Don Lemon calls the claims that Susan Rice unmasked names of Trump and his associates last year a ‘diversion’ from Trump’s original tweet and that he won’t insult his audience’s intelligence by pretending there’s any evidence that backs these new claims:
.@DonLemon: "There's no evidence that backs up the president's original claim" that Pres. Obama wiretapped himhttps://t.co/R2dZMiSAP0
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) April 4, 2017
Lemon is right. All we have is reporting thus far and there is no actual evidence yet that Susan Rice violated any laws or that her motivations were political.
However, Lemon is clearly doing his audience a disservice by calling this a distraction. He’s hanging on to the imprecise language on Trump’s original tweet to suggest that this Susan Rice story has nothing to do with the tweet. Yes, Trump went about this the wrong way but that doesn’t mean his underlying claims are completely false.
It does appear through reporting that Trump was surveilled by the Obama administration through the unmasking of names and now we are learning that one of Obama’s very own national security advisors played a role in it.
Look, even Devin Nunes isn’t suggesting that what he saw was illegally obtained. But that doesn’t mean that this is a non-story and a distraction.
Isn’t the very idea that a sitting president surveilled the presidential nominee of an opposing party for six months to a year during a presidential election enough to ask why? Doesn’t it sound out of the ordinary enough to dig deeper to uncover the truth?
So no Don, you don’t have to pretend we have evidence that we don’t yet have. But as a host of a prime-time show, don’t insult your audience by pretending there isn’t enough smoke here to cover the story as a legitimate story.