NBC’s Ben Collins: Extremists Justifying FBI Threats Because They See a ‘Big Spy Novel’ Where Trump Is ‘the Only Good Guy’

Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters believe there is an elaborate “spy novel”-type conspiracy against him after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago property, NBC News’ Ben Collins said on Monday.

Collins, who covers disinformation and extremism, appeared on MSNBC and said chatter online among extremist Trump supporters have turned to identifying all those involved in the raid, including a reported mole who could have helped get the search warrant. The search warrant was to find allegedly classified materials taken from the White House, though Trump has referred to the raid as “prosecutorial misconduct” and criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI in the wake of it.

Collins told MSNBC’s Alex Witt that the reveal of a mole in Trump’s midst would add to conspiratorial talk among extremist supporters as “they believe this is a big spy novel where Donald Trump is the only good guy,” and he’s facing an Ocean’s 11-style effort to throw him behind bars.

That’s certainly what they’re hoping for. They’re hoping for some big, ridiculous, over-the-top spy-novel kind of thing to be revealed that shows that Donald Trump was secretly being spied on and this guy tapped the phones at Mar-a-Lago and x,y,z. In their world, that’s what all of this is. In their world, this is a big spy novel where Donald Trump is the only good guy and everybody else is doing some sort of elaborate Ocean’s 11-style thing to get him into jail. That’s not reality.

This thinking, Collins added, is what is justifying increased threats against the FBI and its agents, citing the shooting at an FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio as an example of these threats being “acted out.”

“That’s what justifies these people, in their brains, to sending crazy threats to the FBI,” he said.

Watch above via MSNBC