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"They are coming after me because I am fighting for you, that's what's happening," Trump said while accepting the GOP nomination. "It's been going on from before I even got elected. And remember this, they spied on my campaign and they got caught. Let's see now what happens."
The phrase is a shorthand used to encapsulate Trump's grandiose conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. In his view, Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden abused their powers by ordering US intelligence agencies to spy on Trump's campaign, to prevent him from winning.
That is not what happened. There are snippets of truth, like the fact that some Trump aides were investigated and surveilled by the FBI. But Trump's exaggerated retelling has become so ubiquitous that it's taken as fact among his political allies and right-wing media cheerleaders.
Another recent incantation came Wednesday night at the Republican convention, when Trump's former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said the "Obama-Biden administration secretly launched a surveillance operation on the Trump campaign." Though that is a slightly softened version of "they spied on my campaign" the story is essentially the same.
Here's the reality: During the 2016 campaign, Trump aides had extensive contacts with Russian officials and operatives, while the Kremlin was meddling in the US election. This raised alarms within the US intelligence community, so, the FBI opened an investigation and utilized routine surveillance methods to find out what was going on. Along the way, the FBI made some serious mistakes, but there's no evidence Obama or Biden were personally involved in anything.
Trump first pushed claims of illegal surveillance in March 2017, shortly after taking office. Since then he hasn't let up. As Biden recently climbed in the polls, Trump pushed similar claims with increasing vigor, repeating the conspiratorial catchphrase more than two dozen times this summer, at campaign rallies, White House news conferences, interviews and on social media.
By coining a simple slogan to capture his grievances against Obama and federal law enforcement, Trump gave his supporters something to latch onto. Fox News and other Trump-friendly media outlets gladly obliged, and devoted significant airtime to promote his theories.
"Trump is successful in heralding back to an era when there was significant distrust of the Justice Department and FBI under Hoover," said CNN national security analyst Juliet Kayyem. "He's playing with that distrust. This is something for people who view government as the problem, which includes a lot of his supporters. This idea is consistent with their philosophy."
He even uses his gripes about 2016 to shatter democratic norms while campaigning against Biden. At a recent campaign event, Trump egged on his supporters by saying he "should get a redo of four years" -- an unconstitutional third term -- "because they spied on my campaign." He also says the "spying" makes Obama guilty of treason, a crime that is punishable by death.
Here's a breakdown of the facts behind Trump's "spying" claims, the parts that are flat-out conspiracy theories, and the kernels of truth that are buried underneath his allegations.
Asked to back up Trump's assertions, a Trump campaign spokesman told CNN that Biden once referred to unmasking as "spying" while he was a senator. The Trump campaign also noted that that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, an Obama appointee, once said on CNN that the use of FBI informants "meets the dictionary definition of surveillance or spying."
But the Trump campaign didn't provide any evidence backing up Trump's assertion that Obama oversaw a massive "spying" conspiracy against him. The evidence simply doesn't exist. Trump would be on firm footing if he stuck to the known wrongdoing that has been factually established.
Nonetheless, Trump's deceptive slogans will live on as he continues fighting for reelection.
