U.S.”
Republicans expressed outage at the tactic.
“Now it’s clear the FBI was spying directly on Donald Trump as early as August 2016. In fact, it looks like the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation was just a pretext to open up a massive spying operation on Trump’s campaign,” Rep. Dunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee whose report in 2018 unraveled the false narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. – READ MORE
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