Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) reacted to remarks from Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who had said the FBI had done exactly what they were supposed regarding allegations of surveilling members of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
DeSantis said such activity was “not normal” and the proper course of action would have been for the FBI to notify Trump himself of the possibility of Russian involvement directly.
“The way the FBI and potentially other agencies did that was not trying to protect then-candidate Donald Trump,” DeSantis said. “If you had a problem with somebody on the periphery of the campaign, the obvious thing to do is to go brief the campaign and brief Donald Trump. And guess what Donald Trump would have done — if it was some tangential figure, he would say ‘OK, we will not have them involved in the campaign.'”
“Instead, they deployed this informant to spy on the campaign, and he was trying to manufacture contact with Papadopoulos, with Sam Clovis, you know, with these people,” he added. “And he was doing it over and over again. He may not have been the only one, Brian. So, when you are deploying surveillance powers, counterintelligence powers, against an opposition party’s campaign, that is not normal, and I think that is not what Americans want the FBI to be doing.”
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