Trump Goes After Obamas Birthcertificate Again
President Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets on Saturday morning, accusing his immediate predecessor of "wiretapping" his offices during the campaign. Trump offered no proof, neither has the White House, while current and former intelligence officials say there was no wiretap (and besides, the president can't order one).
Now we know how Obama feels about the accusation: He's pissed.
People close to the former president told The Wall Street Journal that Obama is "furious" over the accusations.
He was livid over the accusation that he bugged the Republican campaign offices, believing that Mr. Trump was questioning both the integrity of the office of the president and Mr. Obama himself, people familiar with his thinking said.
CNN had a slightly different take on Obama's reaction, saying he was "irked and exasperated" by Trump's accusations, but he was not furious, as the Journal suggested.
NBC News reported that Obama had an even lighter reaction—he simply rolled his eyes.
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Obama has not commented publicly on the matter, but his spokesman said on Saturday afternoon that "neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
This isn't the first time Trump has made Obama the target of unsubstantiated and inflammatory claims. Trump built his political reputation on the false claim that Obama was not born in the U.S.
Both CNN and the Journal confirmed that Obama and Trump have not spoken since inauguration day. Trump did try to call Obama to thank him for the note he left in the Oval Office, according to the Journal. But they didn't connect because the Obamas were traveling at the time.
The hostility between the current and former president comes one month after Trump told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that he thinks the former president likes him.
"We get along," Trump said. "I don't know if he'll admit this, but he likes me. I like him."
The type of open friction between the president and his immediate predecessor breaks from tradition, Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, told the Journal. Although it's not entirely without precedent—previous presidents have experienced icy relationships with the men they've succeeded, according to The New York Times—a commander in chief accusing his predecessor of a felony is new territory.
"There are these kinds of things that have happened in the past, but nothing to the degree where a sitting president would charge his predecessor with a felony," Brinkley said. "It creates a feeling of instability in the United States."
When Obama left the White House there was the appearance of detente between the two men as they smiled warmly for the cameras. Now Trump believes "Obama is at war with him," Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Trump, told the Journal. That's partly because of the administration's belief that myriad government leaks are coming from current and former government workers loyal to Obama.
The accusations Trump leveled against Obama in a series of tweets on Saturday were unsubstantiated and unprecedented.
The notion that Obama tapped Trump's phones during the election apparently came from conservative radio host Mark Levin, who discussed the conspiracy theory on his show last Thursday. On Friday, Breitbart News ran a story about the topic, which, according to The New York Times, was shown to the president that day.
Journalists have pressed White House aides on the accusations—including Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—but they offered no evidence of the claim. Huckabee Sanders told ABC News' Martha Raddatz that she'd let the president "speak for himself."
Trump has demanded that Congress investigate his claims of wiretapping, and Rep. Devin Nune, a California Republican who's chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the committee will look into whether the government "was conducting surveillance activities on any political party's campaign officials or surrogates." It will be part of the House and Senate intelligence committees investigation into contacts between Trump's campaign and Russian officials, he noted.
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Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a9872/obama-trump-relationship/
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