Your guide to the anti-FBI conspiracy theories rippling through conservative media
January 25, 2018 ----The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website January 24, 2018.
https://www.dfl3cd.org/your-guide-to-the-anti-fbi-conspiracy-theories-rippling-through-conservative-media/

There was a window of about a week at the end of 2016 when the FBI and its then-director, James B. Comey, were two of Donald Trump’s favorite things in the world. From the moment news broke that the bureau was investigating new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Trump celebrated the FBI — and its investigation — on as many occasions as possible.

After the election, that relationship soured. With news reports that there was an active investigation into Russian efforts to swing the campaign to Trump and, subsequently, that there was an investigation into Trump’s campaign itself (an investigation confirmed by Comey in early 2017), Trump lashed out at U.S. intelligence agencies.

In March, Trump publicly accused intelligence agencies of having wiretapped Trump Tower before the election, an accusation that was quickly revealed to be both baseless and untrue. Unlike Trump’s fuming about the then-still-nebulous investigation into meddling, though, the response to Trump’s wiretapping accusation from his allies was to try to defend it — regardless of how challenging it was to defend.

Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus “knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements,” Howard Kurtz writes in his new book about the Trump administration. Outside the White House, the response was similar, with allies including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) working to prove, if not that Trump Tower was wiretapped, at least that Trump was the focus of an unfair, politically motivated investigation initiated by the Obama administration. The focus of the wiretapping charge evolved into the Obama administration having de-anonymized the identities of Trump allies in surveillance reports, an act that Trump eventually called “the real story.”

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