Setups...

Obama-era officials like former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have cast the effort to investigate Russian influence in the Trump campaign as a standard counterintelligence operation. As such, they were just doing their duty.

If foreign entities were attempting seriously to subvert the Trump campaign, it would have made most sense immediately to warn Donald Trump. Once alerted he could have insulated his campaign, and worked actively with the Intelligence Community to expose the malign foreign network.

But the intelligence community treated his campaign like a target. Instead of helping Trump block Russia from penetrating his organization, it seems more like the agencies were hoping to discover that a collusion network was up and running.

The CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center soon became a “conduit to the FBI” feeding information about alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. But as House testimony from Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos reveals, many such contacts were setups seeking to entrap people tied to Trump. Papadopoulos recently tweeted to Brennan that the assets the CIA “weaponized … are being outed in London, Canberra and Rome,” and that “foreign governments are now cooperating with the Trump administration to out the rest.

” Does the activity Papadopoulos alleges sound like “spying?” It certainly uses the tools of the trade,