Former Vice President Joe Biden leaves after speaking at a rally by striking union workers in Dorchester, Mass., on April 18, 2019. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Biden’s Presidential Bid Puts Spotlight on Spygate Scandal

Joe Biden’s April 25 announcement that he is running for president has raised questions about what he knew about the spying on the Trump campaign as vice president under the Obama administration.

During the 2016 elections, officials within the Obama administration—including those at the Cabinet level—spied on the Trump campaign in a number of ways.

The known methods of spying include the FBI’s FISA warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the unmasking of members of the Trump campaign by Obama officials Susan Rice and Samantha Power, informant Stefan Halper, national security letters, and foreign intelligence gathering.

The spying on the Trump campaign is currently under investigation by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Attorney General William Barr has said he is personally looking into the matter as well.

“[Joe Biden] was vice president and presided over the biggest political scandal in history,” Jason Meister, an advisory board member for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told The Epoch Times.

“High ranking Obama-Biden appointees used a phony dossier … to fraudulently obtain a warrant from the FISA court to wiretap, phone-tap, and email-tap Trump and his associates who were all private citizens.”

The dossier, which played a key role in the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who has been credited with creating the dossier, alongside Glenn Simpson, co-founder of political research firm Fusion GPS, spread it to members of the media and Congress, as well as the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department.

A nearly two-year-long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, concluded in March, showed that there was no evidence to support the claims contained in the dossier.

“What did [Biden] know? He was vice president, did he know anything of what was going on?” Meister asked. “That is a big cloud over candidate Joe Biden.”

Marc Ruskin, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a 27-year veteran of the FBI, believes it is highly unlikely that the Obama White House wasn’t aware of the investigations into the Trump campaign.

“I can’t imagine a set of parameters or circumstances where the director of the FBI, or the director of intelligence services, would have restrained themselves and not informed the White House,” Ruskin told The Epoch Times.

Ruskin said that “a very strong argument could be made that the White House, at the very least, was aware of what was going on, and perhaps complicit, and this is why a thorough investigation needs to be conducted.”

Key questions remain about the investigation: Why was the FBI using false information paid for by a political candidate to investigate an opposing candidate, what role did unofficial foreign intelligence play in the investigation, and did then-President Barack Obama have any direct involvement himself?

Meister said: “We need to know, what did Obama know and when did he know it? Was Obama authorizing the spying?”

A key player in starting the investigation into the Trump campaign was Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who has acknowledged in public interviews and in congressional testimony that the agency had obtained unofficial foreign intelligence on the Trump campaign, which Brennan then passed on to the FBI.

“You have a mix of intelligence officer chiefs, such as Brennan, [James] Clapper, and [James] Comey, participating along with officials who are political officials. They really shouldn’t,” Ruskin said.

“In my experience, intelligence officers in the intelligence services and special agents in the FBI abhor this type of activity, the fact that their leaders were engaging with essentially politically motivated behavior.”