The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website July 23, 2018:
President Trump claimed his campaign was “illegally spied on,” after the release of redacted surveillance documents for former campaign adviser Carter Page. (Reuters)
President Trump attacked two of his most hated enemies on Twitter in the past 12 hours: Iran and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
In tweets on Monday morning, Trump encouraged his followers to join him in watching “Fox & Friends” on Fox News and then quoted at length comments made on the show about the FBI’s push in October 2016 to obtain a warrant to track Carter Page, a onetime adviser to the Trump campaign.
Over the weekend, the government released a redacted version of the application for that warrant. Some of what was contained was already well-known, thanks to dueling memos from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and House Democrats earlier this year debating the validity of the document. Releasing the document didn’t change the contours of that debate significantly, except to further undercut Nunes’s assertions about its significance.