Obama "didn't 'choke,' he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good."

4 Trump tweets from a few hours ago:

1. "The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win.."

2. "...and did not want to 'rock the boat.' He didn't 'choke,' he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good."

3. "The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING after being informed in August about Russian meddling. With 4 months looking at Russia..."

4. "..under a magnifying glass, they have zero 'tapes' of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!"

Don't let girls learn.

"The Trump administration is discontinuing a signature girls education initiative championed by former first lady Michelle Obama, according to officials."

The "Let Girls Learn" program, which she and President Barack Obama started in 2015 to facilitate educational opportunities for adolescent girls in developing countries, will cease operation immediately, according to an internal document obtained by CNN....

UPDATE: I thought I saw a headline saying that the Trump administration disputes this news story, but now I can't find it. "Trump administration denies it plans to end Michelle Obama’s girl’s education program."

Judge Andrew Napolitano was apparently right about British surveillance on the American election.

He was openly mocked — and suspended from Fox News — but now, it seems, he was right.

"The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump..."

"... part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said," The Washington Post reports.

The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.

This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents. Such contacts are now at the center of an investigation into whether the campaign coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor....

“This confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” Page said in an interview Tuesday. “I have nothing to hide.” He compared surveillance of him to the eavesdropping that the FBI and Justice Department conducted against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

"Trump Says Susan Rice May Have Committed a Crime."

The NYT reports.

“I think it’s going to be the biggest story,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office, declining repeated requests for evidence for his allegations or the names of other Obama administration officials. “It’s such an important story for our country and the world. It is one of the big stories of our time.”

He declined to say if he had personally reviewed new intelligence to bolster his claim but pledged to explain himself “at the right time.”

When asked if Ms. Rice, who has denied leaking the names of Trump associates under surveillance by United States intelligence agencies, had committed a crime, the president said, “Do I think? Yes, I think.”

"I hope Susan Rice was keeping tabs on Trump’s Russia ties."

By Michelle Goldberg at Slate.

I love the way the messaging turns on a dime.

One minute it's ridiculous to think that the Obama administration was doing surveillance on the Trump campaign. The next minute the Obama administration was doing the right thing if it did surveillance on the Trump campaign.

"White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign..."

Writes Eli Lake at Bloomberg, citing "U.S. officials familiar with the matter."

The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."...

The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks. It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask U.S. persons....

The NYT struggles to fight off Trump's use of that NYT headline "Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides."

I recommend reading this closely, looking for the weasel words: "Fact Check: Trump Misleads About The Times’s Reporting on Surveillance," by Linda Qiu. I've been blogging too long today to parse through this right now, but let me highlight a few things. First, Trump was right about the headline, but maybe wrong about the NYT motive to change it. As Qiu puts it:

There were in fact two different headlines on the online and print versions of the article, which is typical. At no point was either headline altered. Times headlines often differ in print and online....

It's still true that the NYT said "Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides." Why they changed it, who knows? Qiu refers to what is "typical" and "often" happens, yet we can't know exactly why what happened in this case happened. But it could have changed for some neutral reason. [ADDED THE NEXT MORNING: I can see I've written this confusingly, saying "changed" when Qiu's point is that nothing was ever changed. I only mean that the print headline was written and for some reason, a different/changed headline was written for the web. Qiu has taken pains to show that the web headline wasn't belatedly tweaked to eliminate the hot word "wiretapped."]

Liu writes that Trump was "misleading" to say that the Times said that "wiretap data" was "used in inquiry of Trump aides." "Misleading" is NOT the same as false, so Liu really is admitting that it was true. The reason it's misleading, according to Liu, is that the article doesn't say that "Mr. Obama ordered surveillance on him." Did Trump say Obama ordered surveillance on him? There's no Trump quote to that effect, and it makes me suspicious that Trump is being paraphrased to confine him to what can be refuted, which — talk about misleading! — feels very misleading. See:

The Times reported that there were intercepted conversations involving Mr. Trump’s associates, but it did not report that they or Mr. Trump were the subject of wiretap orders. To date, The Times has not found evidence of that.

What seems to have happened is that that the official targets were other than Trump people, but that Trump people got swept in, and these people were legally entitled to protection from surveillance. Here's how Liu (misleadingly?) puts it:

American intelligence agencies typically monitor the communications of foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and so they routinely sweep up any conversations between American citizens and those officials — called “incidental collection.”

For example, it is routine for F.B.I. counterintelligence officials to keep the Russian ambassador under surveillance. Therefore, when Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, spoke on the phone with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, the government intercepted that conversation because it was wiretapping the ambassador.

Mr. Trump claimed he used the word “wiretapping” as a broad definition of surveillance.

“Now remember this. When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wire tapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes.”

This is misleading. Mr. Trump did put the word in quotes in two of his tweets, but explicitly accused Mr. Obama of wiretapping his phones.

That sounds like a concession that Flynn was wiretapped! He may not have been the original target or the official target, but he got swept in, and we shouldn't even know about that. But there was a leak, and wasn't the leak targeted on him — a gross violation of law designed to take him down? I can't believe we're nitpicking Trump's use of the term "wiretapped" rather that outraged about a shocking abuse of power for political purposes.

Many words are dead metaphors, and "wiretapped" may be one, whether it's in quotes or not. Who cares if there were "wires" that were "tapped"? It's like looking for eaves when someone is said to be eavesdropping. I think the stress on the word "wiretapped" is part of an effort to say that some other party was targeted — some foreign official was listened in on — and that caused the overhearing of some Trump-associated persons. There was a wiretap, but the wires tapped (metaphorically) were not a Trump associate's.

But to use that opportunity — that wiretap — to listen in is a terrible infringement on the non-target, and the law required the protection of these non-targets from an invasion of their privacy. Instead, the leakers did the opposite and took advantage of what they heard and deliberately exposed what they were legally required to mask. That's what I gather from Liu's article anyway.

Why doesn't the NYT care about this problem!

"The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned... that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials."

"During an interview on Fox News, Woodward said that if that information about the unmasking is true, 'it is a gross violation.'"

He said it isn't Trump's assertion, without proof, that his predecessor wiretapped Trump Tower that is of concern, but rather that intelligence officials named the Americans being discussed in intercepted
communications....

"[T]he idea that there was intelligence value here is really thin," Woodward said. "It's, again, down the middle, it is not what Trump said, but this could be criminal on the part of people who decided, oh, let's name these people."

He drove the point home, adding that "under the rules, that name is supposed to be blanked out, and so you've got a real serious problem potentially of people in the Obama administration passing around this highly classified gossip."

"There's nothing worse for the credibility of all of Washington than an intel 'leak off' — entering a potentially destructive phase."

There's nothing worse for the credibility of all of Washington than an intel "leak off" -- entering a potentially destructive phase.

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) March 22, 2017

ADDED: "President Donald Trump said he felt 'somewhat' vindicated on his wiretapping claims against former President Barack Obama after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said he had seen evidence that members of the Trump transition teams were surveilled following November’s election."

I'm fed up with headlines like "FBI’s Trump-Russia probe knocks White House on its heels."

That's at Politico. The article, by Shane Goldmacher and Matthew Nussbaum, does not seem to have any sources inside the White House feeding information about how people working there are feeling. We're just told...

The White House was knocked on the defensive ahead of its biggest week yet on Capitol Hill after FBI Director James Comey confirmed the existence of an active investigation into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, including whether there was any coordination with now-President Donald Trump’s team.

That's the standard news of the day yesterday — Comey testified — puffed up with some annoying prompting to think that something he said is a significant new revelation. 

In another blow to Trump, Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers also publicly refuted his unsubstantiated claims on Twitter that President Barack Obama had ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower phones.... “I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said. 

"Refuted" is the wrong word. Trump said he heard X is true. For Comey to refute that, he would need to say he knows X is not true. But whatever. It is what it is. The FBI looked and couldn't discover that Obama wiretapped Trump, and the FBI has an ongoing investigation into Russia's activities in relation to the American election. That's the story yesterday about hearings that were out in the open for all of us to see and quote.

What is there about the behind-the-scenes reaction? First, we're told that Trump himself was out in Louisville, Kentucky doing one of his rallies. That doesn't sound knocked on his heels. That sounds like Trump barreling forward, sanguine as ever. We're told Trump completely ignored the Comey business. Where's the knocking back on the heels?

To be fair to Goldmacher and Nussbaum and whoever typed out the headline, it wasn't Trump specifically who was supposedly knocked back on his heels. It was the White House. So maybe Trump was just fine out in Kentucky, but the White House — sans Trump — got knocked back on its heels. Here's the relevant text for that theory:

Meanwhile, the White House scrambled to contain the fallout, deploying two simultaneous war rooms, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, one in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to monitor the Comey hearing and another in the Senate offices to keep tabs on Gorsuch.

It sounds as though they were geared up and ready to deal with everything as it happened. That's the OPPOSITE of being knocked back on your heels.

Finally, the article tells us Spicer had his usual encounter with the press and got asked some questions about the Comey testimony. Of course Spicer wasn't knocked back on his heels. He gave the predictable press-secretary answers: there's nothing new, there was no collusion, other issues are more important, etc.

I'm sick of the phony emotionalism. Maybe some Trump haters and media people and establishment politicians are hysterical, but don't project that emotion onto Trump. If you have actual information that Trump and his people are breaking down emotionally, tell me about it in strictly factual terms: What do you know and how do you know it? But don't take a story and imagine how Trump must feel or make up how you WISH Trump would feel and then report it as if it is news. It's fake news!

"We have no information to support those tweets. All I can tell you is that we have no information that supports them."

Said F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, testifying today before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, about Trump's assertion that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.

Enough about squeaky, it's time for Spicey.

From "White House Tries to Soothe British Officials Over Trump Wiretap Claim" (in the NYT).

5th highest-rated comment: "And this is the man that has the nuclear codes? It was be laughable if it weren't so downright terrifying."

Which reminds me of this other thing on the NYT front page right now: "Rex Tillerson Rejects Talks With North Korea on Nuclear Program."

“The policy of strategic patience has ended,” Mr. Tillerson said, a reference to the term used by the Obama administration to describe a policy of waiting out the North Koreans, while gradually ratcheting up sanctions and covert action....

Mr. Tillerson’s tougher line was echoed by President Trump on Twitter later Friday. “North Korea is behaving very badly,” he posted. “They have been “playing” the United States for years. China has done little to help!”

The Harvard law professor argues that the President of the United States can and should be impeached for saying something that's not supported by evidence.

This is Noah Feldman, writing at Bloomberg:

The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech....

In a rule of law society, government allegations of criminal activity must be followed by proof and prosecution. If not, the government is ruling by innuendo....

But impeachment is not available as a solution to excessive innuendo.

Breaking the law by tapping Trump’s phones would have been an abuse of executive power that implicated the democratic process itself. Impeachment is the remedy for such a serious abuse of the executive office....

Why would that make impeachment the right remedy for saying that Obama did it?

The Constitution speaks of impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”... Suffice it to say that what makes crimes “high” is that they pertain to the exercise of government office. That’s exactly what accusations by the executive are: actions that take on their distinctive meaning because they are made by government officials....

Obama is the best-known and most popular Democrat in the country. The effect of attacking him isn’t just to weaken him personally, but to weaken the political opposition to Trump’s administration.

Given how great the executive’s power is, accusations by the president can’t be treated asymmetrically. If the alleged action would be impeachable if true, so must be the allegation if false. Anything else would give the president the power to distort democracy by calling his opponents criminals without ever having to prove it.

So the power available to be used against the President must equal the President's power? We need symmetry, an equal-playing-field fight? If that's the theory, we won't have a presidency anymore. The fact that seems to escape Feldman is that Trump was elected President. THAT was the procedure. The trust was put in him.

I know some people are having a terrible time accepting that. Trump wasn't supposed to win. But he did, and the people who voted for him are entitled to their victory, and those who did not still need a President, and those about to devote themselves to the next campaign need elections to maintain their meaning.

Trump may be outright lying about Obama, but Obama told lies too, and all Presidents tell some lies, sometimes for good reason. We made a human being President. We always do. This person will say many things, and we'll be saying many things against him too. Like Professor Feldman, we can say that the President ought to be impeached. But to say the President should be impeached for lying about a political opponent is too much drama.

"While all this head-spinning legal jibber-jabber goes back and forth, the foundation of the false narrative we’ve been hearing since November 8 has vanished."

"Now that we’re supposed to believe there was no real investigation of Trump and his campaign, what else can we conclude but that there was no real evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia . . . which makes sense, since Russia did not actually hack the election, so the purported objective of the collusion never existed."

Writes Andrew McCarthy.

The weasel word of the day is "Ordered."

I'm tired of reading things like "President Trump’s astonishing and reckless accusation that he was wiretapped on orders from President Barack Obama should finally be the tipping point in how the country views him and his presidency." (That's E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post.)

From what I've read, "ordered" is the weasel word that allows anti-Trumpsters to make flat statements portraying Trump as out of his mind. But the notorious Trump tweets do not say that Obama "ordered" a wiretapping. They ask if it is "legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election?" and refer to what a court had done. Though Trump didn't precisely say this, any "order" came from the court. He then said "President Obama was tapping my phones," which isn't to say that he "ordered" it. I think the story Trump is relying on is that the FISA court granted a warrant (after some funny business to get around a previous denial), not that Obama just "ordered" it. Then, Trump tweeted that Obama had gone "low... to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process." Trump portrays Obama as doing something, not "ordering" it.

Unless the anti-Trumpsters can speak clearly avoid the safety of that word, I will not trust what they say. 

It's the Winter of the Shark, and I find it offputting and childish, but it's also an ominous sign that we don't have enough problems.

There's way too much insanity right now. It's like the "summer of the shark" before 9/11.* If anything really serious started happening, I assume all the participants in the current insanity would suddenly sober up and act like grownups.

I don't have a taste for blood myself, and I've been turning away from this drama, disgusted. I don't know who's most responsible for the current insanity, but I will be looking for some decent journalists to read and politicians to listen to.
_____________________

* "The Summer of the Shark refers to the coverage of shark attacks by American news media in the summer of 2001. The sensationalist coverage of shark attacks began in early July following the Fourth of July weekend shark attack on 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast, and continued almost unabated—despite no evidence for an actual increase in attacks—until the September 11 terrorist attacks shifted the media's attention away from beaches. The Summer of the Shark has since been remembered as an example of tabloid television perpetuating a story with no real merit beyond its ability to draw ratings."

"FISA Is Not Law-Enforcement – It’s Not Interference with Justice Department Independence for White House to Ask for FISA Information."

The invaluable legal analysis of Andrew M. McCarthy, checking the work of the NYT.

According to [the NYT report "Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones"], a Trump official said that White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II is “working to secure access” to what is believed to be “an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing some form of surveillance related to Mr. Trump and his associates.” Presumably, this means the Trump White House is seeking to review the Justice Department’s applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance of Trump associates, and perhaps Trump himself, from June and October 2016, including any orders issued by the FISA court – as my post explains, it has been reported that the Obama Justice Department’s June application was denied, but its October application (which apparently did not name Trump) was granted.   

The NYT report makes assertions about the law — "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" — that McCarthy debunks. McCarthy is adamant:

[A] FISA investigation is not a “law-enforcement matter” or “case.” A law-enforcement matter is a criminal prosecution. That is the mission in which there should never be any political interference because it involves the strictly legal matter of whether there is evidence that penal statutes have been violated. In such a situation, White House intrusion would be political interference in a proceeding that is essentially judicial in nature, involving the potential removal of liberty from a citizen.

McCarthy has great expertise in this area and the NYT should be powerfully embarrassed to botch things this badly — whether the mistakes are from ignorance or from a deliberate attempt to deceive. I'm not an expert in this area, so maybe McCarthy is wrong and the NYT is right. The NYT had better scramble to explain itself if it's right or come clean if it's wrong.

Meanwhile, this gets my "fake news" tag.

"President Trump... demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election."

The NYT reports.

“President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in the statement.

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.”

"In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine..."

"Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner."

From "How Jokes Won the Election/How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?" by Emily Nussbaum (in The New Yorker).

Here's video of the "lacerating takedown" (including the unsmiling Trump).