Morning Joe suffered a split personality today over President Trump’s tweets alleging that President Obama had tapped his phones. On the one hand, Joe and Mika waxed apocalyptic, claiming the country is “in crisis” and questioning President Trump’s “stability.” At one point, Mika even seemed to choke up as she said, “this is really a dark time which could get worse.”
But at the same time, Joe Scarborough zeroed in on former Obama spox Josh Earnest’s “very legalistic” responses to questioning by ABC’s Martha Raddatz. On This Week, Raddatz cited former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau’s tweet, warning “I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.” Pressed by Raddatz, Earnest admitted “I don’t know” whether the Obama Justice Department sought and obtained a court-ordered wiretap of the Trump campaign.
Let’s put Morning Joe‘s hyperventilation aside for a moment. Readers will remember Salena Zito’s famous analysis of the election, to the effect that Trump supporters took him seriously, but not literally.
Could this be a case in which President Trump did something similar? By this theory, he took seriously the reports that the Obama admin had obtained wiretaps. And when he tweeted that President Obama wiretapped him, did he perhaps not literally mean that the former prez personally ordered the wiretap, but that it had happened on Obama’s watch, by initiative of the Justice Department, controlled by his hand-picked AG, Loretta Lynch?
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