IG report rebuts the left's false narrative that Obama did not spy on Trump

Margot Cleveland:

Last week, President Trump triggered the left when he tweeted a Photoshopped picture that portrayed former President Barack Obama perched midair outside Trump Tower, binoculars and listening device in hand.

The liberal outlet Vox condemned the president for his “increasingly bad tweets,” before declaring “there’s no evidence the Obama administration spied on Trump.” Vox then regurgitated the false narrative that, while the FBI did surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page, “that didn’t happen until after Page left the campaign.”

For years, conservatives tried to correct the record, noting that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order gave the government access to Page’s past emails and other electronic communications with members of the Trump campaign, but the mainstream media ignored this reality. That the liberal and legacy press continue to push this narrative now, following the release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse, is beyond baffling, because the IG report established that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign, and the spying was much worse than previously thought.

The FISA warrants, of course, gave the FBI authority to spy on Page, and now that the government has finally made a mea culpa, we know that surveillance was illegal. But contrary to the continuing narrative, that spying wasn’t limited to Page. It included internal Trump campaign communications.

The IG report acknowledged this, noting that Gabriel Sanz-Rexach, the chief of the Office of Intelligence’s Operations Section, explained “that the evidence collected during the first FISA application time period demonstrated that Carter Page had access to individuals in Russia and he was communicating with people in the Trump campaign.”

Horowitz’s report added that, “based on our review of the Woods Files and communications between the FBI and [Office of Intelligence], we identified a few emails between Page and members of the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign concerning campaign related matters.” The Woods file is a record of compliance with procedures intended to “ensure accuracy with regard to…the facts supporting probable cause.”

Don’t let the “few emails” mislead: The FISA surveillance didn’t just accidently sweep in a few random campaign communications. Rather, the “few” campaign communications the IG identified came from its limited review of the Woods file and select FBI communications. The IG report made this point clear in a footnote, stating it did not review the entirety of the FISA-intercepted communications—only those “pertinent to” the IG’s review of FISA abuse.
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There is more.

Page was used as a means of getting to the communications of the Trump campaign.  The "two-hop" rule that allows the spies to look at who Page communicated with and then who those people communicated with put the FBI inside the Trump campaign.  The whole operation was based on the bogus Russian collusion hoax pushed by Hillary Clinton who secretly paid Fusion GPS for the hit.