Trump’s baseless allegation that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower

Susan Rice, President Obama’s final national security adviser, has all of a sudden become public enemy No. 1 in Trumpworld. In a Wednesday interview with the New York Times, President Trump suggested that she had criminally misused classified information for political purposes.

“Do I think [she committed a crime]? Yes, I think,” the president told the Times’ Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman. “It’s such an important story for our country and the world. It is one of the big stories of our time.”

A CBS poll out today finds that 47 percent of Americans — and a full 74 percent of Republicans surveyed — believe it’s “likely” or “somewhat likely” that President Donald Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign.

There is of course no credible evidence that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. As Vox has outlined, both “the heads of the FBI and NSA categorically denied President Donald Trump’s tweets claiming that President Barack Obama ordered the US intelligence community to wiretap Trump Tower.”

Here’s a startling and depressing statistic: 74 percent of Republican voters think it’s at least “somewhat likely” that Donald Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the campaign — a conspiracy theory that has been conclusively shot down by the leaders of Trump’s own party and by the heads of both the FBI and the National Security Agency.

That suggests the Trump administration’s strategy of refusing to back away from the unfounded assertion may be paying off, at least with his GOP base, and at least for the moment. It also suggests House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’s efforts to deflect attention away from Trump by making unfounded allegations of his own could be working politically, despite what they’re doing to the lawmaker’s own credibility.

If you’re the Republican chair of the House panel charged with leading the growing investigation into President Trump’s wiretapping allegations, it isn’t a good sign when a leading senator from your own party says you’ve lost all credibility and mockingly compares you to Inspector Clouseau.

It’s also not a good sign when the top Democrat on your committee accuses you of doing the White House’s bidding and demands that you recuse yourself from the probe. Or when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says you’ve tarnished your office. Or when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer goes even further and flatly calls for your removal.

Someone needs to tell House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes to stop digging.

Nunes has faced sustained criticism for a bombshell announcement last Wednesday that an unnamed source had given him information that seemed to validate Donald Trump’s baseless wiretapping allegations. Nunes later acknowledged he had no such evidence and apologized for personally briefing top White House officials about the supposed information before speaking to the rest of his committee.

Rep. Devin Nunes, chair of the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, held a hastily convened press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. Standing in a hallway in front of a staircase, he announced that he had startling information to share: The US government had intercepted communications between Trump’s transition team and foreign nationals in the three months prior to Trump taking office.

“On numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about US citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes announced. “Details about US citizens, details with little or no foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

John McCain just offered a master class in how to talk about President Trump’s rocky debut on the world stage: acknowledge there’s no evidence for Trump’s wiretapping claims, praise the administration’s national security team while ignoring Trump’s more egregious missteps, and when all else fails, blame Barack Obama.

The lessons came in a Wednesday roundtable with reporters that featured the Arizona senator, who is the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Texas Rep. Mac Thornberry, who runs the House Armed Services Committee.

It’s official: Each of President Donald Trump’s claims about President Obama wiretapping him during the presidential election has now been officially debunked, under oath, by FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers.

The statements came during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Monday. Comey also officially stated on the record that the FBI is in fact currently investigating links between Trump allies and Russia.

Adm. Mike Rogers directs the National Security Agency, which is responsible for much of America’s surveillance operations. If anyone would be in a position to know the veracity of Donald Trump’s allegation that then-President Barack Obama tapped his communications, it would be Rogers. And on Monday, Rogers flatly said it didn’t happen.

“I have seen nothing on the NSA side that we have engaged in such activity, nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity,” he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump met today after months of subtle jabs from Washington to Berlin.

But all anyone will remember of the meeting was Trump’s decision to double down on the unfounded claims that he was wiretapped by British spies at the behest of the Obama administration, and his awkward attempt to joke about it with Merkel (whose phones had been tapped by the National Security Agency during the Obama years).

There are jokes that bomb, and then there are jokes that bomb.

Donald Trump told one of the latter during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel where he faced repeated questions about his baseless claim that he had been wiretapped by President Obama.

President Trump had a blunt response when reporters pressed him about whether he would retract his unfounded allegation that President Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign: Blame it all on Fox News.

During a press conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump said the White House wouldn’t apologize for the unfounded allegation and instead said any blame rested with the Fox News commentator, Andrew Napolitano, who first raised it.

President Donald Trump’s closest political allies have flatly denied his baseless claims that President Barack Obama wiretapped him during the campaign. Now, a leading spy agency from Washington’s closest foreign ally is angrily dismissing the allegations as well.

In an unusually sharp public shot at the new president, Britain’s top electronic surveillance agency, the GCHQ, dismissed Trump’s new charge that it helped Obama spy on Trump as “nonsense.”

In the day-to-day crush of news, it’s easy to lose perspective. And this year especially, it’s easy for the abnormal to become normal.

So let’s be clear: If President Trump truly does have no evidence to back up his accusation that President Obama tapped his phones — as increasingly seems to be the case — he has viciously slandered his predecessor with a bogus accusation.

Top Republicans have spent days distancing themselves from President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegation that President Barack Obama tapped his phones. Now the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee are flatly saying it didn’t happen.

“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” the panel’s chair, Republican Sen. Richard Burr, and ranking member, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, said in a joint statement.

President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones during the election has been unraveling for so long now that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that no Republicans of any stature remain willing to defend it — and that even Trump’s closest aides are twisting themselves into pretzels to avoid having to explicitly concede that their boss seems to have made the entire thing up.

In the past few days alone, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer used actual air quotes to suggest Trump hadn’t literally been talking about wiretapping — even though the president’s own tweets had literally been talking about wiretapping — while Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway hinted that the real culprits were tiny cameras hidden inside microwave ovens (prompting this gem of a sentence from the New York Times: “Ms. Conway clarified on Monday that she was not accusing the former president of snooping via a kitchen appliance”).

It’s been a week and a half since President Trump angrily tweeted that President Obama had had Trump’s “phones” tapped “in Trump Tower,” and the accusation is looking more and more bogus.

The latest indication is that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), a loyal Trump ally who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters Wednesday that if Trump’s tweets are taken “literally,” then “the president was wrong.”

In a Monday morning interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway doubled down on President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that Barack Obama wiretapped his phones in October.

Asked to explain what evidence Trump had for the allegation, Conway responded:

Set aside, for a moment, Donald Trump’s wholly unsubstantiated allegation that then-President Obama tapped his phones before the elections. Ignore that it’s been denied, on the record, by the man who just stepped down as the nation’s top spy. And ignore that FBI chief Jim Comey wants to go public with a formal denial that would effectively mean accusing the president he serves of lying.

Let’s focus on something much scarier. Trump’s weekend tweetstorm shows that he has a dangerous misunderstanding of how the US legal system works — and a false belief that an elected leader could simply order the wiretap of another politician. Trump made clear during the campaign that he sees the Justice Department as an extension of the White House that tailors its investigations and prosecutions to a president’s whims. With that kind of worldview, it’s easy to see how a man as paranoid as Trump could come to believe that Obama personally ordered the wiretaps.

FBI Director James Comey requested yesterday that the Justice Department publicly refute President Trump’s claims that President Obama had “tapped” phones at Trump Tower in the runup to the November election, according to the New York Times.

Trump had suggested that the behavior rose to “Watergate/Nixon” levels of illegality.

Early Saturday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted that he “just found out” that former President Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before the election. Trump then claimed his “phones” specifically were tapped by Obama “in October” and added, “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The president cited zero sources and gave zero evidence for these earthshaking claims, and even his top aides were reportedly caught flat-footed by them. Then, he changed the subject from this allegedly momentous scandal he had just discovered to tweet about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s low ratings as host of The Apprentice. And then he headed out to go golfing.