Newt Gingrich: It's Not 'Conceivable' Obama Was Unaware the FBI Was Spying on Trump Campaign
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that he believes knowledge about spying into the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 went all the way to the top of the Barack Obama administration.
The Trump campaign initially was placed under surveillance in October 2016, while the election between Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton remained up in the air.
Federal officials have admitted that a since-discredited dossier about Trump was used to help get a warrant to conduct surveillance, leading to assertions from critics that intelligence officials based their surveillance on claims they knew were bogus.
The initial investigation later mushroomed into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, leading to the investigation of former special counsel Robert Mueller, which found no truth to the allegations.
Gingrich appeared Sunday on WNYM-AM radio’s “The Cats Roundtable” hosted by John Catsimatidis and was asked about allegations that senior officials in the Obama administration, and perhaps the then-president himself, knew what was really going on.
“With everything we’re learning from the inspector general’s report, how is it conceivable that the attorney general and the president didn’t know about it?” Gingrich said.
“So, part one is to go back and look at 2015, 2016, and ask, given what a hands-on and dynamic president that Barack Obama was, do you really believe all these things happened and the attorney general and the president didn’t know it?” he said.
In past interviews, the former Republican congressman has indicated that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had extensive knowledge of surveillance into the Trump campaign.
Gingrich said there is a crisis of confidence in the system and that to address it, former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe must be prosecuted for violating Justice Department rules.
“Now, how can we not prosecute Comey? How can we not prosecute McCabe? How can we say that they’ve done all the terrible things that the inspector general said they did, but they’re somehow above the law?” he said.
“People are not going to have any faith in the system until people who are guilty are prosecuted and are treated like everybody else. People are not going to have any faith in the system,” he said, later adding, “It’s clear that no matter how bad they were, the fix is in and they’re not going to be prosecuted.”
Gingrich called for the release of all documents related to the surveillance so that “the American people can render judgment about what their view of this.”
“There are a number of documents that had to be declassified and released that will tell us a great deal more about what happened from about 2012 to 2017,” he said. “A real test for Attorney General [William] Barr is going to be, will he insist that those documents be released so the American people can know what happened? And the American people can render judgment about what their view of this is.”
Gingrich has long said that he believed spying on Trump was authorized at the highest levels of the Obama administration.
“What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Because what you’re seeing happen is, on every single level — and this is what happens with really big scandals — they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding,” he said during a May 2018 appearance on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
“I don’t believe in an administration that was as tightly centralized as the Obama administration, you could have had as many different things going on — all of them illegal — without the president having been briefed,” he said.
Gingrich made similar comments in July on “Fox & Friends.”
“Barack Obama is a really smart guy,” he said. “He was also sort of a control freak. Do you think the FBI said, ‘Oh, we’re going to go get a FISA warrant, a foreign intelligence warrant, in order to investigate an American presidential campaign,’ and nobody thought to mention it to the incumbent president?”
Gingrich said it is less clear whether the information would have been shared with former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden “is so flaky, he might not have known if he knew … but Obama is really, really smart, and I think it’s very unlikely, virtually impossible that all this stuff went on and he wasn’t in some way informed,” he said.
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