ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The New York Times served up a preemptive attempt at damage control in front of the pending Inspector General’s report on the FBI and DOJ’s conduct during the Clnton email investigation which is due out any day now.

However, hidden inside the obvious attempt to justify the dubious origins of and tactics employed in the FBI counter intelligence investigation into the Trump presidential campaign 100 days before election day in 2016 is the obvious fact that the FBI, under Barack Obama, launched an FBI investigation against Donald Trump’s campaign.

OK. Actually, it’s not hidden. It’s right there in plain sight. But the way the mainstream media is covering the Times article, you’d think it was the biggest buried lede in the history of journalism.

In March 2017, President Donald Trump sent out the following tweet:

1. Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! 2. Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! 3. I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election! 4. How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

At the time the claim was ridiculed and decried. Trump was called a liar and much worse. Only a handful of observers looked at the facts at hand and reached a conclusion other than the sanctimonious claims made by mainstream journalists.

Radio talk show host and former Justice Department official Mark Levin was one of them. He used published reports in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to piece together the road map of FISA surveillance and spying that the New York Times confirmed Wednesday.

Here’s Levin at the time:

“This is the case made by the New York Times, The Washington Post, McClatchy and the rest of them. I just put it together,” radio host Mark Levin said Sunday as he quoted media reports to back up President Donald Trump claim on Twitter that the Obama White House had spied on him. “The evidence is overwhelming. This is about the Obama Administration spying. And, the question isn’t whether it spied; we know they went to the FISA court twice. The question is the EXTENT of the spying,” Levin said in a Fox News Channel interview.

And now, over 14 months, $10 million and a special counsel appointment later, the New York Times confirms what Levin and many observers have been piecing together:

The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.

Let’s be clear, The DOJ and FBI, under Barack Obama, investigated and spied on the Trump presidential campaign complete with wiretaps, informants and moles. They also concealed the activities from congressional oversight for months.

And, as far as we’ve been told, the entire premise of this operation was a comment made by George Papadopoulos, a low-level campaign volunteer, and the unverified opposition research known as the “Steele Dossier” which was paid for by the Clinton campaign.

Now, tell me again how this isn’t worse than Watergate?

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