Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that President Obama ordered phones in Trump’s offices in Trump Tower to be tapped during the campaign. If that was part of an official investigation and had warrants to back it up, that would still be pretty controversial. It wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to say the president had knowledge or was responsible, although he could have signed off on it. But there’s a reason the FBI shies away from investigating during campaign season.
If it was done off the books, however, it would be a legitimate scandal.
In the former case, it shouldn’t be hard for the new president to learn the truth and even to provide evidence to back it up. In the latter case, I suppose it’s possible that the people responsible in the FBI or NSA would try to hide what they had done, but that would involve insubordination and disloyalty.
Either way, Trump hasn’t yet provided any proof to back his allegation that this was done. And that’s leading to speculation that he isn’t basing his allegation on any first-hand knowledge:
Citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of five tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”
Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump’s senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration’s activities.
Obviously, I don’t know what is going on here. But if I were the president and this theory was suggested to me, I’d make some phone calls and probably dispatch a few aides to visit with senior management at the NSA and FBI. I’d try to figure out if it was true that phones in my business headquarters had been tapped, whose phones were tapped, and if it had been done in a legal way. And, if it was done in a legal way, I’d want to know what the targets had done to justify the taps in the eyes of the Bureau and the FISA court.
I’d be worried that it was politically motivated, but I’d also be worried that people in my organization might be legitimate security risks or possibly even criminals.
What I wouldn’t do is Tweet about it without having any of this information. After all, exposure of such an operation might make me look worse than the former president if it turned out to be justified.
We already know that the FBI sought and failed to get warrants on Trump officials sometime during the summer, and that they probably received approval for some taps in October.
The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
It’s not clear at all that these warrants would have applied to any phones in Trump Tower, although they probably would have covered cell phones of people who spent considerable time there. The four individuals are suspected of being Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Roger Stone.
If that reporting is correct and the summer application was denied, then Paul Manafort was no longer Trump’s campaign chief by the time that he may have been tapped. The other three presumably did not have any dedicated lines in Trump Tower.
It’s important to understand that all four of these individuals were suspected of having improper communications with Russian officials and/or intelligence officers, and that the FBI wanted to investigate if they were colluding with the Russians’ hacking of voter files, the DNC email/chat servers, and John Podesta’s email, as well as WikiLeaks’ and DCLeaks’ disclosures of that pilfered information.
As far as we know, there wasn’t any separate operation aimed at spying on Trump without any probable cause or judicial review.
All of this should be investigated by an independent counsel or panel.
Trump’s tweets just make this more obvious.
