Commentary: Donald Trump's wiretap tweets raise his risk of impeachment
Commentary: Donald Trump's wiretap tweets raise his risk of impeachment
Noah Feldman
March 6, 2017
President Donald Trump has accused his predecessor, President Barack Obama, of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That's not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and Obama did order a warrantless wiretap of Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.
But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn't care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter. That's when Trump wrote: "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!"
The basic premise of the First Amendment is that truth should defeat her opposite number. "Let her and Falsehood grapple," wrote the poet and politician John Milton, "who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"
But this rather optimistic adage accounts only for speech and debate between citizens. It doesn't apply to accusations made by the government. Those are something altogether different.
Bloomberg View
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include "Cool War: The Future of Global Competition" and "Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It."
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