Trump's Obama Accusation Backfires And Also Makes Him Look Guilty

UPDATE: Director of National Intelligence says on Meet The Press that there was no FISA court order allowing wiretaps on Trump Tower. Note that he does not say there were no FISA orders relating to Trump campaign officials. At the same time, Spicer feeds the Obama interference meme, citing Mike Mukasey, former Attorney General under G.W. Bush who would have no direct knowledge of the situation.  END OF UPDATE (for now).

The Trump team continues to dig in even further on the meme that Obama was interfering in last year’s election. Trump’s tweetstorm yesterday accusing Obama of ordering that Trump Tower be wiretapped backfired pretty badly with those who live in the world of reality. No one except the millions of Obama-haters actually believes that Obama ordered those taps. But, if there were actually taps, and reporting seems to indicate there probably were, that would mean that a FISA court felt there was enough evidence to authorize those wiretaps. Even Fox News reported that a FISA request was made in the early summer and the court turned it down. A subsequent request was made in October that was apparently accepted by the court. It also seems clear that part of the evidence that supported these FISA requests was intelligence from European governments that was shared with their American counterparts, indicating multiple contact between Trump campaign officials and people associated with Russian intelligence.

If a FISA court had authorized a warrant, that would mean there is a serious national security investigation underway that probably involved Paul Manafort, who has an office in Trump Tower, and others associated with the Trump campaign. It would be interesting to track Manafort’s whereabouts in the aftermath of his “leaving” the campaign under a cloud of suspicion about taking off-the-books payments from his Russia-backed Ukrainian clients. If he was in Trump Tower quite a bit, there would be nothing to stop him from seeing Trump and the campaign operation located there on a regular basis.

In any case, Trump’s tweets only heightened the belief that there was some real fire hiding in all the smoke that surrounds his Russia connections. But Trump and his team continue to run with the accusation that Obama ordered the wiretaps and interfered in the election. Last night, it was reported that Trump’s lawyer and White House Counsel is looking into how and what he can learn about the wiretaps, including getting access to the FISA order itself. Of course, getting access to that order would show the Trump team just how much information the investigation had already gleaned as of October. That alone would clearly be improper and should create a legal firestorm. But the fact that the Counsel is even indicating he is trying to get access to that order is dangerously close to, if not over, the line of interference in an investigation.

This morning, in a statement put out by the White House, Trump doubled down again, requesting that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expand their investigation into Russian hacking to include “whether executive branch executive powers were abused in 2016”. At the same time, the White House made clear it will not comment further on the issue as the very next sentence was, “Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted”. I’m pretty doubtful the White House press office has any idea of what the President may or may not comment on.

So Trump has put himself in a bind with this accusation. Whether it is true or not can only be determined by looking at how the wiretaps were initiated. And if it turns out, as is likely, that the wiretaps were approved by the normal FISA channels without any input from the White House, then it shows there was clearly enough evidence about Trump campaign collusion with Russia to authorize a warrant. The investigation by the White House Counsel looks remarkably like an attempt to interfere in the ongoing investigation. But handing the issue over to the congressional investigations and then refusing to comment further sounds like Trump is just trying to make his wild accusation go away, as he has so often in the past. Both actions are not mutually exclusive. But do any of these actions look like an administration that has nothing to hide?