Cite your evidence. FUX News would be all over it,

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The investigation is over, reported to congress after it was discovered an FBI spy in the Trump administration that was paid.

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The argument that Halper was a spy planted in Trump’s campaign, though, early on suffers from two significant flaws.

The first, as we noted on Tuesday, is that Halper contacted Papadopoulos and Page only after they were already on the FBI’s radar.

The FBI had interviewed Page in March; he met Halper in July, after he’d traveled to Moscow. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign began in July; Halper’s outreach to Papadopoulos began in September.

The second, of course, is that Halper was never embedded in the campaign. Nor is there any evidence he was ever spying on the campaign.

His outreach was to three specific individuals, including Clovis — whose position in the campaign meant that he was a point of contact for both Page and Papadopoulos. It would be a bit like trying to take down the Mob by interviewing street hoods whom you thought you could convict on shoplifting charges.

So that’s all the public evidence, those meetings with a guy who was not in any sense part of Trump’s campaign. That and rumors.

Now, you may be thinking, Well, maybe Trump has seen other evidence that isn’t public. That’s possible, but it is undercut somewhat by the weeks-long fight that’s taken place over whether to reveal Halper’s relationship with the FBI. Why the focus on Halper if there’s better evidence than Halper out there?

This is also an administration that, early in 2017, invited Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to the White House complex to view classified documents that it believed would help bolster Trump’s off-the-cuff claim about phones at Trump Tower having been wiretapped during the campaign. That “spying” also did not occur, but the White House — or at least White House staffers — had few qualms about sharing material that might help prove it.

The “tapped phones” incident is a good reminder that we’ve seen this dance before: Trump whips up a conspiracy theory out of the ether and uses it to suggest that he is an unfair victim. He’s never been terribly worried about backing up his assertions with facts; his claims about seeing Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks come to mind.

He learned from that incident that he could make a false claim and that his base would throw up enough scaffolding around it that it could stand on its own. It’s happened time and again, with Trump saying that something that didn’t happen actually did and his allies scrambling for scraps of evidence that suggest it might have.

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