I don’t know where to even start with this nonsense…and we can tell it’s Saturday.
Without providing any evidence whatsoever, President Donald Trump using his Twitter account again, accused the Obama administration of wire tapping his campaign’s communications. He accused the former president of Nixon/Watergate stuff or McCarthyism.
President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.
While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of four tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”
Well the most apparent connection to Nixon/Watergate would be the paranoia that President Trump shares with the late President Nixon. But beyond that, there is very little in common.
But McCarthyism? Does he even know what McCarthyism was? Most likely not, since we all know he is no student of history. But there is a parallel to Senator Joseph McCarthy with this pronouncement…that would be the president’s accusations against the former president without a lick of proof…not unlike the senator waving around a sheaf of papers purportedly a list of names of State Department employees who were communists…and they were nothing at all.
So what’s the official word on the street?
Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement early Saturday afternoon: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
Senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the wide-ranging federal investigation into Russian interference in the election said Saturday that there had been no wiretap of Trump.
Officials at Justice and the FBI declined to comment.
Possible source for the information the president is slinging around is Breitbart…one of the biggest purveyors of alternative facts on the internet.
If the president really thinks this is true, it would take one or two phone calls to the actual security agencies under his control to get the facts…and he has the authority to release any and all related documents. But once again he believes the mud slung in the dark reaches of the internet over his own government departments.
One other view from the other side of the aisle:
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Trump was making “the most outlandish and destructive claims without providing a scintilla of evidence to support them.”
Schiff added: “No matter how much we hope and pray that this president will grow into one who respects and understands the Constitution, separation of powers, role of a free press, responsibilities as the leader of the free world, or demonstrates even the most basic regard for the truth, we must now accept that President Trump will never become that man.”
Ed, thanks; an important and fast moving story.
IMHO https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/03/04/the-conspiratorial-game-of-telephone-in-bannons-rag-that-made-left-right-and-potus-go-crazy/ is the best reporting on it. It’s a little weedy, but worth the effort.
We need to investigate Schumer, Pelosi and Obama on this wiretapping.They were all involved withtth eNSA.
When you have an original thought that makes any kind of sense…get back to me, would you?
Maybe he’s not just paranoid.
Howard Dean:
“This means a judge found probable cause that Trump was engaging in criminal activity and issued a warrant for a wire tap”