Donald Trump’s Carter Page fiasco goes down in flames

| 6:00 pm EST December 9, 2019
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Donald Trump has spent years publicly pushing the notion that the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community maliciously targeted his former campaign adviser Carter Page, as a way of trying to take the Trump 2016 campaign down. Trump lies every time he opens his mouth, of course. But he put so many eggs in this particular basket, you’d think there must have been something to it, right?

The long-time-coming Department of Justice Inspector General report was publicly released today on the origins of the FBI’s criminal investigation into the Trump 2016 campaign. The IG found that the FBI was entirely justified in its decision to investigate the Trump campaign. This comes as no surprise, as several of Trump’s top campaign people have since been convicted of serious felonies, making clear that the campaign was in fact a criminal enterprise.

The IG report also found that the FBI was justified in its decision to investigate and surveil Carter Page. The report did find that the FBI made mistakes in the FISA surveillance warrant application process against Page – but it did not find that any such mistakes were made in bad faith. In other words, Page can take up his grievances with the FBI if he so chooses, but this is the absolute death of the narrative that the FBI maliciously targeted Page to try to sabotage the Trump campaign.

This raises even more questions about why Donald Trump spent so long putting so many of his eggs in the Carter Page basket. Trump was never going to change a single mind by pushing this bizarre conspiracy theory. Now it turns out to have been such nonsense, even Trump’s own DOJ is publicly shooting it down. Page does not stand accused of any crimes, but he’s very much a pro-Kremlin guy who has lived in Russia, met with Russian officials, and publicly praised Russia. You have to wonder if Trump tried so hard to paint Page as a good guy because he thought it would somehow make Putin happy. There’s no reason to believe Putin would care about Page one way or the other, but Trump always ends up doing whatever he thinks will make Putin happy – even if it’s something that can’t possibly help Trump at all.