I spent most of the last two days reporting out the extraordinary allegations President Donald Trump made against his predecessor, Barack Obama – that Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped in Trump Tower.” And I’ve spent many hours over the past several weeks looking into claims about ties between Trump’s team and Russia and counterclaims that the entire thing is an elaborate attempt to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
Let me begin with an admission, an observation, and a guess.
The admission: Even after weeks of reporting, with good sources in the national security world, on Capitol Hill, and (believe it or not) among Trump’s team, I cannot claim with any real confidence to know the ground truth about Trump and Russia or potential federal investigations or Obama loyalists pushing storylines.
The observation: Neither do most of the people closest to the back-and-forth allegations, including President Trump, or those talking in public about what is unfolding. Most of what we’re seeing in the media is the public version of an elaborate game of “telephone” that’s taking place behind the scenes.
The guess: March 4, 2017, will end up being a rather consequential day in the presidency of Donald Trump.
Either: the president used thinly sourced media reports to float a conspiracy theory about his predecessor and he was wrong; or, citing thinly sourced media reports, he overstated the details of an actual investigation into his activities or the activities of those around him, alleging presidential involvement without evidence; or, citing thinly sourced media reports, he accurately accused the former president of doing something highly illegal and accidentally uncovered what would surely be one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history. Whatever the case, the events of the last two days will undoubtedly have lasting effects.
Here are some thoughts about this moment, based on my reporting:
President Trump’s tweets Saturday morning were not part of a deep strategy or clever misdirection play—at least not one known to anyone other than the president himself. The tweets set off a frantic effort inside the White House to substantiate retroactively what the president had tweeted. Aides collected stories published in sources ranging from Breitbart to the New York Times in order to make their case that he might have been right.
Here are the four tweets from Trump making the allegations about wiretapping.
1. Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
2. Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
3. I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
4. How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
White House sources acknowledge that Trump had no idea whether the claims he was making were true when he made them. He was basing his claims on media reports—some of them months old—about the possibility that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have authorized surveillance of Trump associates, presumably pursuant to a federal investigation of their ties to Russia.
Later Saturday morning, White House Counsel Don McGahn told staffers to avoid discussions about the president’s tweets or any possible investigation—an order that effectively paralyzed the White House staff for much of the day. Staffers were afraid to talk to one another for fear of running afoul of McGahn’s guidance and even those authorized to talk to the media were nervous about doing so.
At 8:55 on Sunday morning, the White House issued a statement about the president’s tweets and the ensuing controversy. “Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling. President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016. Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”
The formal language masks the rather extraordinary work that this statement is doing: The White House is asking Congress to investigate in order to determine whether President Trump’s tweeted claims were true.
This would not be the first time Trump has trafficked in conspiracy theories, of course. From his piloting of the nationwide Obama birther effort to his repeated, evidence-free claims that Rafael Cruz was involved with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Trump’s mind is a welcome receptacle for unproven intrigue and imagined treacheries.
In an appearance Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week, Deputy White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged Trump had no proof of his claims. “He is going off of information that he’s seeing that has led him to believe there’s a very real potential” of the wiretapping of Trump Tower having taken place.
Are those media reports true?
The short answer: We don’t know.
The first report came last fall from Louise Mensch in Heat Street and her report seems to have been the basis for several others. There are reasons to be skeptical. The headline on that report: “Exclusive: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties to Russia.” It posted at 10:18 p.m. on November 7, 2016, just hours before voters would go to the polls to determine the next president. Mensch, a fierce critic of Trump, attributed her claims to “sources with links to the counter-intelligence community.”
She wrote: “the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.”
Mensch sees the Trump-Russia story as part of a much broader conspiracy, as she later made clear in a Twitter exchange with National Review online editor Charles Cooke on February 24, 2017. “I absolutely believe that Andrew Breitbart was murdered by Putin, just as the founder of RT was murdered by Putin,” Mensch tweeted.
“Why?” Cooke wondered.
Mensch tweeted a link to a story she’d written in August, arguing that Trump Adviser Steve Bannon “Is the Link Between Donald Trump and Nigel Farage,” and pointing to praise for Putin from both Trump and Farage.
Cooke didn’t buy it. “You actually believe this?”
Other news outlets have published similar reports about an October FISA warrant, including the BBC and McClatchy. The Guardian could not confirm reporting on a FISA warrant in October, but reported that a request in June had been denied.
Some of the best-informed analyses came from Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor with deep knowledge of issues related to federal investigations, writing in National Review. McCarthy wrote on January 11, 2017, under the headline “FISA and the Trump Team,” raising the possibility that Obama had targeted Trump or his associates. McCarthy cited the reporting from Heat Street, the Guardian, and a New York Times article as he built a case that the Obama DOJ may have targeted Trump and his associates in a national security investigation. McCarthy’s argument seemed to assume that the Heat Street report was accurate, but his assessment was a measured analysis based on his own experience and he was careful to avoid coming to hard conclusions. “While it’s too early to say for sure, it may also be an example of what I thought would never actually happen: the government pretextually using its national-security authority to continue a criminal investigation after determining it lacked evidence of crimes.”
A little more than a week later, on January 19, the New York Times reported: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.”
More: “The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said. Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.”
And one line in the Times story suggested possible White House involvement—or at least knowledge—of the investigations and their progress. “One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.”
Questions based on these reports had been raised anew in the days before Trump’s mini tweetstorm, with talk radio host Mark Levin using his show to make the case that Obama had targeted Trump and his team and Breitbart echoing his arguments in a post. Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked House Speaker Paul Ryan about the reports in an interview Friday.
Even if Trump’s tweets were irresponsible—based only on media reports— Democrats and many journalists have treated the substance of the claims themselves as utterly inconceivable. Is it?
It’s the Obama Rorschach test. When Valerie Jarrett claimed shortly before the end of the Obama presidency that he’d had a “scandal free” eight years, most Democrats and journalists nodded their heads and most conservatives howled with a combination of laughter and frustration. To the extent that they paid attention to them at all, for journalists, the Obama scandals were minor footnotes to a much happier story of the Obama presidency. But for conservatives they were not just part of the story but key drivers of the narrative.
The Obama Department of Justice targeted James Rosen of Fox News as a possible “criminal co-conspirator” in a leak investigation and seized phone records of AP reporters and editors in 2013. The IRS under Barack Obama systematically targeted the president’s political opponents.
And there are numerous examples of the Obama administration and the intelligence leaders loyal to the president politicizing intelligence. In collaboration with the Obama White House, CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper worked for more than five years to keep the documents captured in the Osama bin Laden raid from public view. (See here and here for the exhaustive details). During the heated debate over the Iran Deal, Clapper’s office rewrote the threat assessment on Iran to downplay Iran’s involvement in transnational terror.
Beyond that, we know that several high-ranking Obama administration officials were caught lying about the details of the Benghazi attacks in the weeks before the 2012 presidential election—and for several years after.
None of that means that what Trump alleged is true, of course. It’s entirely possible that if there were FISA warrants, Obama had nothing to do with them. And it’s entirely possible that there weren’t FISA warrants.
An Obama spokesman, Kevin Lewis, put out a carefully-worded statement 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.”
In an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday, Clapper said that while his investigation this winter found that Russia tried to influence the election in Trump’s favor “there was no evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Clapper also denied the claims at the heart of Trump’s tweets yesterday, saying, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, president-elect, candidate or campaign.”
Both sides are citing Clapper as the final word on the parts of the interview that support their case. He should not be considered the final word on anything. In addition to his involvement in the bin Laden documents cover-up and his office’s rewriting of the Iran threat assessment, Clapper was caught misleading Congress.
We won’t know the full truth about all of this anytime soon. And even as we see bits of the truth revealed will we—will the country—recognize it? Or will Democrats believe their Democrat truth and Republicans believe their Republican truth? There is reason for concern.
We don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions—or the dozens of others that have brought us to this moment of crisis. But it is a moment of crisis. And as we suggest in the accompanying editorial, one necessary response is radical transparency—the kind of transparency that many of us might not favor in other circumstances but the kind that is required right now.
