Trump traps the media on wiretap stories

John Hayward:

...
That headline, “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides,” was most assuredly not a right-wing production, and it’s not even slightly ambiguous about the existence of wiretapping. Jeff Dunetz at The Lid couldn’t help noticing that the exact same reporter who wrote that New York Times piece in January is now claiming, right in his headlines, that Trump has “no evidence” of the very same wiretaps he reported as established fact just two months ago.

“This is the ultimate in liberal media bias. In January Michael S. Schmidt perpetuated the rumor that team Trump had Russian connections, and to support his point he said that Trump’s people were wiretapped. However when President Trump claimed his people were wiretapped, the same guy, Michael S. Schmidt, said there was no evidence,” Dunetz observes.

This is backpedaling on a scale one would only expect to see if a pack of velociraptors appeared at the finish line of the Tour de France. It doesn’t help that reporters slipped a few “none of this can be confirmed” caveats into their stories — caveats that were, of course, left out by the many social media loudspeakers that blasted their incendiary headlines into Twitter streams and Facebook feeds.

There were always cracks in the media’s Trump-Russia stories. As of yesterday, the cracks became more important than the stories. Suddenly the media is shrieking at us for daring to take their coverage seriously.
...
If Trump is strictly going by the reports from big media outlets and their favorite leakers, whose fault is it that he became convinced the Obama administration was spying on him? Mark Levin hit that point in his response to the CNN article:

I simply put together the stories that YOUR profession reported, on the public record. Do you deny there were two FISA applications? Do you deny the first was turned down? Do you deny the second was approved? It’s called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It is about surveillance. The fact that we cannot discern all the details because of the secrecy, except for what the media have revealed and selective leaks by the government, should cause you to want to know more, not to trash those who point it out.

And yes, we can make several logical implications based on events and experience. A FISA application is a big deal. One, or two in this case, that involve campaign surrogates, or a server or computer related to a candidate or campaign, etc., is a big deal. President Obama’s statement is not a definitive statement of anything, other than he, personally, did not order a wiretap, which I never claimed. But that does not mean he was unaware of surveillance activity by several of his departments, even through routine reports to the president, such as the Daily Intel Briefing or information conveyed to him or his staff via the Justice Department re the FBI counter-intelligence activities.

Levin noted that in the course of denying any FISA surveillance was conducted against Trump Tower, James Clapper also said “no connections between the Russians and the Trump campaign have been found.” That is … rather different from the conclusion one would reach by ingesting mainstream media coverage over the past few months, isn’t it?

Perhaps CNN should take a break from sneering at “right-wing conspiracy theories” and take a look at what left-wing blogs have been saying about the Trump-Russia story. Until yesterday, they were firmly convinced that extensive surveillance was conducted against Trump and his campaign, and it produced all kinds of damaging information.
...

The liberals in the media are descending into incoherence on the issue.  They now seem to be admitting that the story of Trump operatives colluding with the Russians is not supported by the facts or the government investigation.  It appears they have been going along with a Democrat ruse to attack the President and attempt to delegitimize him.