Thread: 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."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...306-story.html

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.

Trump never said the wiretap was "warrantless". So "BOOM" you sacrificed the very TRUTH you're wailing for, Noah, to create a false premise for a hate-Trump pro-impeachment fake news article. How so very cheap is that?!!

Harvard has been running on past reputation for so long, it doesn't even know it's gurgling in a SWAMP that has destroyed our country. The only hope our country has right now is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the only person in this country for decades with the ability, skill, knowledge and will to fix our country. No one would have wiretapped Trump Tower without the knowledge and approval of Barack Obama. Everybody knows that. No lawyer in the DOJ woke up one day and said to himself "lets bug Trump". No FBI agent came home for supper with the idea "lets bug Trump in the morning". Nope, that idea came from Way On High.

I don't know if Trump Tower was bugged, wiretapped or had any surveillance on it at all outside of Secret Service and what they do to secure the environment of a candidate for President or a President-elect. But I certainly understand why Trump would think it was, and he's as entitled to his opinion that Obama is a bad sick guy for doing it along with the right to express that view publicly without any threat of harm or punishment as you are Noah to suggest that a President of the United States can be impeached for expressing an opinion about a political opponent more concerned with who is talking to Russia than he is with unemployed and underemployed Americans.

An expected story line from the Chicago Tribune.