Donald Trump's tweets to deflect attention from 'Russiagate' are not working

Paul McGeough

MARCH 5 2017

Washington: Donald Trump is up in the middle of the night – again. His latest lash-out – a Twitter blitzkrieg early on Saturday, in which he accuses Barack Obama of a "Nixon/Watergate" plot to tap the phones at the Trump Tower headquarters in New York in the run-up to last year's election – featured a succession of five similarly-worded tweets, belted out between 3.32am and 4.02am.

But more instructive was Trump's next tweet, because it shines a light on how the mind of this President works. Having lobbed his earlier grenades, Trump might have been expected to lie low for a bit, to see what happened.

His 5.19am effort raises legitimate questions of the fitness of the President for his role.

Can the US presidency be left in the hands of a man who:

• thinks it's appropriate to use Twitter to level such charges against Obama - without a shred of evidence. 
• and then, seemingly bored, or perhaps believing the issues are of equal gravity, he was tweeting again:

So, the former president was wiretapping his rival and Schwarzenegger was a dud host on The Apprentice, the reality TV show on which the world knows that Trump was brilliant as host.

Trump's tweets might be a bid to deflect attention from "Russiagate"  - except that the reverse is the case.

Current and former senior security, intelligence and legal officials have been lining up to explain to various media outlets, without formal attribution, that what Trump is alleging could not have happened - and that creates an onus for Trump to produce evidence that it did.

The President's claims are seemingly based on two uncertain points:

• Trump or someone else in his administration reportedly had ordered White House chief counsel Donald McGahn to launch a search within the bureaucracy for what he believes is an order from the highly-secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorising surveillance of Trump and or his associates – but nothing has been found to date.

• An unsubstantiated Breitbart News report, apparently being circulated in the White House, which alleges a series of "known steps taken by President Barack Obama's administration in its last months to undermine Donald Trump's presidential campaign and, later, his new administration".

Simply false, a spokesman for Obama said.

"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement. "As part of that practice, neither president Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

A tweeted response by Ben Rhodes, Obama's long-time national security adviser, used blunt language to address Trump:

Senior administration officials, who claim to be across the various security and congressional investigations into Trump's Russia connections, also insisted that Trump had not been wiretapped.

There's an argument that invoking the name of the FISA court is a risky strategy for Trump - because, if it had issued an eavesdropping order on Trump or his associates, it would mean that a federal judge had been convinced that there was "probable cause" for such an order, which is to say there was explicit evidence that a crime had been committed.

"It's extremely unlikely that there would have been any sort of criminal or intelligence surveillance of Trump," Jennifer Daskal, a former senior Justice Department national security official, told The Washington Post.

"There's no credible evidence yet to suggest that that happened. It would be an extraordinary measure for the FBI to ask for and the court to grant a surveillance order on a presidential candidate of the opposing party in an election year."

Republicans were as affronted as Democrats by the Trump tweets. Republican senator and vocal Trump critic Lindsey Graham seemed happy to implicitly push Democratic Party demands for an independent investigation, arguing that "[we have to] get to the bottom of this … biggest scandal since Watergate".

Republican Senator Ben Sasse demanded that Trump substantiate his charges. "We are in the midst of a civilisation-warping crisis of public trust, and the President's allegations today demand the thorough and dispassionate attention of serious patriots," he said.

Experts described a strictly controlled and onerous approval process for criminal and foreign intelligence wiretaps, requiring multiple levels of internal Justice Department review and a formal order from the FISA court - and which was designed to make sure that a sitting president could not use the process to go after his rivals.

Frustrated by a seemingly endless stream of embarrassing leaks to the mainstream media on Trump's Russia connections - from election hacking to collusion between Trump and the Russians to signs of a cover-up - conservative media in recent days have been serving up unfounded stories of Obama and his circle attempting to force Trump's impeachment or resignation.

And Trump has ordered an internal witch-hunt, egged on by his sometimes adviser Roger Stone, who told The Washington Post: "He needs to clean house. Just clean house! Hand the pink slips to everybody ... Lock them out of their offices and tell the FBI to start going through their emails and phone messages."

Trump advisers were reportedly stunned by his Saturday outburst on Twitter. But his friend Thomas Barrack tried to rationalise Trump's lash-out, telling The Washington Post: "He's angry, and he thinks that the leaks - even forgetting the rhetoric on politics - are a significant problem that hurts the security of the country.

"He feels if he can't rely on his team, if he were negotiating with North Korea on something sensitive and death by a thousand leaks continued, he views that as really being disruptive to the security of America."