FOES RUSSIAN TO BRING DOWN DON
HERE a Russian story, there a Russian story, everywhere a Russian story — all based on leaks from anonymous sources. You don’t have to be a spook to spot the plan: Destroy Donald Trump by putting him in a bear hug.
To judge by their scattershot approach, the conspirators are fishing for a bombshell. The fallback goal is to inflict death by a thousand cuts.
Already they’ve gotten one scalp and part of another. Gen. Mike Flynn is gone, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is wounded. Each made a mistake that obscured a larger truth: Somebody in the government has been spying on Trump’s team and giving top secret information to anti-Trump media outlets.
Our president is many things, but dumb he’s not. He recognized the stakes, so yesterday he struck back in a way that dramatically upped the ante in the war over his presidency.
Trump’s early-morning tweets accusing President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him at Trump Tower startled the world. It is a sensational claim, but in light of the tsunami of leaks from intelligence agencies, the president is right to suspect that he’s the target of a dirty game.
To start with, the unprecedented alliance against him clearly includes remnants of the Obama administration, and probably the former president himself. The recent New York Times report that Obama and his team dropped intelligence findings like bread crumbs so they would get wide readership and to prevent the Trump administration from burying them reveals an attempt to undermine if not subvert a legally elected president.
The Times report conveys suspicions that Trump would deepsix the findings if he could while giving a free pass to Obama’s leakers who may have committed crimes. The Times knows who in the Obama camp was involved and what they did. The paper has an ethical obligation to report it.
Yet here’s the rub: What exactly was in those findings? All the public knows is that intelligence officials said they investigated whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, and we only know that because it was leaked by anonymous sources.
But that knowledge, while sounding suspicious, raises more questions than it answers.
For example, did investigators looking at Trump’s campaign find anything substantive? The Times has said no but keeps suggesting the probes continue. Publicly, the FBI won’t confirm or deny anything and even Congress is frustrated by the bureau’s behavior.
Yet the fact that there are leaks reveals something important: The investigation involved monitoring phone calls and maybe computers and maybe physical surveillance.
One piece of evidence involves the Justice Department warning to the White House that Flynn lied when he said he hadn’t discussed sanctions with the Rus- sian ambassador during a December phone call.
Justice could know that only because the call was bugged and there was a transcript. We were assured, anonymously, of course, that the tapping was on the Russian, not Flynn.
But what if that wasn’t true? What if Flynn was being tapped?
Here’s another clue: How did The Washington Post learn that Sessions met twice with the Russian ambassador? Sessions was a United States senator and an early and vocal supporter of the Trump campaign. Was he under surveillance, electronically and otherwise?
If all this smells like a kettle of rotten fish, it is — and it gets worse. Numerous reports say there was a warrant approved at the court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — FISA — to monitor a computer in Trump Tower that was suppos- edly communicating with a Russian bank.
The Times said investigators concluded the computer was merely sending spam, but the investigators who spoke to the paper could know that only if they had access to the computer or the Russian bank. And if it was only spam, why would the investigation remain active?
We are left then, with daily leaks feeding a giant blob of information and maybe misinformation. Separating fact from fake news has never been more essential.
All that is certain is that we are witnessing a homegrown attack on a sitting president, most likely by elements of our own government and most likely for purely partisan purposes.
If true, that would be at least as un-American as anything the Trump people might have done in communicating with Russians.
In that context, we cannot ignore an ominous warning the top Democrat in the Senate issued before the inauguration. At that point, Trump already had made accusations that intelligence officials were leaking secret information in a bid to deny him the presidency.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Chuck Schumer said on television. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”