Let’s
begin with what the public can know for certain. President Trump had no
evidence on Saturday morning when he smeared his predecessor, President
Barack Obama, accusing him of ordering that Trump Tower phones be
tapped during the 2016 campaign. Otherwise, the White House would not be
scrambling to find out if what he said is true.
Just
contemplate the recklessness — the sheer indifference to truth and the
moral authority of the American presidency — revealed here: one
president baselessly charging criminality by another, all in a childish
Twitter rampage.
The
Times reported on Sunday that the F.B.I. director, James Comey, was so
alarmed by Mr. Trump’s fact-free claim — which implicitly accused the
F.B.I. of breaking the law by wiretapping an American citizen at a
president’s behest — that he was asking the Justice Department to
publicly call it false. In other words, the F.B.I. director was
demanding that Justice officially declare the president to be misleading
the public.
This
is a dangerous moment, which requires Congress and members of this
administration to look beyond partisan maneuvering and tend to the
health of the democracy itself.
In four tweets, capped by one
about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “pathetic” ratings on Celebrity
Apprentice, Mr. Trump declared as fact a theory he apparently
encountered on alt-right websites: “How low has President Obama gone to
tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is
Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Mr.
Obama issued a statement saying that neither he “nor any White House
official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.” James Clapper,
the former director of national intelligence, denied on Sunday that the
government had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election, and said he
had no knowledge of any effort to do so before Mr. Obama left office.
The
background for Mr. Trump’s outburst is, of course, the F.B.I.’s
investigation of his inner circle’s contacts with Russian intelligence.
It would be highly unusual for a president to be privy to details of a
law enforcement investigation targeting his associates, let alone
targeting him. If the inquiry is primarily a counterespionage
investigation, however, he might properly have been briefed on it. Not
much is known about this inquiry. The mere fact that a new
administration is being investigated for potentially colluding with
Moscow is uncharted territory.
Mr. Trump is now trying
to bootstrap his claims into a congressional investigation of the Obama
administration. On Sunday Sean Spicer, his press secretary, issued a
statement demanding that congressional intelligence committees, led by
Republicans friendly toward Mr. Trump, “determine whether executive
branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.” Representative Devin
Nunes, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
and a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, quickly made clear he
intended to do the president’s bidding.
Congressional
leaders need to act more forthrightly than that to safeguard public
confidence in government. By alleging potential criminality in the
nation’s highest office, Mr. Trump has tweeted himself into a corner.
His accusation is so sensational — so explosive if it turned out to have
some basis in fact and so corrosive if not — that Congress has no
credible option but to convene a bipartisan select committee to
investigate all questions related to Russian interference in the
election. And if Mr. Trump has confidence in his claim, he should have
no reluctance about the appointment of an independent counsel to get to
the bottom of the Russia affair.
As
for those senior officials of this administration who have integrity:
It is past time for them to begin asking themselves if they can continue
lending their names and exposing their reputations to a president with
so little regard for democratic institutions, and for the truth.
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