Sean Spicer had an incredibly long back and forth with ABC’s Jon Karl over the claim that Trump was ‘wiretapped’ by Obama.
Spicer’s main beef with Karl and other media outlets is that they gladly parade that some in Congress are saying that they’ve seen no evidence of ‘wiretapping’, but ignore when Devin Nunes says it was possible that Trump communications were incidentally captured in surveillance of Russia.
Spicer then proceeds to read at length from many media reports of how intelligence that was captured on the Trump campaign:
Spicer was very thorough, making the point that Trump didn’t just dream up this allegation that Obama had surveilled his campaign. You should watch entire video if you have time. If you don’t, skip to just before the 8 minute mark where he and Karl continue their back and forth.
I will note that the Senate Intel Committee statement doesn’t say “at this time” in their statement. They simply say ‘based on the information available to us” that they don’t see any “indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016”.
It sounds pretty conclusive, but Spicer is saying that they haven’t been in contact with the DOJ yet (which doesn’t appear to be in their statement), which I guess means there is more information out there they haven’t seen.
So why would the Senate Intel Committee chairs put out a conclusive sounding statement if they haven’t seen all the data?