Did Obama Order the Code Red?

Wow! This is a real powder keg and it's big enough to cause a national crisis if there is even an element of truth to it. Roger Simon at PJ Media indicates that there's trouble on the horizon for Democrats with respect to president Obama's ordering a wire tap on president-elect Trump. That's not exactly

Forget the usual smokescreen of hyper-partisan blather from Chuck Schumer on "Meet the Press" or the myriad calls for Trump's head from the usual press suspects and consider the situation: Congressional committees, the FBI, not to mention numerous avid media organizations and who knows who else (NSA? CIA? ASPCA?) have been investigating putative Trump-Russia collusion for some time now and come up with... exactly nothing.

Are they likely to come up with something of significance at this point? Almost certainly not.

So now we have Trump's bold, brash, "unhinged" Twitter accusations that Obama wiretapped him. This came after Mark Levin, Breitbart, Andrew C. McCarthy, Louise Mensch and others I've forgotten about or am unaware of reported about two appeals to FISA courts (one denied last summer and one approved in October) for permission to tap phones in Trump Tower. Did they happen?

It seems that tapping of some sort actually occurred because it was virtually acknowledged in tweets from Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, who sprang to action only hours after Trump tweeted, writing : "I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it." Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former president, had almost simultaneously declared: "Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U. S. citizen." Ordered? That's what we used to call plausible deniability and now is known as a wiggle word.

That's cause for real worry in Democratic circles.  No doubt former president Obama does have plausible deniability or will be able to craft it in due course if things start to look bad.  But so far the Democrats remain on offense, as Roger Simon noted.

That despite the obvious double standard Democrats afford themselves.

We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

Apparently it was all above board - just like Jeff Sessions' meetings with the Russian ambassador were. But the Democrats don't care. They have a compliant media willing and able to aid in their cause to derail Trump at the cost of morality.

When I woke up Sunday, I thought the morning news shows would all be talking about the unusual, perhaps dangerous, decision of the Obama administration to wiretap the offices of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

I’ve been watching Chuck Todd’s “Meet the Press” as I write this. There is actually little talk about this unprecedented wire-tapping and even less worry over it.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, usually thoughtful, just told Chuck Todd he found it is “shocking” that Trump disclosed the wiretapping claim on Twitter.

But Friedman offered no shock that such a wiretap might have taken place!

...The big news Saturday after Trump’s disclosure was the fact that neither Obama nor any Obama administration officials actually denied that Trump’s offices were ever wire tapped.

Instead the press focused on the rather narrow denial that Obama himself never ordered such a wiretap. [Wouldn’t it strain belief that a major presidential candidate’s offices were wiretapped and the president was never informed?]

If the right ever gets its act together and organizes with this as a concern, that's a game changer.  The left will go into hyper-defensive mode to protect former president Obama, and any sustained attacks on president Trump and team will cease except as counter-attacks, especially if there is reasonable evidence this was done.  In the short term, maybe Hillary Clinton wins out of this as the focus on her goes away.  But maybe not.  It's more likely the investigation of her gets dredged up again as this ties directly into her loss - especially if it turns out that the wiretap happened before the election and not after it.

Why is this so explosive? Well, it's a president engaged in illegal activity on the scale of Watergate, or even worse.

...If the Obama administration abused the FISA process to wiretap a political opponent, it is a scandal of the first order–the worst political scandal of my lifetime, easily. And the press has known about it and covered it up? Unbelievable.

But if this is a story that has been out there for a while, why does Trump say he “just found out”? Sounds like at a minimum there are new developments. We will see.

I suspect some of it might be that Trump has known about this for a while but is using it now because of the unabated Trump = Russia garbage we keep hearing about. Yes, it's a diversion tactic but if it's one of real substance it is a powder keg. Stay tuned.