Countercoup, Part 4: Spicer Repeats Napolitano Allegation, Trump Jokes Obama Tapped Him and Merkel
from Rogue Money:
The president said he may make a statement on the matter before or after the Senate and House committees conclude their investigations.
“Let’s see whether or not I prove it,” Trump said. “I just don’t choose to do it right now.”
Trump hints at “very interesting items” related to wiretapping claims https://t.co/heDlGDQARZ pic.twitter.com/flGLbbwLjs
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 16, 2017
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Thursday stood by President Donald Trump’s unproven accusations that his predecessor wiretapped his New York skyscraper, despite growing bipartisan agreement that there’s no evidence to back up the claim and mounting pressure to retract the statement.
Angrily defending the president’s statement, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Trump “stands by” the four tweets that sparked a firestorm that has threatened Trump’s credibility with lawmakers. Spicer denounced reporters for taking the president’s words too literally and suggested lawmakers were basing their assessments on incomplete information.
Spicer’s comments were a rebuttal to the top two members of the Senate intelligence committee, who released a statement earlier Thursday declaring there is no indication that Trump Tower was “the subject of surveillance” by the U.S. government before or after the 2016 election. Spicer suggested the statement from Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Mark Warner, D-Va., was made without a full review of the evidence or, incorrectly, a briefing from the Justice Department.
“They are not findings,” he said.
The standoff between the White House and lawmakers came four days before FBI Director James Comey is slated to testify before Congress, when he will inevitably be asked whether the president’s accusations are accurate. The White House’s refusal to back down raised the stakes for Comey’s appearance before the intelligence committee on Monday…
“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Burr and Warner said in a one-sentence joint statement Thursday afternoon.
The phrasing of the statement left open the possibility that tenants or employees working in the tower may have been monitored. In response to Trump’s claims and a request from the House intelligence committee, the Justice Department is doing its own review of whether Trump or any of his associates were the subject of surveillance. The department is slated to provide a response to the committee by Monday.
The Great Washington Wall of Denial That Anybody in the Obama Regime and the Three Letter Agencies Tapped Donald J. Trump, Much Less Illegally
The entire Washington Swamp, the legacy media, Congressional intelligence committee chairmen, ‘ex’ spooks and shills for the bloated intelligence complex, have as a man decidied to deny everything related to any surveillance targeting Trump or his aides, notwithstanding their repeated caveats (unless they were in touch with Russians, like retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn’s calls to the Russian Ambassador that Flynn almost certainly knew were recorded). With the D.C. Swamp doubling down on a ‘deny everything’ approach now including the British government’s anonymous spokesman for GCHQ, the Anglo-American Establishment is headed toward a showdown, as President Trump told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson with more revelations likely within the next two weeks.
If, as Trump and Spicer insist, they have evidence from third party sources (whistleblowers inside NSA or GCHQ?) that contradict the entire Washington/London line, then the Establishment including FBI Director James Comey who’s set to testify and expected to confirm his agency’s denials for the Congressional record soon will all look like fools if not liars. But for now, the legacy media and shills are out in force engaged in deny, deny, deny. There is however one crack that the Russia Analyst noticed in the wall of denials today. And that was ex-Deputy Director of the CIA Mike Morrell backing off his previous allegation that Trump was a willing dupe of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, basically repeating former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s statements that he’d seen no evidence of actual collusion between the Trump camp and the Russians.
