[NYTImes] 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.
| Or, perhaps because it lays bare just how political the FBI has become... |
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.
| Yet in other columns at the NYT and WaPo we read of Mr. Obama setting up an operation to do just that, and that ValJar will be all but living there. |
Along with concerns about potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election.
| Or that there was no collusion, that it was all fake news and phony accusations by the butt-hurt Democrats. That likely would be a worse outcome for the FBI... |
Mr. Comey’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.
It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue the statement himself.
| He's tired of being a pinball in an arcade game? |
| It does make you wonder if what Mr. Comey is doing is trying to get off the hook here -- last thing he wants to do is disclose a FISA warrant. |
Mr. Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter messages, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”
A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.
I doubt he ever had to order milk or butter for the White House kitchen either.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.
| And if you can't believe the spokes boy for a former president waist-deep in chicanery, just who can you believe? |
| The claims are speculative unless Breitbart has evidence that they have yet to share. But the notion that this couldn't possibly have happened wears a little thin when we 1) know just how willing FISA was to grant warrants 2) just how politicized the Holder/Lynch DoJ was 3) just how the CIA/NSA deep intelligence state has been wanting to take Trump down and 4) just how politicized Mr. Comey himself is. He can't issue statements about investigations into the Clinton campaign -- not once but twice -- and then claim that he's a spring chicken when it comes to the Trump campaign. |
| That's some hyperbole right there: not Obama personally, but perhaps some folks in the White House. We first have to know that FISA did indeed authorize a warrant, and then who got the information, and then how it spread. Knowing that Obama, in his last days, allowed a "loosening of restrictions" on sharing information makes plausible -- not proved, plausible -- that people on the political side of the administration got to see things that they weren't supposed to see. And it isn't about the Russians. If the wiretappers had access to Trump campaign communications they could have ferreted out a fair bit of what his fall campaign strategy was. If communicated to Hillary's people (and if they were smart enough to use it, which may have been Trump's saving grace), that would be quite the boon to the Democrats. There's your Watergate right there -- remember, Nixon was trying to get info on Democratic party donors. |
Yes, "greatest abuse' pretty well sums it up.
“Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Ms. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.”
The claims about wiretapping appear similar in some ways to the unfounded voter fraud charges that Mr. Trump made during his first days in the Oval Office.
| Except that now we're discovering that they were, indeed, founded. Perhaps you don't want to go there, Mr. Journolist. |
As with his demand for a wiretapping inquiry, Mr. Trump also called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud, saying on Twitter that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” No investigation has been started.
Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, “Not to my knowledge, no.”
| That's not a resounding no. "Not to my knowledge" is one of the standard weasel phrases used in political circles. |
| Clapper -- oh yeah, he's the guy who lied to Congress, right? |
“I’m not sure what the genesis of that statement was,” Mr. Rubio said.
Pressed to elaborate on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Rubio said, “I’m not going to be a part of a witch hunt, but I’m also not going to be a part of a cover-up.”
| Fair statement. It's too early yet to know. |