Ousted FBI director, James Comey, said he doesn’t think of his agency’s electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign as “spying.”
America’s former top cop responded Thursday to comments from Attorney General Barr that he had a basis for believing the Obama Administration “spied” on the Trump campaign.
“With respect to Barr’s comments, I really don’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about spying on the campaign,” Comey said during an appearance in Sausalito, Calif., at the Hewlett Foundation's Verify cybersecurity conference.
“It’s concerning,” Comey continued, “because the FBI, the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying.”
"If the attorney general has come to the belief that that should be called spying, wow, that's going to require a whole lot of conversations inside the Department of Justice," Comey added.
As recently noted in the Epoch Times, there are at least five different types of spying of the Trump campaign that are already publicly known:
1. FISA Warrant: Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was targeted with a FISA warrant by the FBI in October 2016. The warrant was subsequently renewed three times for 90-day periods. Other members of the Trump campaign might have had FISA warrants on them, as well.
2. Unmasking: Hundreds of so-called unmasking requests were made for the identities of members of the Trump campaign in intelligence reports. The House Intelligence Committee has so far identified Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, and former CIA Director John Brennan, as having filed such requests.
3. Undercover Informant: The FBI used Stefan Halper, an undercover agent, to infiltrate the Trump campaign. He contacted Trump campaign associates Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Halper has ties to the CIA, as well as MI6.
4. National Security Letters: The use of national security letters to target the Trump campaign was first revealed by officials to The New York Times in a May 16, 2018, article. National security letters allow the FBI to secretly subpoena customer records from banks, phone companies, internet service providers, and others.
5. Foreign Intelligence: British intelligence agency GCHQ provided officials within the CIA with information on the Trump campaign as early as late 2015, The Guardian reported in April 2017. Then-head of GCHQ Robert Hannigan also provided Brennan with sensitive information on the Trump campaign on a “director level” in the summer of 2016.
6. Reverse Targeting: Brennan admitted in an Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that the CIA had obtained the communications of Americans associated with the Trump campaign through what appears to have been the use of reverse targeting. “We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA’s foreign intelligence collection authorities,” Brennan said.
Comey’s former colleague, James Clapper, has himself referred to their surveillance of the Trump campaign as “spying.” Appearing last year on “The View,” Clapper said President Trump should be “happy” that a “spy” was placed in his campaign.