The Obama administration tried to take over the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign, The Hill’s John Solomon reported on Fox News Thursday night. And according to Solomon, the FBI began spying on members of the Trump campaign to gather the intelligence that ultimately justified the collusion investigation, weeks or even months before the FBI had a formal predicate.
“That’s very important. The rules say you can’t use sources until you have a predicated investigation. The predication is July 31, 2016,” Solomon told Fox host Sean Hannity. The investigative reporter said he had sources and documents backing up his claim that he would be making public in his report in The Hill on Friday.
He stressed that informants were making contacts with the Trump officials and providing information to the FBI “much, much earlier than July 31.”
The second part of his bombshell report, Solomon explained, deals with internal FBI communications between former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, his mistress Lisa Page, and others discussing how the Obama White House was trying to take over the investigation.
“The words ‘the White House is running this’ are clear in the text message,” Solomon told Hannity, adding that “the FBI agents who opened this case feared that Barack Obama was weak on national security and wouldn’t do what they needed for Russia.”
He said, “The political elements of the administration were trying to intrude on the FBI investigation.”
Solomon’s report does not square with what former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes wrote about the investigation in his new book “The World as It Is,” which is set to be published next week by Random House.
In his book, Rhodes reportedly claims that Obama didn’t know there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible contacts with Russia until he left office.
Rhodes said that “neither he nor Mr. Obama knew at that time that there was an F.B.I. investigation,” according to the New York Times, which obtained an advance copy of the book.
The failed novelist claims in the book that he learned about the FBI investigation from news reports after he left office.
[Click here for a list of eight other times Obama was oddly in the dark about his biggest controversies.]
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