Wiretap claims sully the U.S. presidency
Too bad America can’t run the White House through a car wash. After last weekend, the place needs lots of soap and hot water. Donald Trump’s entirely unpresidential accusation that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the campaign was reckless and demeaning to the office he holds.
This was more than the birther conspiracy on steroids.
Trump turned the presidency into a joy ride of self-serving, unsubstantiated pronouncements.
If he has evidence that his predecessor engaged in wiretapping Trump Tower, he should have presented it.
He should have done so with the gravity such a charge demands. Not with a drive-by tweet.
He might also have explained how such a thing could have happened.
Remember last year’s rumors about an embarrassing video of Trump in a Moscow hotel room? Trump said it couldn’t exist and boasted about his antibugging vigilance while traveling.
Does he expect us to believe he is less vigilant in his own palace? The place where he conducts high-level wheeling and dealing? That’s hard to swallow.
What’s far more likely is that a White House besieged by nagging questions about its expanding Russian connections tried to change the subject.
Trump’s Saturday morning tweet about an Obama wiretap operation came after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was accused of lying to Congress about his previous conversations with Russian officials.
It came after Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser because he had made misleading statements to Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador.
It came on top of the judgment of most of our nation’s top intelligence agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump win an office he clearly does not revere.
It’s important to keep in mind that this interference was probably less about Trump than it was about trying to destabilize and discredit our democratic system of government. This is a long-term goal of Russia’s.
It is something far bigger than even Trump’s outsized ego. If a foreign government can influence U.S. elections, that represents an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States.
It matters, people. It matters a lot.
The president of the United States should be first in the line of patriotic Americans who want to fully understand what Russia did so this country can make sure it is not repeated or escalated in the next election.
Trump says his campaign did not collude with Russian hacking and distribution of Democratic emails. So far, there is no proof of a direct connection.
But there are questions. Trump should want the answers for his sake and for the sake of uniting a divided America. Unless he has something to hide. Trump’s demand for an investigation into his unsubstantiated accusations about Barack Obama looks like a desperate attempt to bury the real issue. To conflate fantasy with fact. To confuse legitimate questions about Russian hacking with Trump’s bizarre attack on the Obama presidency.
Unlike the Russian hacking scandal, there is no known evidence to back up Trump’s allegation. Obama has denied it. So has James Clapper, Obama’s former director of national intelligence.
FBI Director James Comey, who inadvertently helped Trump by reopening the Hillary Clinton email probe shortly before the election, has reportedly called on the Justice Department to debunk Trump’s wiretap charges.
If a wiretap occurred, there is a paper trail through the FBI, Justice Department and the courts.
It shouldn’t be hard to find — and it shouldn’t require a congressional investigation.
Nor should Trump’s high-speed excursion down a muddy road distract Congress from investigating Russia’s interference in our elections and Trump’s connections with Russia.