Now that Donald Trump has gone and made a complete fool of himself yet again with his dubious claim that former President Obama had him wiretapped, attorneys for the administration are frantically attempting to find something–anything–that might bolster Trump’s charges.
The New York Times reports that at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat this weekend, senior White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II is spending every waking hour trying to gain access to a court order that may or may not exist.
Two possibilities are in play in regard to the wiretapping charge Trump leveled via Twitter early Saturday morning:
- Trump is getting his suspicions from right-wing sites such as Breitbart.com and InfoWars, and has created his own paranoid delusion from what he has read at such sites.
- Trump is under surveillance as ordered by a warrant from a FISA court. If this proves to be case, it would mean that the FISA court felt there was probable cause to issue a warrant because Trump is suspected of a crime or is an agent of a foreign power such as Russia.
Should the second possibility prove to be true, it would be highly unusual–not to mention a breach of Justice Department independence–for Trump to compel the DOJ to turn over documents relevant to an ongoing investigation. As the Times noted:
“Any request for information from a top White House official about a continuing investigation would be a stunning departure from protocols intended to insulate the F.B.I. from political pressure. It would be even more surprising for the White House to seek information about a case directly involving the president or his advisers, as does the case involving the Russia contacts.”
In other words, White House lawyers are seeking proof that their client is being investigated by the same Department of Justice he is in charge of as head of the government. That within itself would seem to be a major conflict of interest. But when dealing with a person as mentally unstable and petulant as Donald Trump, the unheard of becomes plausible.
Former Hillary Clinton Press Secretary Brian Fallon said Saturday that all of the action taking place at Mar-a-Lago this weekend by Trump’s legal team serves to bolster the case for appointing a special prosecutor to look into Trump’s connections to Russia:
WH scrambles to justify Trump tweets but doing so amounts to interference in probe & builds case for special counselhttps://t.co/kRO2cBvc87
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) March 4, 2017
Featured Image Via the Independent.uk
