What you need to know about Trump’s escalating war with the FBI

President Trump’s battle with the FBI and the Justice Department went up another notch this week. Republican members of Congress are threatening to hold Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in contempt. The president’s new lawyer Rudy Giuliani is saying the FBI has a group of “renegades” that could render the entire Russia investigation “completely illegitimate.” And Trump is tweetstorming.

The catalyst was a paragraph buried deep in a long New York Times story examining the origins of the Russia investigation:

So there may have been an FBI source who helped collect information on a presidential campaign. Which is weird.

Then again, it’s also weird for a presidential campaign to have a foreign policy adviser (in this case George Papadopoulos) bragging to an Australian ambassador that he knew the Russian government had dirt on Hillary Clinton and another (in this case Carter Page) who described himself as an “informal adviser to the staff of the Kremlin” as recently as 2013.

Here’s what you need to know about the latest brouhaha.

Trump is using this revelation to discredit the Russia investigation.

Trump and conservative allies in the media and Congress jumped on the Times report as proof of a conspiracy by the FBI to spy on and undermine the Trump campaign in 2016.

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to say, “It looks like the Trump campaign in fact may have been surveilled.”

Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Post that Trump has every right to be angry, especially if the FBI was paying its informant to infiltrate the presidential campaign. “If you are paying somebody to come talk to my campaign or brush up against my campaign, whatever you call it, I’d be furious,” Nunes said.

And Fox News brought on guests who fueled the narrative that this was evidence of an FBI conspiracy against Trump, which Trump himself then tweeted out.

But Trump might not actually know what happened.

Trump appears near-certain in his conviction that a conspiracy placed an embedded FBI informant in his campaign, but Giuliani undermined that case Friday morning on CNN.

“First of all, I don't know for sure, nor does the president, if there really was one,” Giuliani said of the allegations. But just to cover all his bases, he added: “[Trump] may turn out to be closer to truth than people thought.”

We don’t know much about the alleged informant.

Despite all the allegations swirling, there’s a lot we don’t know about this alleged FBI informant. We don’t know how he or she met with Page and Papadopoulos, how many times, what information was received, or what the FBI did with that information.

The Washington Post reported that the informant is “a U.S. citizen who has provided information over the years to both the FBI and the CIA” and has continued helping with the Russia investigation since special counsel Robert Mueller took over a year ago. The paper also reported that the FBI “is taking steps to protect other live investigations that the person has worked on and is trying to lessen any danger to associates if the informant’s identity becomes known.”

Trump has alleged a Deep State conspiracy for a while.

Trump has long argued that the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are out to get him.

Shortly after the infamous “pee tape” dossier leaked to the press in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the president-elect accused American intelligence agencies of allowing the information to get out, saying, “That’s something Nazi Germany would have done and did do.” In a tweet, he added:

As president, Trump has continued to push the Deep State conspiracy narrative, having taken to calling it a “witch hunt.” In March 2017, Trump tweeted:

The accusations have kept coming and coming. Here’s just a small sampling from the past few months:

It’s become such a common refrain that he once tweeted, simply:

It’s unclear whether Trump sincerely believes there is a conspiracy against him or if he’s constantly complaining about it in order to discredit the Mueller investigation, no matter what it finds, or some combination of the two. As Trump himself once said during the campaign: “I am a whiner and I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.”

Trump thinks a lot of things are “bigger than Watergate.”

The president’s Thursday tweet suggesting that the surveillance on his presidential campaign could be “bigger than Watergate” isn’t the first time he’s used that phrase.

In fact, he said the same thing about Benghazi, Obama’s birth certificate, and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Follow Alex on Twitter @AlxThomp.

Cover image: President Donald Trump speaks during an event at the White House, Friday, May 18, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)