Lo and behold, the Obama Administration had been spying on Trump campaign even earlier than thought!

This started way before the Summer of 2016...

In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”

Basically starting sometime in early 2016 John Brennan decided to try to "set up" various Trump associates to see if they could manipulate them into improper behavior. This is what happened with George Papadapoulos, who was charged with "misleading the FBI" after being approached by an FBI asset to claimed to be Putin's niece. Sounds like they simply targeted 26 different member of Trump's campaign in a similar fashion, which of course is not only unethical but possibly illegal.

Not that it matters much anymore, but what is both disturbing and infuriating is people like Brennan act as if they did what they did for good cause, when in fact they did it for pure partisan political purposes.