RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you’re a fading Baby Boomer, you’re faintly amused that the FBI code-named its Trump-Russia investigation “Crossfire Hurricane.” It’s an homage to the Rolling Stones golden oldie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — which, come to think of it, might just be a perfect handle for John Brennan, the former Obama CIA director whose specter hovers over each critical juncture of the case.

The young’uns may not believe it, but back before it was known as “classic rock,” you couldn’t just play your crossfire hurricane on Spotify. You had to spin it. Fittingly, that is exactly what the New York Times has done in Wednesday’s blockbuster report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

The quick take on the 4,100-word opus is that the Gray Lady “buried the lede.” Fair enough: You have to dig pretty deep to find that the FBI ran “at least one government informant” against the Trump campaign — and to note that the Times learned this because “current and former officials” leaked to reporters the same classified information about which, just days ago, the Justice Department shrieked “Extortion!” when Congress asked about it.

But that’s not even the most important of the buried ledes. What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

Anyone examining FBI and Justice Department abuses is smeared and ridiculed.

President Trump is opening a whole new chapter in the war between him and the investigators pursuing him. Today, he tweeted: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond. In March, Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced he would be examining exactly how the DOJ set about employing the so-called Steele dossier to help obtain permission from a special court, the FISA court, to eavesdrop on Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Apparently, Trump is demanding that the DOJ now look at a range of recent developments, including the news that an FBI informant was fishing for information from Trump officials before any Justice investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia was supposed to have begun.

For well more than a year, we’ve heard about the “Did Trump Collude with Russia” storyline that the special counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing. In recent months, a parallel narrative has been developing. In this account, for which a case is slowly building, figures inside the Obama administration and in the Hillary Clinton campaign may have actively spied on and tried to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign.

But anyone who broaches the thought that there might be two stories relating to 2016 campaign skullduggery rather than just one is viciously attacked. When radio and TV host Mark Levin stitched together mainstream media reports to allege that FISA-court warrants had been sought by the Justice Department to investigate Team Trump, he was branded a conspiracy theorist by Trump critics. He has since been vindicated.

Trump foes have also launched attacks against Kimberly Strassel, my former colleague at the Wall Street Journal. She has done pathbreaking reporting on the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over documents on its 2016 actions to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.).

Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law.

On Friday, the Washington Post’s David von Drehle sniffed that “there’s nothing surprising about pundits under the influence of the president attacking U.S. intelligence agencies while minimizing the threat from Russia.”

But it’s Nunes who has faced the most vitriolic attacks. Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law. “Someone has to watch the watchers,” he told me recently. “The Constitution vests Congress with oversight powers over the executive branch.”

But that’s not how the media see it. Last month, Jason Zengerle of the New York Times wrote a scathing profile of Nunes, whom he dismissed in a tweet as someone “who’s been propagating (and/or falling for) conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”