It only took an instant for the tables to turn.
During a news conference Wednesday at the United Nations, President Donald Trump took a question about the current Ukraine controversy and turned it neatly back on the questioner.
And in the process, he shifted public attention onto the Obama administration and its role in the events surrounding the 2016 election.
The issue arose when CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers asked Trump: “Can you explain to the American people why it is appropriate for an American president to ask a foreign leader about a political rival? And what you would have said if you discovered that Barack Obama, perhaps, had asked a foreign leader for information about you” during the campaign for the presidency.
Trump didn’t miss a beat.
“Well, that’s what he did, isn’t it? Really, when you think about it,” Trump said, referring to the origins of the Russia “collusion” hoax that clouded Trump’s election and first two years in office. “Look, that whole witch hunt was started and, hopefully that will all come out.”
Check out the video here:
.@EamonJavers asks President Trump why it would be appropriate to ask a foreign leader about a political rival and what he would've said if Obama had perhaps asked a foreign leader about him during a campaign.
Trump says his call was "perfect" and he "didn't do it"
66 people are talking about this
The exchange was largely ignored in coverage of the news-packed day, though liberal outlets like Newsweek and HuffPost deigned to notice it.
The lead sentence on the Newsweek story used the words “without offering any evidence” to describe Trump’s statement, while HuffPost disparaged Trump’s statement right in the headline: “Trump Baselessly Claims Obama Asked Foreign Leaders For Intel On Him.”
Leaving aside the important point that Trump did not ask the Ukraine president for information about a political rival, his answer to the question was dead on.
And if there’s a semantic objection to Trump’s words — possibly a “foreign leader” was not involved — they’re missing Trump’s point, probably deliberately.
There is now no question that American intelligence agencies under then-President Barack Obama were working with foreigners to spy on the Trump campaign. Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence agent, was on the payroll of the FBI that was fully aware of his anti-Trump animus.
And it was the Australian government that passed on to the FBI the tip that Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos might have information related to Russia and the Trump campaign (at least that’s the FBI’s story).
In fact, the whole “Crossfire Hurricane” operation — the FBI’s code name for the Trump investigation — is chockablock with foreigners in prominent roles, like Steele, Alexander Downer, the former Australian high commissioner to the U.K., and the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud.
Much of the investigation had links to London, as even The New York Times described one meeting from right out of a Le Carre novel involving Papadopoulos, an American Cambridge professor named Stefan Halper and a woman who was apparently Halper’s “assistant.”
To say the Obama FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election had an international flavor would be an understatement. And it’s almost impossible to believe that much or all of all of that — the Australian contacts about Papadopoulos, the FBI’s operations in London — was not known of and approved at some very high levels by the foreign governments in question.
To say the agents conducting the investigation of Trump had an overwhelming bias against Trump would not even come close to the truth. The FBI’s Peter Strzok was fanatically determined to stop ensure the Trump campaign failed, and he was getting plenty of help from his employers, including former FBI Director James Comey.
All of that adds up to Trump’s essential point — that Obama and his minions had trafficked with foreign nationals to damage him politically in the run-up to the 2016 election.
And as anyone who’s been awake for the past three years knows, they the deep state’s anti-Trump efforts haven’t stopped.
“What [Democrats] have done to this country is a disgrace,” Trump said on Wednesday. “They’ve hurt this country very badly, and no other president should have to go through what I’ve gone through.”
Any fair-minded person could understand that statement.
But even Trump critics should be able to see that in that Wednesday answer, Trump turned the tables on the question completely.
And in the process, he raised questions once again about the Obama administration that the mainstream media has no interest in ever answering.
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