President Trump is complaining on Twitter that the FBI didn’t warn him about the threat posed by Russia during the last campaign.
The problem is that’s not true.
In a Thursday morning tweet, he paraphrased a clip from Rush Limbaugh’s radio program which was played Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.
Trump also added a Trumpian parenthetical — “(hoax)” — to further characterize his dismissive view of the counterintelligence finding that Russia would try to infiltrate a presidential campaign.
RUSH LIMBAUGH “If the FBI was so concerned, and if they weren’t targeting Trump, they should have told Trump. If they were really concerned about the Russians infiltrating a campaign (hoax), then why not try to stop it? Why not tell Trump? Because they were pushing this scam.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018
“Great insight,” Hannity said after the clip, before turning to an extended interview with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, wherein he said there were “guys with ethical issues” at the Justice Department — “You got a group there, a lynching mob.”
The claim that the FBI did not tell Trump Russia would target him and his campaign is factually inaccurate. Shortly after he became the Republican nominee in 2016, Trump himself received a “high-level counterintelligence briefing by senior FBI officials,” according to NBC News, that Russia would try to infiltrate or spy on his campaign. Hillary Clinton received a similar briefing.
To Trump and his conspiracy-minded allies, the goal was to sting Trump. “Why not warn Trump, hey, be on the lookout, the Russians, we think they’re already inside your campaign, Mr. Trump,” Limbaugh continued later on in his radio show. “None of that happened. Because they want, apparently, to catch all of this happening so that they can associate Trump with it.”
Trump has been pushing this false narrative for a while. He asked something similar over the weekend: “why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?”
With Spies, or “Informants” as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or “Justice” contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018
Again, Trump personally received a warning from the FBI of just such a problem. Both he and Clinton were asked to report any “suspicious overtures” to their campaign. According to the Moscow Project, “at least 22 high-level campaign officials and Trump advisors were aware of contacts between the Trump team and Russia” — and the campaign did not report any of the 70-plus contacts these advisers had with Russians.
There are many examples. Beyond Donald Trump Jr.’s famous meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian agent, he also exchanged messages with WikiLeaks, and had dinner at an NRA convention with a Russian banker with close ties to Putin. Former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos told Trump, per a court filing, that he had talked with connections that could put Trump in direct contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Paul Manafort, then chair of the campaign, offered to give a briefing on the Trump campaign to a Russian billionaire friend with close ties to Putin.
The CIA had actually become aware of some of these contacts and alerted the FBI, making the campaign’s reported failure to disclose them even more problematic.
Publicly, in the summer of 2016, Trump was dismissing the idea that Russia could be behind the theft of Democratic emails, after actually inviting Russia to send any of Hillary Clinton’s emails they had to the press, in a news conference.
Trump has also recently attacked the FBI for, as he calls it, “spying” on his campaign. This is an incorrect understanding of what the FBI was doing, as even several normally-supportive conservative allies have pointed out. To hear Trump, or his lawyer Rudy Giuliani tell it, the FBI implanted an undercover spy in the campaign to interfere with it. In reality, the FBI used an informant to conduct a normal counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.