The Daily 202: Wiretapping allegations accomplished what Trump wanted – but may backfire bigly
With Breanne Deppisch
THE BIG IDEA: It is easy to pooh-pooh Donald Trump’s predawn Saturday tweetstorm — accusing Barack Obama of the worst political crimes since Watergate while offering no evidence — as an undisciplined rant from someone who has long embraced conspiracy theories.
That neither gives the president enough credit nor reflects the gravity of his unfounded accusations.
It is past time to dispense with the fiction that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to distract us. And, at least this weekend, he succeeded.
-- The country’s chief law enforcement officer made a false statement to Congress, while under oath, about his contacts with one of this nation’s biggest adversaries. (Legal experts, including Republicans, note that others have been prosecuted for less.) When he got busted, Attorney General Jeff Sessions initially claimed through a spokeswoman that he couldn’t recall specifics of what had been said during his undisclosed sit-down with the Russian ambassador, except that it wasn’t political in nature. Then, with his job on the line, he miraculously remembered supposedly exculpatory details.
This is a big dang deal, no matter how hard Sessions tries to spin it. It’s such a big deal that, after weeks of refusing to do so and with the president publicly urging him not to, the AG agreed to recuse himself from any investigations related to the 2016 campaign.