Donald Trump was doing so well last week. Beginning the day of his successful address to a joint session of Congress, he went four days without any wild tweets.
Americans who were polled and even normally critical pundits were impressed. The markets offered a clear signal of confidence, even in the midst of the latest controversy (over Jeff Sessions). Yes, they seemed to say, we had our doubts, but maybe this guy can actually govern. Maybe this new, presidential-sounding Trump can restore some certainty and predictability that’s been lacking ever since he took office.
It didn’t last long. On Saturday morning, he launched a new attack on his predecessor, with whom he had gotten along fairly well until now. If there’s anything to his accusation that President Obama wiretapped him in Trump Tower, it’s obviously a massive scandal.
The thing is, Trump’s tweets appear to be a reference to news coverage that doesn’t actually say any such thing. And the unwillingness of Trump’s allies to vigorously defend the extremely serious allegations he made is a tip-off that, even if they haven’t been definitively proven false at this point, there is no reason at all to think they are true.
Here’s what might be true: As Julian Sanchez notes in this excellent explainer, the FBI apparently applied for, and might even have eventually received after two rejections, authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor “transactions between two Russian banks and four persons connected with the Trump campaign.”
Still, this part is not quite groundbreaking. News reports that certain current and former Trump aides were under investigation for foreign ties were already being published last September and again in early November, before the election. We learned more in January from the New York Times. That there might have been more to it that wasn’t leaked before the election is news, but it isn’t shocking news.
Sanchez does, however, point out the separate question of FISA abuse — the potential use of an investigation of foreign targets in order to conduct an indirect domestic investigation. This is not quite what Trump alleged. If true, it would be a serious issue, but it’s apparently legal. And that’s more an indictment of the PATRIOT Act’s spying regimen than anything else.
If….the primary purpose of the investigation was to build a criminal case against U.S. persons in the Trump camp, then the use of FISA authorities to gather information by naming foreign entities sounds like “reverse targeting”—tasking collection on a foreign target when your real interest is a U.S. person with whom they’re communicating. That would be, to use the technical term, highly shady even if not unlawful. Thanks to the Patriot Act, however, FISA authorities may be used in investigations that have a “significant” foreign intelligence purpose, even if the “primary” purpose is criminal prosecution—a change from the prior standard imposed by the courts…
This is a matter for Congress to take up. It is still nothing like “Nixon/Watergate” (as Trump put it), as it would be if there was any hint Obama had personally ordered the feds to spy on an opposition politician.
Another thought: If there were more bona fide investigations of Trump aides by law enforcement that were not leaked to the media before the election in order to discredit his candidacy, it would be a rare case of a secret investigation being appropriately kept secret in Washington. (Perhaps relevant: Clinton campaign operatives, unwilling to shoulder the blame for their catastrophic and unexpected loss, have since the election expressed anger that the Obama administration did not leak supposedly available information about Trump-Russia ties in order to prevent Trump’s victory.)
In any event, none of the reports, and no evidence available to this day, suggest any direct White House involvement, as Trump alleged. He went so far as to call Obama a “[b]ad (or sick) guy.” And there has been no indication of phone tapping at all.
If Trump has actual evidence of any of this, he now owes it to the public to release it, or else to retract the allegation. Unless he has evidence that no one else is currently aware of, Trump is blindly defaming Obama and needlessly creating a crisis that undermines faith in our political system — even more than his (also groundless) allegations that millions of illegal votes were cast in the November election.
When you’re just a celebrity, your wild, baseless charges just become someone’s punch line. When you’re president, it’s a whole different ballgame.
