There are two broad angles to Donald Trump’s allegations that Barack Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower before the election. Let’s take them one at a time.The first is that pretty much everyone has concluded that the Republican president was lying. The top two members of the House Intelligence Committee looked into the allegations and said there’s no evidence to support Trump’s claims, and yesterday, top two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said they too looked into the allegations and reached the same conclusion. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) conceded this week, “No such wiretap existed.”The Trump White House, true to form, remains defiant.
President Donald Trump stands by tweeted claims that President Barack Obama authorized surveillance of his campaign headquarters before the November election, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday, despite a Senate congressional intelligence committee statement that seemed to counter those accusations. […]Spicer, in the press briefing on Thursday, which was delayed in starting by nearly an hour, also blamed the media for cherry-picking reports to discredit the president’s claims. He aggressively pushed back on journalists’ questions about the apparent disconnect and read from a long list of news articles — reporting he said was further verification of the president’s claims and “merit looking into.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."