The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.
Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.
A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.
Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.
WaPo‘s fact checker ,Glenn Kessler, is a man who surely will want to retire to a quiet, happy place if he survives the Trump Administration. He tried to determine if the White House has any information about wire taps that it didn’t get from media reports, and came up zilch.
There are credible media reports that intelligence agencies — not President Obama — made a FISA request to investigate connections between Russian banks and a server owned by the Trump organization that may or may not have been in Trump Tower. That’s a far cry from Obama tapping Trump’s Trump Tower phones.
A lot of the reporting on right-wing sites is coming from a British reporter named Louise Mensch. Mensch just reported that there is new evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians, however, so the righties may have to find a new favorite reporter.
Karen Tumulty writes for WaPo,
Donald Trump’s presidency has veered onto a road with no centerlines or guardrails.
The president’s accusation Saturday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had tapped his phone “during the very sacred election process†escalated on Sunday into the White House’s call for a congressional investigation of that evidence-free claim.
The audacious tactic was a familiar one for Trump, who has little regard for norms and conventions. When he wants to change a subject, he often does it by touching a match to the dry tinder of a sketchy conspiracy theory.
But the stakes have gotten higher, and the consequences more real and serious, as questions mount over Moscow’s reported attempts to interfere with last year’s presidential election.
It’s my understanding that if Trump has knowledge of classified information on the wiretaps, he could have that information declassified. One suspects he does not.
Remember all those illegal voters gave Hillary Clinton the popular vote majority? Yeah, nobody but Trump does, either.
It was kind of amusing for private citizen Trump to continue to make stupid allegations about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but he’s not a private citizen any more. Some of the senior Republicans need to sit him down and gently explain to him that a president can’t do crap like this.