President Donald Trump continues to sound deeply paranoid and behaves as though essentially the entirety of government that isn’t staunchly loyal to his every whim is in on some kind of conspiracy against him. Recently, he has run with the idea that as part of some kind of poorly defined, alleged scandal that he’s termed “Obamagate,” former President Barack Obama’s administration committed crimes amidst the Russia investigation, which in part targeted the Trump team. This Wednesday afternoon, he rushed to Twitter with an all-caps freakout that seemed to be about these supposed crimes — but the basic premise of what he alleged seemed to be completely incorrect.
Trump in the past has called for the execution of Edward Snowden, whose disclosures exposed an NSA surveillance program that collected American phone records in bulk, among other things. https://t.co/c5TavVP0n5
— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) May 27, 2020
Trump posted:
‘WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS IS WRONG!’
WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS IS WRONG!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
There was no warrantless surveillance of the Trump team, an allegation of which the president may have in mind here, although there have also been broader concerns circulating on the right recently about supposedly overreaching government surveillance powers in general.
No matter how many times that the president and his allies passionately claim otherwise, the Obama administration acted in accordance with actual, tangible evidence when they launched the Russia investigation, and the only surveillance that was a part of that investigation — which targeted individuals like one-time Trump adviser Carter Page — was conducted with a warrant. Trump has alleged that via these other wings of the investigation, the authorities behind the Russia investigation were trying to get to him personally, but there’s simply no evidence of that kind of nefarious political plotting guiding the course of the Russia investigation.
What did he just find out about him being on tape? https://t.co/25u0fyKgmk
— Thomas E. Ricks (@tomricks1) May 27, 2020
None of these facts have stopped Trump from ominously proclaiming that individuals like Obama should be in jail, although Trump has yet to effectively actually define what crimes he alleges that Obama committed.
During a recent Fox interview, he proclaimed:
‘If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences…people should be going to jail for this stuff…this was all Obama. This was all Biden.’
He sounds like he’s trying to be some kind of dictatorial despot.
"If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would've been in jail a long time ago, & I'm talking with 50-year sentences…people should be going to jail for this stuff…this was all Obama. This was all Biden": Trump suggests Obama & Biden should be in prison pic.twitter.com/MOwPvpYRu4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2020
Check out Twitter’s response below:
