Donald Trump told friends he wanted to hire a private eye to investigate Obama wiretap claim
Even as the media, the public, and Donald Trump’s own White House try to figure out what to make of his bizarre false claim that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, his own allies aren’t exactly helping his cause with their explanations. For instance, some of Trump’s associates are now revealing that he wanted to hire a private investigator over the matter, while another is acknowledging that Trump didn’t even know now wiretap warrants work.
That may help explain why Donald Trump was under the mistaken impression that President Obama had wiretapped his building. Trump finally got wind of the months-old evidence that the FBI had been granted a FISA eavesdropping warrant for the Russian email server inside Trump Tower, a story which I reported on in November. The story had recently been grossly misrepresented by right wing propaganda site Breitbart, one of the fews “news” outlets Trump believes. Because Trump didn’t bother to run the claim past any of the numerous legal experts and government insiders at his disposal, he wasn’t aware that any such warrant would have been granted a federal judge and that President Obama would have had no say in the matter.
But the even stranger revelation is that Trump floated the idea of hiring a private eye to try to dig up evidence that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by Obama. As president, Trump has the authority to order a federal agency to investigate the matter, and yet he instead seemed to want to hire someone out of the phone book to look into it instead. Even more stunningly, these new revelations are coming from Trump’s own associates, as relayed by the New York Times. It paints a picture of Trump as a man without a clue and with a tenuous grasp on reality at best.
