“On the Holmes Front, with Frank Holmes”

A series of political insiders and legal experts say former President Barack Obama knew his administration spied on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — he could even go to jail over it.

An investigative specialist, a former federal prosecutor, and one leading experts on the US intelligence community agree Obama may have leveraged the most powerful position in the world to rig the 2016 election.

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The New York Times admitted the Obama administration had planted an “informant” – the paper refused to admit he was a “spy” – in the Trump campaign in the summer and fall of 2016.

The spy effort, known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane,” began July 31, 2016 – just 10 days after Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination.

The revelation turned Washington’s political establishment upside down – and threatens to put some of its members in the slammer.

“You can bet [Obama] was briefed on this operation against the campaign, especially given its sensitive nature,” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told Fox Business this week. “President Obama should disclose what he knew.”

Trump has demanded an investigation into whether the feds infiltrated his campaign for political purposes – and if Obama was behind it.

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“Obama knew all about this and the notion that he didn’t is ludicrous,” said former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova.

The smoking gun came during a meeting on January 5, 2017, he said.

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, NSA advisor Susan Rice, and acting Attorney General Sally Yates huddled together “to figure out a way to explain” the investigation and spy embed, diGenova said. “They knew since Hillary didn’t win, now it was going to come out and they needed a story.”

He called former administration officials’ denials nothing more than “gaslighting.”

Andrew McCarthy, a former terror prosecutor, agrees.

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“The White House had to know about this from the start,” McCarthy, who writes for National Review, told Washington’s WMAL radio. “The Susan Rice…‘CYA’ memo she wrote going out the door makes that clear.”

That’s the whole point of this kind of investigation, he said.

“Counterintelligence is done for the president,” McCarthy explained. “The purpose of it is…to enable the president to…(protect) the country from foreign threats to national security.”

But what if Obama abused that constitutional authority in order to carry out his own top priority: Keeping Democrats in power?

It’s not like Obama hasn’t been guilty of this before: the IRS harassment of the Tea Party, covering up Hillary Clinton’s homebrew e-mail server, prosecuting Sheriff Joe Arpaio on the flimsiest pretexts – and the list goes on and on.

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Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Clovis said the spying scandal looked like one huge phishing effort.

The FBI’s spy – Stefan Halper of Cambridge University – struck up a relationship with Carter Page after Page visited Moscow. Page referred him to Clovis, who said Halper was mild-mannered in their meeting and made a boring lecture about China.

But when Clovis introduced Halper to George Papadopoulos, a low-level Trump campaign official with questionable ties to Russia, Halper bared his fangs.

Halper “used Carter Page to get to me and he used me to get to George. George was the target,” Clovis told the Washington Examiner. “His goal was to drag George into this to say the Trump campaign tried to get access to those emails from Russia.”

Halper aggressively pressed George over whether he knew about Russia’s hacking of the Clinton campaign’s e-mail server. People present at the meeting believed Halper was wearing a wire to entrap the campaign…and he still got nothing.

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The Obama administration just used meetings to make its spying on the Trump campaign seem more plausible to the secret FISA court – and keep the warrants coming, Clovis said.

The top-down abuse of national intelligence makes this scandal worse than Watergate, according to political guru Michael Barone.

“Has an outgoing administration ever worked to delegitimize and dislodge its successor like this?” he wrote in the New York Post. The most “dangerous departure from (constitutional) norms may be that of the Obama officials seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”

That could be more than a political scandal: It could be a crime.

Halper has deep ties to Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency and received $400,000 from the US Defense Department around this time.

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If this was a backdoor pay-off for spying, then it’s a criminal offense, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

“The people involved would – or at least should – go to prison,” IBD writes. “And that, in turn, could lead to the ultimate irony: Obama asking Trump for a pardon.”

Trump has pardoned patriots like Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza.

He should see that Obama and his ilk, who tried to trash the Constitution and overturn the will of the American people, are frog-marched into a maximum security prison for a long time.

— Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”