In a shocking allegation, President Trump has accused Barack Obama of tapping the phones at his Trump Tower just prior to the election.
The accusations were leveled in a series of early-morning tweets in which Trump called the ex-president a “bad (or sick) guy,” branded the alleged actions a “new low” and likened them to “Nixon/Watergate.”
The tweet storm began at 3:35 a.m. E.T., not surprising with a high-energy president known for little sleep and impulsive tweets. And while Trump hasn’t yet cited any evidence to back up his claims, he seemed to be referring to “a Thursday evening radio show hosted by Mark Levin that claimed Obama executed a ‘silent coup’ of Trump via ‘police state’ tactics, according to … Breitbart News,” reports the Daily Mail.
“Levin suggested the former president should be the target of congressional investigation,” the paper continued.
Here are the relevant tweets, in succession:
Reporting yesterday on Levin’s recommendation, Breitbart provided an expanded version of the case against Obama. Attempting to combat the WikiLeaks emails damaging the Hillary Clinton campaign, the site informed, the Obama administration submitted a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) request last October.
Using the present tense, Breitbart writes that this request is “focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.”
Of course, President Trump might have been alluding to a different — and perhaps illegal — type of monitoring in his early-morning tweets. Time will tell.
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This story, of course, concerns the now worn-out media narrative that the Russians “hacked the election,” deceitful terminology alluding only to the idea that Moscow might have provided WikiLeaks with the Democrat Party emails so damning to Clinton’s electoral fortunes. Note, however, that WikiLeaks head Julian Assange denies this, stating that the entity providing the information is not a state actor.
Also note that, whoever hacked the emails, the Democrats’ complaint boils down to this:
Truths they wanted hidden came to light.
Among the revelations was that Clinton was given debate questions prior to one of her debates with candidate Bernie Sanders, thus proving a conspiracy to undermine his burgeoning anti-establishment campaign.
Further playing the Russia card, Politico is accusing Trump of using the Obama accusations to deflect attention from his alleged Muscovy machinations. Yet there’s an unnoticed irony to this left-wing (mainstream) media beating of the Russia drum.
Some leftists have attempted to score political points by claiming that Cold War warrior Ronald Reagan is spinning in his grave looking at how today’s U.S. government is “in bed” with the Russians. The idea is that contemporary Republicans have betrayed some kind of eternal principle in not overtly spitting in the Bear’s eye.
Unmentioned is that the entity Reagan called the “evil empire” and so zealously combated was not Russia — it didn’t exist at the time.
That empire was the Soviet Union. Russia had died along with Tsar Nicholas II.
Moreover, the Left (socialist at heart) back then consistently showed sympathy for the Soviets and antipathy for Reagan. In fact, Senator Edward Kennedy — dubbed the “Lion of the Senate” by many and called “America’s conscience” by the Lost Angeles Times — secretly, and shockingly, offered to help the Soviets deal with Reagan if Moscow would aid the Democrats in defeating him in 1984.
At the same time, leftists demeaned Reagan as “Ronald Raygun” for proposing to counter the Soviet nuclear threat with the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Note that making a deal with a hostile foreign power to undermine a domestic political foe is precisely the kind of treasonous behavior the Democrats now accuse Trump and the GOP of engaging in, again adding weight to the observation that leftists continually project their attitudes and behaviors onto others.
The irony, however, is this: When Russia was the USSR and explicitly Marxist, our left loved it.
Now that the Berlin Wall has long been down, the USSR is Russia again, and its people actually can vote for their leaders, it’s the Left’s favorite whipping boy and boogeyman.
As for Obama, while it’s unknown whether he hacked the Trump Tower phones, he wasn’t a typical president any more than he’s a typical ex-president. A community agitator at heart, Obama showed little regard for the law while in office; out of it, he has refused to walk into the sunset as is former presidents’ wont.
Instead, he took up residence in a mansion two miles from the White House (and built a wall around it, mind you); moreover, his Rasputin-like advisor Valerie Jarrett has actually moved in with him to, some allege, help him wage an “insurgency” against the Trump administration.
Whatever Obama’s precise degree of culpability and Trump’s accuracy in leveling allegations, one might think Obama would be legally vulnerable enough so that he wouldn’t want to make waves. Notably, a major law-enforcement agency definitively determined that the “birth certificate” he produced was a forgery — and not long ago handed its investigation’s results over to the Department of Justice.
Yet perhaps this gets at the goal. Radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed out this week that the driving force behind all the allegations against the Trump administration is not a desire to drain the D.C. swamp, but to stop it from being drained. Leftists want to keep President Trump so embroiled in faux scandal that it’s impossible for him to govern.
To this end, it helps if you not just make waves, but a tsunami that washes away those who dare wrestle the Washington gators.
