Devin Nunes Finally Gives Up on the Trump Tower Wiretap

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The latest joke around the Drum household is a question: “Is there any evidence yet?” Marian asks whenever she comes home from an errand. She’s waiting diligently for someone to produce evidence that Trump Tower was bugged by President Obama. It looks like she’s going to have to wait a long time:

“I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) told reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “You have to decide, Are you going to take the tweets literally, and if you are, then clearly the president is wrong.”

….By Monday, the White House had walked back Mr. Trump’s allegation. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Mr. Trump didn’t believe that Mr. Obama had personally tapped his phone, but instead was talking broadly about surveillance.

“They’ve been all over the map,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel. “The reality is, I don’t think they have the foggiest idea of what was behind the president’s claim except maybe something he watched on TV. And I think the rest is designed to downplay, minimize or obfuscate the fact that the president said something that was patently untrue.

Schiff is obviously right. Trump just swatted out something he saw at Breitbart as a way of grabbing a news cycle, and after that he sat back to watch the chaos unfold. On his other Twitter account (the one just for close friends that you and I never get to see) he was probably tweeting something like this:

This is annoying enough even for liberal types, but I wonder how long it’s going to be until Republicans start to rebel at this idiocy? Democrats get to just sit back and throw brickbats, after all. It’s Republicans who have to waste their time pretending to investigate all this nonsense.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate