Dokumenter som Kongressen har fået udleveret indikerer at FBI placerede en agent dybt inde i Trump-kampagnen.

Justitsministeriet har kæmpet med næb og klør mod Kongressens krav om at få udleveret bestemte dokumenter. Torsdag måtte ministeriet kaste håndklædet i ringen.

Kimberley Strassel i Wall Street Journal har fulgt tvekampen dag for dag: Lederen af efterretningskomitéen i Repræsentanternes Hus, Devin Nunes, kom på sporet af en person/et navn som indikerede, at denne havde spioneret mod Trump-kampagnen under dække af at være en almindelig civil.

Dette er i så fald en meget alvorlig sag. FBI har allerede brugt Steele-rapporten, som endnu ikke er verificeret, til at få lov til at spionere mod Trump-kampagnen. Rapporten var bestilt og betalt af Trumps modstander, Hillary Clinton.

Hvis Justitsministeriet og FBI også har plantet en spion i Trump-lejren, vil bægeret snart være fuldt. Hoveder må rulle.

The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.

Vicejustitsminister Rod Rosenstein uddelte en verbal skideballe i sidste uge, hvor han påstod at Kongressen bedrev «afpresning» overfor justitsministeriet og det ville han ikke finde sig i. Udtalelsen vakte opsigt. Det er Kongressens forfatningsmæssige rolle at føre kontrol med den udøvende magt.

-Nunes var i sin fulde ret, sagde Paul Ryan torsdag.

Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.

This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

About That FBI ‘Source’
Did the bureau engage in outright spying against the 2016 Trump campaign?