House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who’s earning a reputation as a Republican who “cries wolf,” published a social media message this week professing his deep admiration for Donald Trump. The Ohio congressman began his missive, “They spied on his campaign.”
It’s a false claim that Jordan has been pushing for years, as if it were true. It’s not.
A few days earlier, Trump sat down with Fox News’ Howard Kurtz and added new details to this ridiculous story.
TRUMP: They were spying on my campaign!
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2024
HOWARD KURTZ: The spying accusation, as you know, is very much a subject of dispute
TRUMP: It is? pic.twitter.com/vIeqrR1N4i
“They were, Biden and Obama and the whole group, they were spying on my campaign,” the former president claimed, adding, “They heard I was going to run. They started spying on my campaign. That was before I came down the escalator.”
Kurtz reminded his guest, “The spying accusation, as you know, is very much a subject of dispute.”
Trump, incredulous, replied, “It is?”
Yes, actually, it is.
It’s bizarre that the presumptive GOP nominee and his acolytes continue to pretend that this is a real controversy. It’s even more bizarre that Trump, years later, is still tweaking the story with strange new fabrications, as his allies play along.
As regular readers might recall, over the course of his presidency’s first year, Trump seemed quite excited about something he called “Spygate.”
He had a hard time explaining exactly what he thought the story was all about, which in turn led to multiple iterations of the fantasy. In 2017, for example, Trump invested a fair amount of energy pretending that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. (There was no such wiretapping.) A year later, “Spygate” involved an imagined scheme in which the FBI put a spy in his 2016 political operation. (That didn’t happen, either.) In time, the Republican suggested that it wasn’t Obama who spied on him, but rather, it was Hillary Clinton, who left public office several years before Trump launched his political career. Now, evidently, Americans are supposed to believe that officials in the Obama/Biden administration were so aggressive in launching an espionage operation that they spied on the Trump campaign before there was a Trump campaign, which is every bit as absurd as it sounds. For much of the Republican Party, the basic idea behind this entire narrative is that some Trump campaign communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies while those agencies were conducting surveillance on Russian targets. But that really doesn’t do Team Trump any favors: It’s an argument rooted in the fact that the Trump campaign partnered with Russian allies during a Russian attack on U.S. elections, which in turn meant that some of the GOP operation’s messages were inadvertently caught up in routine intelligence gathering. Given these facts, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the former president feels the need to make up new details about a story that he’s lied about for years? This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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