Of course Donald Trump’s phones were tapped!

Kit Knightly

The ongoing clashes between the factions that make up the US political elite keep getting more and more absurd. And annoyingly, as no particular fan of Donald Trump, I keep finding myself in the position of having to fight his corner.

In this instance it is about wire-tapping. Donald Trump tweeted out that Obama’s administration had pulled a Watergate and had his office phones monitored during the election. As yet there is no proof, something everyone from CNN to the The Guardian to The NYT were very eager to point out.

In fact, every single MSM source that covered this story mentioned the lack of evidence in the headline:

Whilst simultaneously quoting the other side of the story, without feeling the need to be quite so thoroughly honest:

And honestly, yes, there is (as yet) no proof. There may not be any proof, ever. It’s a possibility that Trump simply made it up. Politicians make things up all the time. I doubt one word in fifty spoken in Washington DC has any kind of basis in fact.

There is, indeed, no proof. However, there is quite a large piece of evidence, one that the media seem to have neglected to mention.
This is where we need to have a quick reality check, because it seems our friends in the media have forgotten:
The Obama administration spied. A lot.

They spied on American civilians, foreign nationals, domestic political figures, and international heads of state. They monitored our internet histories and our phone calls and read our e-mails. None of this is disputed. Obama did one of his hokey phony apologies about it. He almost certainly used the word “folks”.

This was famously reported exclusively in the Guardian just 4 years ago. They stood by their serious journalism back then…right up until GCHQ told them to smash their hard drives with a sledgehammer.

Edward Snowden (perhaps you remember him?) is currently hiding-out in Russia for telling us all about it. Luke Harding, a Guardian star reporter, wrote a not-very-good book about it. It seems odd they’ve all forgotten.

The refutation of Trump’s claim, offered by former Obama admin. officials went roughly as follows:

No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you. https://t.co/lEVscjkzSw

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) March 4, 2017

There was also this statement from an Obama spokesperson.

The argument being that Barack Obama can’t have ordered a wire-tap on Donald Trump…because it would exceed his legal authority. Now, I’m all for living in a world where the US Government, and all the elected and unelected officials there-in, act only according to their legal authority. It would be a nice world…a lot of people would still be alive that, currently, are not.

But time has shown, hundreds (if not thousands) of times over the past few decades, that legality is not an obstacle to an American political establishment driven to protect their financial interests and military empire.

Torture camps, extraordinary renditions, drone executions, funding of terrorist groups, targeting of civilians, use of cluster munitions, use of chemical weapons, use of depleted uranium, terrorist attacks, mass surveillance and all out wars of conquest are all very, very illegal. That has never been a problem.

To suppose that adding illegal wire taps on presidential candidates to this list is a line they would not cross is naive to the point of insanity.

It is inherently ridiculous to openly acknowledge the existence of a massive (illegal) surveillance network, and not assume that bombastic, populist political opponents would be at the top the target list.

In summary: of course the Obama administration spied on Donald Trump. They spied on everybody.

It’s very important we don’t let them shove that fact down the memory-hole.