Yesterday Donald Trump went wild on Twitter, accusing President Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower and demanding that somebody do something about it, I guess forgetting that as the guy supposedly in charge that he can happily interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation into his Russian collusion and declassify whatever he wants to.
President Donald Trump made a stunning claim Saturday, alleging without offering evidence that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election.
"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" Trump tweeted early Saturday morning in one part of a six-tweet tirade that began just after 6:30 a.m.
The President went on to compare the alleged tapping of his phones to Watergate and called Obama "bad (or sick)."
"How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy," Trump tweeted.
But two former senior US officials quickly dismissed Trump's accusations out of hand.
"Just nonsense," said one former senior US intelligence official.
Another former senior US official with direct knowledge of investigations by the Justice Department under the Obama administration said Trump's phones were never tapped.
"This did not happen. It is false. Wrong," the former official told CNN.
A spokesman for Obama, Kevin Lewis, called "any suggestion" that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump "simply false."
Republicans are of course happy to enable Trump's fantasy, vowing to investigate this "latest Obama scandal."
A Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee says he believes President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated allegations that his predecessor ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower will become part of the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton says, "We're going to follow the facts wherever they lead us. And I'm sure that this matter will be a part of that inquiry."
Trump has provided no evidence of his tweeted accusation that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.
And Cotton said he has not seen any evidence of official wiretapping.
Cotton tells "Fox News Sunday," ''That doesn't mean that none of these things happened. It simply means I haven't seen that yet."
Note Cotton is carefully hedging his bets here. The obvious reality is that Trump, long considered a national security risk thanks to his dealings with the Russians, was and still is being investigated under FISA statutes by the FBI. The Breitbart/Bannon wing of the Trump regime is desperately trying to flip this on its head as this being a gross abuse of power by Obama, and indeed the calls to immediately jail the former President are already all over white supremacist Twitter, led by Roger Stone and Mike Cernovich.
Things could get ugly, fast here. Again, no president in US history has ever been removed against his will. Nixon resigned when it became clear he had lost the trust of both parties and the American people. Trump will do no such thing. If Republicans in Congress decide that it's Obama that needs to be investigated here and not Trump, the results could be both bloody and disastrous.
Sadly, there's every reason to believe that in the name of political expediency, the GOP will play Trump's games.
What's really stopping Trump from rounding up Democrats at this point?
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