It just keeps happening. Over and over again, throughout the primaries, throughout the general election, and now throughout the first months of his presidency, it just keeps happening. Donald Trump says something outrageous – something with absolutely no basis in fact, something that could not possibly be true, something that every reporter in the Western hemisphere tells us is certainly NOT true – and then, a short while later…it turns out to be true!
And it has happened once again. When President Trump tweeted last month that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had wiretapped his Manhattan offices, you couldn’t find a reporter this side of InfoWars to give the claim any credibility. Republicans seemed abjectly embarrassed that their president would even say such a thing. The FBI director went out of his way to refute the claim in front of the House Intelligence Committee. The media went to town, asking us how the U.S. could possibly move forward with a president who would lie so blatantly to the American public.
And now: Vindication.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes held a press conference on Wednesday to drop a big ol’ bombshell on the skeptical masses. From the AP:
Communications of Donald Trump’s transition officials – possibly including the incoming president himself – may have been scooped up in legal surveillance but then improperly distributed throughout the intelligence community, the chairman of the House intelligence committee said Wednesday.
In an extraordinary set of statements to reporters, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes said the intercepted communications do not appear to be related to the ongoing FBI investigation into Trump associates’ contacts with Russia or any criminal warrants.
Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, said he believes the intelligence collections were done legally but that identities of Trump officials and the content of their communications may have been inappropriately disseminated in intelligence reports.
“What I’ve read bothers me, and I think it should bother the president himself and his team,” Nunes said Wednesday after briefing Trump privately at the White House.
According to Nunes, this incidentally collected surveillance was what ultimately led to several Trump campaign aides being “unmasked” by leaks to the press. In further comments, he said that none of the intelligence reports had anything to do with the Russians. He said he was not sure when the surveillance took place, nor whether Trump himself had been picked up by the operation.
Naturally, Democrats were enraged by Nunes’s revelations. The ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, said in a statement:
“This afternoon, Chairman Devin Nunes announced he had some form of intercepts revealing that lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials included information on U.S. Persons, potentially including those associated with President Trump or the President himself. If accurate, this information should have been shared with members of the committee, but it has not been. … The Chairman also shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity, given that the matter is currently under investigation. I have expressed my grave concerns with the Chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way.”
Sorry, but if transparency hurts the credibility of any investigation, then it is the investigation itself that needs to be called into question. Democrats want to keep as tight a lid on this story as possible, only leaking out what THEY want us to hear. They want to keep this investigation going indefinitely, because that’s the only way they can keep using it as a political weapon.
On Wednesday, Nunes showed the left that “drip, drip, drip” is a game that both sides can play.
