Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday that Republicans could end up getting the last laugh after all the ridicule directed at then-President Donald Trump when he alleged that the Obama administration spied on him.
“You and I both remember when President Trump said the Democrats are spying on me,” the Texas Republican said to host Bill Hemmer on “Fox News Sunday.”
“And the corporate media collectively laughed at him, they mocked at him, they said what a ridiculous claim for him to make. Well if what special counsel Durham is alleging is true, what Donald Trump said was absolutely right,” he said.
Trump had tweeted in March 2017: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” He has since restated that allegation in various forms.
On Sunday, Cruz was responding to questions from Hemmer about one of John Durham’s court filings in the case of Michael Sussmann, an attorney connected to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign who was indicted in September 2021 on one count of lying to the FBI. Durham was appointed as a special counsel in 2019 to investigate the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.
Earlier this month, Durham filed a motion in the case about possible conflicts of interest for Sussmann’s attorneys. That filing, among other things, connected Sussmann to a technology executive who was allegedly gathering information pertaining to Trump.
Supporters of the former president saw the filing as confirmation of a far-reaching conspiracy against Trump that included Clinton, the media, major tech companies and the apparatus of the federal government. “In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death,” Trump said in response to the filing.
Sussmann’s legal team has accused Durham of deliberating inflaming public opinion with court filings “that unnecessarily includes prejudicial — and false — allegations.” On Thursday, they filed a motion to dismiss his indictment, calling it “extraordinary prosecutorial overreach.”
Cruz on Sunday called the Durham allegations “deeply concerning.”
Cruz said if the substance of the allegations in Durham’s filing were proved true, the scandal would be far larger in scope than the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974.
“If this is true, it’s a lot bigger than Watergate,” he said.
“That was a bungled third-rate burglary. It was wrong. People went to jail for Watergate, and people need to go to jail for this if these allegations are true.”