As you know for the last week or so there has been the claims by the Trump camp that Obama had his home at Trump Tower wire-tapped. Since then there has been a parade of double downs, changing the story to “wire-tapped” means all surveillance techniques, to the absurd- Microwaves can do surveillance, to the dangerous- blaming the UK, then saying he heard it on Fox, not from is intelligence. The issue led to an awkward moment on Friday at a joint press conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel when Trump was asked about the wiretap claims by a German reporter.Trump said he and Merkel had “something in common,” apparently referring to reports during the Obama administration that Merkel’s phone was bugged. The quip left the German leader looking bewildered.
Well, today- the FBI Director James Comey confirms there is no evidence of any wiretapping happening to Trump during the election. He joins a long list of people in the know to refute the Trump claims
* FBI Director James Comey: “I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey told the House Intelligence Committee Monday.
* House Intelligence Committee: Congress took up an investigation of the substance of Trump’s tweets at the request of the White House. But instead of vindicating him, the investigation exposed Trump’s claims as nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
Last week, the House Intelligence Committee received information from the Justice Department related to the wiretapping claims. Both the chair of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and the ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said the evidence showed nothing to back up the president.
“Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No, there never was,” Nunes said Sunday. “The information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction.”
“I got a classified briefing on [the DOJ] response. They delivered it after most of us had left town. But once again, no evidence to support the president’s claim that he was wiretapped by his predecessor,” Schiff added.
* Senate Intelligence Committee: In a joint statement last week, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee ― Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) ― said they saw nothing to support Trump’s theory: “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.”
* Former President Barack Obama: “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen,” Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement. “Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
* The British Government: Although Conway said that Trump knew more than the rest of us and therefore would be in a position to know about secret wiretapping, the White House has pointed to media reports ― which are available to everyone ― as evidence for the March 4 tweets. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, for example, recently cited Fox News legal pundit Andrew Napolitano’s claim that Obama circumvented U.S. intelligence agencies and instead worked with British officials to spy on Trump. Napolitano specifically named the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which is the equivalent of the National Security Agency.
So we have to ask- Was Trump’s March 4 tweetstorm simply the impetuous act of man who reacted to the latest news he read, fake or not, or was Trump acting like Nixon in a deliberate way to distract attention from the growing concern about ties between his campaign and the election-tampering Russians? (Comparing Nixon to Trump)
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