On Monday, while most Americans were remembering the sacrifice of fallen service members, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., gave instruction to the mainstream media via tweet. The chief Democrat of the U.S. Senate wants President Donald Trump to be taken to task for using the term “Spygate” and insists that there is “absolutely no evidence of a spy” being placed in the 2016 Trump campaign.
Two things:
First, to quote the great Mark Levin, “the evidence is overwhelming” that there was an informant involved in disseminating intelligence about the Trump campaign to the CIA and the FBI. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported it. The Daily Caller connected the dots and identified Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor with ties to the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI-6, as the “informant.” The argument over whether an “informant” is the same thing as a “spy” is semantics. Halper was tasked by the FBI to meet Trump campaign officials and report any evidence of Russian collusion (there is still no evidence so far). An individual who gathers intelligence and reports it sounds an awful lot like a spy.
Second, who does Chuck Schumer think he is to give orders to the mainstream media? A United States government official has no business giving editorial direction to reporters — and, of course, it’s dishonest direction at that. The fact is — reporters are still supposed to use facts — that Trump’s campaign was surveilled and there was at least one individual, Halper, who approached members of the campaign under false pretenses to gather information to report to the government.
Actually, one more thing.
As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out in his column from the weekend, the spy name game is a distraction from the real question: On what grounds did the Obama administration begin a counterintelligence investigation using “police state tactics” against the Trump campaign?
“In the end, it is not about who the spies are. It is about why they were spying,” McCarthy writes.
Chuck Schumer doesn’t want that question answered, and so here he is distracting from the issue at hand.
