Trump Wiretaps In January Report Did Not Need Warrants

His half-dozen somewhat vocal critics, who are mostly senators and include moderates such as Susan Collins of ME, old warhorses such as John McCain of Arizona, and, in Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a principled conservative, have politely cast doubt on Mr Trump’s allegations. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on a USA citizen. O’Reilly asked, to which Trump replied: “Because I can feel it”.

Nunes said he had not spoke to Trump about the tweets or been in touch with the White House. The current White House is not wrong that this seems a bit like a campaign by the previous administration to damage the new one. Nobody except Trump’s eager enablers believed a word of it.

His advisers’ contacts with the Russians?

But Clapper then went on to say that to his knowledge there was “no evidence” of “collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians”.

His fabricated claim that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally, causing him to lose the popular vote?

During White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s first on camera briefing in over a week, the beleaguered spokesperson had to resume his now predictable task of answering for his boss’s batshit insane claims. An official White House statement called this “a belief he maintains”. “After that press conference, in my eyes, he’s now head of church”.

“If a sitting US president alleging that his predecessor engaged in the most unscrupulous and unlawful conduct. that is also a scandal, if those allegations prove to be false”, Schiff said.

I’ll even admit here that I agree with them that Trump probably doesn’t mean to be taken literally at all times.

“We’re going to go anywhere there’s intelligence or facts that send us”, Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

Clearly. When Trump expressed his belief that news organizations weren’t reporting on terrorist attacks, Spicer attempted to document this falsehood with a list of 78 terrorist attacks, most of which had been widely covered.

Speaking of Twitter, Spicer got asked if Trump would correct his latest inaccurate tweet. In the six weeks since Trump took office, Republicans have struggled to make sense of claims that have ranged from his false insistence that millions of illegal votes were cast in the November election to now an unprecedented accusation against his predecessor. The implication is that Trump didn’t really know what he was saying would be a big deal.

People close to Trump had seen the pattern before.

“We accept – we will investigate this”, Schiff said, referring to another Trump tweet in which the president likened the alleged wiretap to a “Nixon/Watergate” style scandal. Wingnut news sites would like you to believe so.

It would be one thing if Trump just misread or misinterpreted that Breitbart report and mused about how odd it was that Obama had been wiretapping him. Mr Trump’s aides have meanwhile put up such a valiant but hapless defence of it that, if the issue were not so serious, it would be comical. “Unfortunately, the public has never seen an actual FISA application over almost 40 years, so we don’t know exactly how the FISA Court has applied or interpreted the probable cause standard in this context”, Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney specializing in national security, said in an email.