Donald Trump ‘infiltration’: why the US president wants a new probe

Donald Trump has called on the Department of Justice to look into claims that the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for political purposes” at the request of the Obama administration.

His demands result from media reports that “federal authorities used an informant to gather information on Trump campaign officials”, says The Independent.

According to The New York Times, FBI agents sent an informant to speak to two Trump campaign advisers “after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign”.

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The Wall Street Journal identified the informant as “Stefan Halper, an American who was a foreign policy scholar at the University of Cambridge until 2015”.

Trump’s call for an investigation came in a series of tweets taking aim at special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, in which he claimed the investigation had overstepped its bounds.

The outburst followed reports that in August 2016 the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, had met an envoy representing the crown princes of United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The meetings “were an indication other countries besides Russia may have offered help to Trump’s presidential campaign”, says the ABC.