After Trump was elected, the FBI realized that Trump was soon going to have access to government intelligence files. If they honestly told the president-elect that they had been investigating his campaign in hope of making a case on him, they had to be concerned that he would shut the investigation down and clean house at the FBI and DOJ. So, they misleadingly told him the investigation was about Russia and a few stray people in his campaign, but they assured him he personally was not under investigation.
This was not true. The investigation was always hoping to find something on Trump. That is why, for example, when director Comey briefed then-President-elect Trump about the Steele dossier, he told Trump only about the salacious allegation involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel; he did not tell the president-elect either that the main thrust of the dossier was Trump’s purported espionage conspiracy with the Kremlin, nor that the FBI had gone to the FISC to get surveillance warrants based on the dossier. The FBI was telling the president-elect that the allegations were salacious and unverified, yet at that very moment they were presenting them to a federal court as information the judges could rely on to authorize spying.
Later, though Comey repeatedly told President Trump he was not a suspect, he gave House testimony patently geared to lead the public and the media to believe Trump was a suspect – which is exactly how the media reported it. In so doing, the FBI (and the Obama holdovers in the Justice Department who authorized Comey’s testimony) violated DOJ rules about publicly confirming the existence of an investigation, and publicly identifying a subject of an investigation: the Trump campaign, which Comey publicly announced was suspected of “coordinating” in the Kremlin’s widely reported cyberespionage interference in the 2016 campaign.
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