President Donald Trump on Monday gave The Wall Street Journal a virtual pat on the back in a tweet, citing the paper’s two-day-old editorial questioning “where in the world” former President Barack Obama was when his FBI was surveilling “affiliates of a presidential campaign.”
“A very good question!” Trump tweeted.
The Wall Street Journal asks, “WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS BARACK OBAMA?” A very good question!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 21, 2018
The WSJ editorial, penned by James Freeman, calls out the media for burying mentions of Obama in its coverage of revelations that a government informant met with two members of Trump’s campaign before the election. Freeman also calls on the former President to provide a public explanation for why his intelligence and law enforcement agencies decided to focus surveillance efforts on a “domestic political campaign.”
Freeman writes:
“By this point it seems clear that Mr. Obama didn’t think much of the theory that Mr. Trump colluded with the Russians. But presumably he learned quite a bit about his government’s efforts to investigate it. It’s not clear what an FBI official meant in 2016 when texting that President Obama ‘wants to know everything we’re doing.’ But we can assume that the President was fairly well-informed about the law enforcement agencies reporting to him. Therefore let’s hear from him in detail the full history of how the government came to investigate the presidential campaign of the party out of power.”
Since the New York Times first reported last week that a secret intelligence source met with the Trump campaign’s foreign policy aides, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, Trump has become increasingly frustrated with the Russia probe. He called the news last week “bigger than Watergate!” and demanded on Twitter Sunday that the Justice Department investigate whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.”
