Whether the FBI's informant for the Trump campaign should be considered a spy is a matter of semantics, National Review contributing editor Andy McCarthy said Tuesday.
"I don't see it being different from being a spy," McCarthy told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "When I was a prosecutor, when informants worked for the government, when I spoke to the jury, I called them the informant.
"When the defense lawyers talked to the jury, they called them the spy, and everyone knew exactly who everybody was talking about, and why they described them the way they described them."
President Donald Trump has been using the terms "spy" and Spygate to describe the actions of the Department of Justice and the FBI, including directing the spy accusation toward Stefan Halper, the informant and university professor who reportedly met with Trump campaign aides George Papadopoulos, Sam Clovis and Carter Page during the 2016 race,
"To me, all this talk about the nomenclature is beside the point," McCarthy said Tuesday. "The question is, did they have a legitimate basis to be using informants, to be using the government's awesome counterintelligence powers, including FISA surveillance, under circumstances where we have a norm in this country against political spying, particularly in connection with elections?"
He added that he does not think, based on what is known now, that the DOJ and FBI had cause to use an informant to investigate the Trump campaign.
"Of course, what we have been asking for is disclosure of why they did it," said McCarthy. "On the basis of what we know now, what they put out, is that they may have had some reasonable suspicions about Russia on behalf of a handful of people and some of the things that Donald Trump had to say during the campaign.
"But it's woefully short of the kind of egregious misconduct that they had to reasonably suspect before you violate the norm of political spying against our election, and that's why we have asked again and again, what was your basis for doing this?"
He said he believes that the reason people with top security clearances were not told about the surveillance was "because they didn't have an adequate basis to do it."
"That suspicion is fortified by the fact that every time they tell us they can't tell us something, they claim it's because of national security and then when the pressure gets ratcheted up and that stuff gets unredacted we find out it has nothing to do with national security," he said.
"On the other hand, because of the nature of this, because you're actually in a situation where the incumbent Democrat administration is using these awesome national security counterintelligence towers to spy on the Republican campaign for the presidency, because of how fraught that is with politics, you would expect that this would go very high up the chain of command."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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