In an article published this week, The New York Times twice claimed President Donald Trump had no basis to claim the federal government under former President Barack Obama spied on him during the 2016 election or abused surveillance powers despite a large body of public evidence showing both things happened.In the article about Trump’s statements on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Times insisted that Trump has a “long and complicated relationship” with FISA, alternating between “condemning it” and “embracing it.”
“During his first term, Mr. Trump posted on social media just hours before Congress was to vote on it to suggest without evidence that the program had been abused by the Obama administration to surveil his presidential campaign,” the newspaper wrote.
Trump has plenty of evidence to suggest his campaign was spied on by the Obama administration, including the release of declassified memos showing two undercover informants directed by the FBI engaged with Trump campaign figures trying to lure information out of them.
The president also has ample evidence that the FBI abused surveillance rules under Obama, including a lengthy Inspector General report from the Department of Justice released in 2019 and a statement by the DOJ admitting some of the surveillance was “unlawful.”
That report found that the FBI altered evidence against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in order to investigate him. A former FBI attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email for the purposes of obtaining a FISA warrant that authorized spying on Page and his dealings with the Trump campaign.
Page had worked with an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency dealing with Russians during the early days of the Obama administration, but Clinesmith altered an email saying this to make it appear as though Page had never worked with the agency. Just the News has confirmed that agency was the CIA.
The FBI received the accurate information under Obama in 2016 and doctored it in 2017, court records show.
In response to a Just The News inquiry, the Times said its “reporting on the challenges to reauthorize FISA section 702 presents readers with a clear and factual picture.”
The IG report noted 17 “inaccuracies and omissions” that were not brought to the attention of the Office of Intelligence prior to the final FISA application filed against Page in 2017. These included Clinesmith’s alteration; omissions from another Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, denying anyone in the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia; and omitting statements from Page about never meeting then-campaign chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, which spoke to the credibility of the Clinton campaign-funded “Steele Dossier,” which claimed otherwise.
Page filed a lawsuit against the federal government for its mistreatment of him, and in April 2026, the Justice Department agreed to settle the lawsuit for $1.25 million.
“No American should ever face covert and unlawful surveillance based on their political view,” a Justice Department spokesman said at the time after the settlement was revealed in a court filing. “The investigation into Carter Page — a man never charged with a single crime — relied on inherently flawed and uncorroborated information, proving it was a political sham from the get-go.”
The Supreme Court recently declined to revive a separate lawsuit from Page against former FBI Director James Comey and others for their roles in the investigation against Page.
Declassified records released by the FBI and obtained by Just the News show an informant who also worked as a Pentagon researcher, Stefan Halper, was directed to meet with Page at a Virginia farm in October 2016, while Obama was still president, to try to elicit information about the campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Halper was given the FBI codename “Mitch,” the memos show.
A transcript of the conversations recorded by the FBI shows that rather than confirming contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, Page actually disputed the allegations to Halper.
“The core lie is that I met with these sanctioned Russian officials, several of which I never even met in my entire life, but they said that I met them in July,” an FBI transcript quotes Page as telling Halper during an Oct. 17, 2016 interaction at Halper’s farm in Northern Virginia.
You can read those records here.
And Page wasn’t the only Trump aide targeted by the Obama administration’s intelligence apparatus.
The FBI sent an undercover operative to meet with Papadopoulos while posing as a research assistant named Azra Turk. The Times broke the story in 2019. The investigators attempted to get Papadopoulos to falsely admit the Trump campaign was working with Russia. Halper was also asked by the FBI to speak with Papadopoulos about alleged Russia collusion, records show.
You can read the FBI documents about Halper’s interaction with Papadopoulos here.
