Former President Donald Trump told conservative talk show host Glenn Beck Tuesday the moment he knew for sure Democrats were spying on him.
“You said from the very beginning, ‘They’re spying on us.’ How did you know that was happening?” Beck asked during a phone interview for his radio show, wondering if it was just a “gut” instinct.
“I think it was a combination of things, but I tell you, the world blew up when I did that,” Trump responded.
Trump said the moment came during his 2016 contest against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when he was watching a television show — he did not identify the program — and “somebody suggested” that then-President Barack Obama’s White House was spying on the Trump campaign.
“I felt there was something strange going on, really strange, and I just put it out,” Trump said.
“I got a call like two minutes later from the head of communications saying … ‘the wires are burning up. They’re smoking,’” despite it being a Saturday, as he recalled.
“And now I know why,” Trump continued. “Because, they said, ‘Oh my God, they caught us.’”
The FBI, under the Obama administration, launched an investigation in the summer of 2016 to determine if Trump’s campaign was colluding with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential race.
Former President Trump tells me how he KNEW the Clinton campaign was spying on him: "I felt there was something strange going on, and I just put it out…I got a call like 2 minutes later from the Head of Communications saying…'the wires are BURNING UP.' And now I know why." pic.twitter.com/Vdw2H9l9IF
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) February 15, 2022
A nearly two-year investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller determined Trump’s campaign had not.
In October 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia probe after testifying the investigation appeared to lack the necessary predicate to be undertaken by the FBI.
Barr said the Obama administration was spying on Trump, a member of the opposite political party, and the attorney general wanted to know why.
Durham has indicted three people so far in his probe: Michael Sussman, an attorney formerly with the Perkins Coie, a law firm with deep attachments to the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign; former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith; and Democratic operative Igor Danchenko.
According to a Fox News report Monday, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a former Texas congressman who previously served as a federal prosecutor, told Durham on several occasions that he believed his office had passed on “enough evidence” to Durham to support the indictments of “multiple people” in relation to the origins of the Russia probe.
Ratcliffe’s office had provided Durham with more than 1,000 pages of material by October 2020, according to a Fox News report from the time.
On Monday, Fox reported that “sources pointed to one key piece of declassified intelligence revealing that intelligence community officials within the CIA forwarded an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton purportedly approving ‘a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.’”
According to a Friday court filing by Durham, the Clinton campaign hatched a plot to infiltrate computer servers at Trump Tower and later the White House in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” linking Trump to Russia.
That information was then passed on to the FBI by Sussmann, according to Durham.
“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations” of wrongdoing by Trump, Durham noted in the court filing.
A tech executive brought in to conduct the server infiltration “indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign,” the filing states.
“Law Firm-1” is unnamed in the filing but is described as “a large international law firm that was then serving as counsel to the Clinton Campaign.” That describes Perkins Coie.
Was one of these VIPs Clinton?
In October 2016, the then-candidate tweeted at least twice in support of the false narratives as she tried to smear Trump just days before the election.
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016
Trump’s instincts have proven right regarding a lot of matters, and it looks like they served him well again in relation to Democrats spying on his campaign.