Questioned by Hallie Jackson over Donald Trump’s failure to produce even a scrap of evidence to support claims that his phones were wiretapped, press secretary Sean Spicer gave the game away. Jackson made several attempts to get at the same issue: If Trump says he already “found out” about the supposed wire tapping, why not provide the information instead of asking for more investigations. Spicer coughed up several meaningless pills about “separation of powers” before letting free a few seconds of truth.
Jackson: If the president has this information; if he’s sitting on this, if he found out, he’s now suggesting or asking or recommending that congress look into this. You talk about they have resources and staff, which they do, but why spend those resources and staff If the president found out this information and already has it?
Spicer: I think there’s a difference between directing the Department of Justice, which may be involved in an ongoing investigation, and asking congress as a separate body to look into something and add credibility to the look. It adds an element that wouldn’t necessarily be there if we were just directing the Department of Justice, for example.
And there’s the whole plan: launch an ongoing “investigation” by Jefferson Sessions at the Department of Justice, and get Congress to engage in a Benghazi-style endless investigation. After all, there was never any evidence of wrong-doing in the Benghazi investigations. It had another purpose.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping."
And that’s what Trump is asking of Congress. He knows that Obama did nothing wrong. Spicer knows that Obama did nothing wrong.
But Trump is obsessed with President Obama. He’s obsessed with Obama’s accomplishments, with his popularity, with how many, many, many more people showed up to celebrate Obama’s inauguration. Asking Congress to “investigate” the non-existent wiretapping is just asking Chaffetz, Gowdy, and company to spend millions trying to hurt Barack Obama’s reputation the way they did Hillary Clinton.
What has Trump’s staff produced to demonstrate that there’s anything to his Breitbart-fueled accusations?
“No, that’s above my pay grade,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary and a feisty Trump loyalist, when asked on Tuesday at an on-camera briefing if he had seen any evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s accusation. The reporters kept at him, but Mr. Spicer pointedly and repeatedly refused to offer personal assurances that the president’s statements were true.
“No comment,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said earlier in the day. Last week, Mr. Sessions recused himself from any investigations involving the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.
“I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday. Mr. Kelly shrugged and added that “if the president of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it.”
Yes. Yes he does. Those reasons are the same ones that drove Trump to say that President Obama was born in Kenya and to go on about what his investigators had “discovered” about Obama long after other Obama-haters had let this ultimately idiotic position drop.
But Trump might want to note this one thing.
Former President Obama was reportedly furious after President Trump fired off tweets accusing him of wiretapping Trump Tower before the presidential election, according to a new report.
Barack Obama is not running for anything. And he’s not going to stay quiet forever.