Former White House deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland Friday called the news that an FBI briefing on election interference in 2016 to then-candidate Donald Trump, Gov. Chris Christie, and Michael Flynn was instead a fishing mission to gather information on them "simply extraordinary."
"It turns out those briefings were not really to warn the Trump administration about other people spying on them," said McFarland on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "They were covers, They were excuses, for the FBI to spy on us. That's the most egregious abuse of power that I've seen in a long time."
McFarland said that when she was with the administration, she often set up defensive briefings for the National Security Council and the White House staff to warn about potential issues concerning spying and how to watch out for the dangers. Such briefings, she said, were not held to gather information on people attending them.
Trump has long maintained that the Obama administration was spying on him, and McFarland pointed out that the officials with that administration "all took notes" of their activities, partly because they thought they could "blame the boss" if they got caught and partly because they never thought their actions would be revealed.
"This is not anonymous sources leaking; these are actual documents and pieces of paper, text messages, and emails," she said. "They are starting to be released from midlevel people. My question is, once those documents are released, it usually indicates that the Justice Department is done with them ... maybe it's an indication that other heads will fall soon."
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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