Troubling Events In Trumpland: Wiretapping

There have been some very troubling and concerning events during the last two weeks.

For example, on March 15, there was a very high-security, highly classified briefing held by FBI Director James Comey with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Chuck Grassley. Grassley is the Republican and Feinstein is the Democrat.  This briefing was held in a specially compartmented facility to ensure that no one who wasn’t in that room would hear what was being said.

When she says that this was “highly classified,” she was not speaking lightly.

I don’t think I have ever seen her look this grim or this serious. She clearly learned some very harmful things during the meeting with FBI director Comey.

There was also all the activity resulting from a series of Trump tweets on Saturday morning, March 4, in which he explicitly tweeted, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” I find it funny and said that Trump cannot spell the word “tap” correctly.

On March 14, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tried to “walk back” the claim made by Trump, trying to say that Trump’s use of “air quotes” (single quotes around the phrase “wiretapping”) meant “wiretapping” in a vague sense, and that Trump was talking about wiretapping in the sense of a variety of surveillance activities, not specifically the tapping of phones in the Trump Tower during the election cycle.

Unfortunately, Trump was very explicit and specific; his first tweet, which I just quoted, was not vague or general in any sense.

Most of us think that Trump tweeting about the “wiretapping” was only intended to serve as a distraction from the investigation of the Trump campaign and the Trump White House staff’s connections to the Russian government, Vladimir Putin, or members of the Russian oligarchy. There is no other reasonable conclusion, since no evidence to support Trump’s claim of wiretapping by President Obama has been found by the FBI or others investigating Trump’s claim.

Trump apparently got the wiretapping idea from a story he heard on Fox News. This is ridiculous.

 

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