Farkas DENIES confirming surveillance of Trump, says comments were taken out of context

Evelyn Farkas says that people are mischaracterizing what she said in order to push the narrative that she confirmed the surveillance on Trump.

Here’s CNN’s report on it:

Farkas says she doesn’t think they’re going to make her testify because, as the CNN anchor puts it, “she doesn’t know anything.”

I suspected this from the very beginning because some people were twisting her exact words. She said that they wanted to protect whatever information they might have had that the Trump administration would want destroyed.

“I was urging my former colleagues, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration,” Farkas, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said.

She says “information” and she says “intelligence” – does that necessarily mean “surveillance”? No, it doesn’t, though some would make you think it does.

Does it exonerate her? No. Maybe she knew about something that was illegal and she encouraged it. But just based on what she said, this doesn’t seem like absolute evidence of the Trump claim.

In the further clarification, she adds the word “if” to make it clear she meant that information should be protected *if* they had it. It’s important to note that she was talking about “former colleagues” – she didn’t work there anymore at the time.

And, some fake news websites are ignoring the fact that she was commenting about a story that was not secret at all – it was in the New York Times.

So what do her comments come down to? She told people to keep doing what the New York Times said they were already doing. That’s not quite the traitorous evil that some have claimed on social media.

BUT, the story is not over. I’m not saying she didn’t lie. I’m saying stop jumping to salacious conclusions…

[For those interested on the inner workings at the scoop website, el Scoopo and I had a long debate about these comments yesterday, he said that my interpretation was a possible, and reasonable one. Boom!]

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