Rand Paul: ‘Somebody Was Spying on the Trump Campaign’

Jeff Poor

Monday on the Fox News Channel, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned President Donald Trump’s detractors who argued there was no validity to his assertion that he had his “wires tapped” in a tweet earlier this month.

According to Paul, most people acknowledge Trump’s former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, a member of Trump’s presidential campaign, had been spied upon and it is coming down to what the definition of wiretap is.

“You know what’s funny about that — everybody admits that somebody spied on Mike Flynn, and he was part of the Trump campaign,” Paul said. “So, it sounds like what the president said has already been proven to be true. Somebody listened to Mike Flynn’s conversation and revealed it to the press, which is a felony, and you don’t do that unless you eavesdropped on his phone conversation.”

“The media has been kind of confused on this,” he continued. “The think there has to be an old-fashioned bug place on a wire. If you haven’t looked recently, most of our cell phones don’t have wires. ‘Wiretapping’ is a broad term for surveillance. Somebody spied on Mike Flynn then illegally released that conversation.”

Paul went on to add there may have been some “imprecision” in the language of Trump’s tweet, but Flynn’s job was still a casualty of someone committing an “illegal felony.”

“I don’t think it’s really important whether or not — was it specifically Donald Trump versus his campaign,” Paul said. “I think most of the conversations are that they had surveillance on the Trump campaign at large. And I think the fact that nobody is denying the fact that they did release somebody from the campaign — Mike Flynn, they did release his conversations, that the spying actually occurred. So, it’s funny that we’re arguing this point when in reality, most people have admitted it.”

“I think there’s a lot of imprecision in the language when you look at a tweet,” he continued. “But I think ‘wiretapping’ to Donald Trump probably meant spying. And I think ‘Donald Trump’ or the ‘campaign’ also probably meant Mike Flynn. So I think really we’re arguing circles around something that most people are admitting that somebody was spying on the Trump campaign and that actually Mike Flynn lost his job because of an illegal felony in which somebody released the results of spying on the Trump campaign.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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