Trump Is Now Fundraising Off Conspiracy Theory That FBI “Infiltrated” His Campaign

Really.

Ron Sachs/ZUMA

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President Donald Trump’s longstanding frustrations with the ongoing Russia investigations hit a new level Sunday, when he announced over social media that he intended to order the Justice Department investigate claims that the FBI may have wrongly “infiltrated” his presidential campaign for political purposes.

Despite criticism that Trump was inappropriately intervening in Justice Department affairs, the president’s reelection campaign saw the order as an opportunity for a new fundraising initiative. On Monday, they sent out an email quoting the Sunday evening tweet and inviting supporters to join in “demanding this abuse of power gets investigated.” The email was sent just as the White House confirmed that Trump was meeting with FBI director Christopher Wray, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats Monday afternoon.

In recent days, Trump, along with Rudy Giuliani and conservative talking heads, have misrepresented reports late last week that an FBI informant may have illegally spied on the Trump campaign. In reality, the reports in the Washington Post and New York Times say something entirely different, that an informant made contact with Trump campaign advisers in order to investigate the campaign’s ties to Russia. The informant was never ā€œembeddedā€ in the campaign, contrary to Trumpā€™s claims.

The presidential order on Sunday followed a slew of erratic, angry tweets over the weekend lashing out at a separate Times report revealing that a second meeting at Trump Tower took place months before the election. The Times wrote the meeting involved loyal Trump associates, including the president’s eldest son and former Blackwater head Erik Prince, and officials representing the United Arab Emirates who offered to help Trump’s campaign.

According to the Times, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has been looking into the previously unreported meeting.

Somehow, Trump used the report as evidence against the special counsel. He also used it as a jumping off point to resurrect the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email server, before eventually landing on his Sunday evening demand to order the Justice Department around.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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