Republicans are not buying the Gowdy-Ryan claims about 'spygate'

PJ Media:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is the latest Republican to attack President Trump’s claim that the FBI wrongly spied on his campaign during the election. This isn’t surprising considering the deepening political divide among Republicans over Trump’s policies, but Ryan, like others siding with the Obama administration, fails to address or explain irregularities in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.

Democrats who have been briefed by the FBI on the investigation say they have seen “no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a ‘spy’ in the Trump campaign, or otherwise failed to follow appropriate procedures and protocols.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy agreed, saying he believed Trump would be “just fine” once he finds out what happened. “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said. Ryan stood by Gowdy’s statement.

One doesn’t have to be party to a secret intelligence meeting to ask some very legitimate questions about the FBI informant and have serious doubts about the conclusions drawn by Gowdy, Ryan, and the bobble-headed cabal of Democrats.

First, let’s put to rest the notion that the outed snitch, Stefan Halper, was just gathering information on Russia and not spying on Trump advisers. Follow the logic here. Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress in no uncertain terms that the full investigation that began on July 31, 2016, was into Russian interference and “the Trump campaign.”

Not Russian interference in general. Not Russian interference into the “campaigns.” The Trump campaign. So, yes, this has a lot — if not everything — to do with Donald J. Trump. Any preliminary investigation involving a covert operation prior to the full investigation would be to find facts relating to the focus of the full investigation. If, therefore, the Trump campaign was a focus of the full investigation, it was also a focus of the preliminary, and any contacts with team members within the scope of the inquiry must be seen in that context.

Second, The New York Times reported that the FBI used a covert human source (spy) to seek “more details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails.” Oh really? Then why was Carter Page, not George Papadopoulos, the first person Halper approached in June, before the FBI had a whiff of Papadopoulos listening to some shady professor with ties to the Clinton Foundation yapping about information from the Russians — information that never materialized and probably wasn’t about actual emails in the first place?
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There is more.

From the stories I have seen, it appears that Halper was not only trying to gather information from certain targets in the Trump campaign but was also aiding and abetting attempts to entrap them.  We do not know it there were other spies placed in the Trump campaign, but we do know that people in the Obama intel and law enforcement community were targetting the Trump campaign and it appears to have been for political reasons and not national security.