Trump and GCHQ: a lie too far?
It is nearly three weeks since President Trump “first tweeted his still unsubstantiated allegations that Barack Obama had tapped his phones during the election campaign”, said Peter Westmacott in The Guardian. Since then, the claim has been denied by, among others, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, the FBI and the National Security Agency. But the story has now moved on “from farce to serious political drama”. Last Thursday, the president’s spokesman Sean Spicer repeated the allegation made by a commentator on Fox News that, instead of using a US spy agency, Obama had asked Britain’s GCHQ to tap Trump’s phones on his behalf. GCHQ broke its traditional silence and moved quickly to dismiss the allegation as “utterly ridiculous”. No. 10 followed suit soon afterwards, stating: “We’ve received assurances from the White House that these allegations won’t be repeated.”
It has been suggested that British and US intelligence agencies sometimes help each other to get round domestic laws by spying on each other’s citizens, and sharing the information, said Henry Farrell in The Washington Post. But it is “wildly unlikely” that they would conspire to monitor a US presidential candidate. “The political risks to both sides would be quite enormous.” Nor was even a shred of proof offered by Fox’s commentator, Andrew Napolitano – a retired judge with a weakness for conspiracy theories. Fox News itself has denied the claim.
Trump, though, was unrepentant, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind,” said the president. His attitude came as no surprise. “This administration operates under the doctrine of Trumpal infallibility: nothing the president says is wrong, whether it’s his false claim that he won the popular vote, or his assertion that the historically low murder rate is at a record high.” No mistake is ever admitted. “There is never anything to apologise for.” This administration seems to be “either scrabbling around desperately for distractions, or living in a fantasy world”, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph. Neither possibility bodes well for the immediate future of the Western world.