Trump’s wiretap claim is anything but “baseless”
American Thinker
by Matthew Vadum
4/7/2017
Excerpt:
The pernicious lie that President Trump’s claim he was wiretapped by President Obama is “baseless” is being regurgitated in the mainstream media virtually nonstop in the 24/7 news cycle.
These people are so desperate to hang Trump that they embraced the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier promoted by political hack Ben Smith's cat-video website Buzzfeed.
At the same time as we are assured by Never Trumpers that Trump is making things up, the so-called evidence of Team Trump’s allegedly nefarious connections and collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American electoral process is treated as Holy Writ. The Left and the mainstream media – but I repeat myself – gravitate to the evidence that hurts Trump, ignoring the rest.
It's that simple. And there is an impressive evidentiary double-standard at work in the weighing of evidence, much of which apparently has been politicized.
But as far as I can tell, nobody has clearly pointed out the seeming arbitrariness in the media taking the word of one group of spies over the other.
We know that the evidence supporting both the anti-Trump and pro-Trump claims reportedly comes from unnamed sources within the same U.S intelligence community (IC). If anyone with direct personal knowledge of evidence backing either claim has gone on the record, I’ve missed it (and I spend all day long on the Internet).
Why should we believe one set of anonymous IC sources over another? We don’t know who these people are – on either side -- and what axes they may have to grind. And we shouldn’t blindly trust these intel people, either. There may be plenty who are honest and honorable, but there are plenty who aren’t. (See McMullin, Evan, and Rice, Susan.) At this point at least, we’re in no position to assess the evidence. All we have so far is one set of faceless spooks anonymously providing evidence that contradicts what the other spook cohort reportedly said.
We’ve just come out of the roughest, nastiest presidential transition in my lifetime, made so by Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat like Obama. While Obama smiled for the television cameras and pretended to be cooperating with the Trump people, behind the scenes he worked zealously to lay minefields to safeguard his destructive, anti-American legacy.
There is no parallel in American history for the Obama administration’s not-so-metaphorical war against the incoming Trump administration. Obama has even taken the extremely unusual step of staying behind in the nation’s capital to vex and harass his successor. He has rented an Embassy Row mansion not far from the White House, built a wall around it to keep prying eyes away, and arranged for his senior White House advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to live there. He is also using his well-funded nonprofit, Organizing for Action, to do his dirty work.
.................................................. ......................
View the complete article including links and comments at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/artic..._baseless.html
American Thinker
by Matthew Vadum
4/7/2017
Excerpt:
The pernicious lie that President Trump’s claim he was wiretapped by President Obama is “baseless” is being regurgitated in the mainstream media virtually nonstop in the 24/7 news cycle.
These people are so desperate to hang Trump that they embraced the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier promoted by political hack Ben Smith's cat-video website Buzzfeed.
At the same time as we are assured by Never Trumpers that Trump is making things up, the so-called evidence of Team Trump’s allegedly nefarious connections and collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American electoral process is treated as Holy Writ. The Left and the mainstream media – but I repeat myself – gravitate to the evidence that hurts Trump, ignoring the rest.
It's that simple. And there is an impressive evidentiary double-standard at work in the weighing of evidence, much of which apparently has been politicized.
But as far as I can tell, nobody has clearly pointed out the seeming arbitrariness in the media taking the word of one group of spies over the other.
We know that the evidence supporting both the anti-Trump and pro-Trump claims reportedly comes from unnamed sources within the same U.S intelligence community (IC). If anyone with direct personal knowledge of evidence backing either claim has gone on the record, I’ve missed it (and I spend all day long on the Internet).
Why should we believe one set of anonymous IC sources over another? We don’t know who these people are – on either side -- and what axes they may have to grind. And we shouldn’t blindly trust these intel people, either. There may be plenty who are honest and honorable, but there are plenty who aren’t. (See McMullin, Evan, and Rice, Susan.) At this point at least, we’re in no position to assess the evidence. All we have so far is one set of faceless spooks anonymously providing evidence that contradicts what the other spook cohort reportedly said.
We’ve just come out of the roughest, nastiest presidential transition in my lifetime, made so by Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat like Obama. While Obama smiled for the television cameras and pretended to be cooperating with the Trump people, behind the scenes he worked zealously to lay minefields to safeguard his destructive, anti-American legacy.
There is no parallel in American history for the Obama administration’s not-so-metaphorical war against the incoming Trump administration. Obama has even taken the extremely unusual step of staying behind in the nation’s capital to vex and harass his successor. He has rented an Embassy Row mansion not far from the White House, built a wall around it to keep prying eyes away, and arranged for his senior White House advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to live there. He is also using his well-funded nonprofit, Organizing for Action, to do his dirty work.
.................................................. ......................
View the complete article including links and comments at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/artic..._baseless.html