Breitbart editor Joel Pollak explains why he wrote the wiretapping story that inspired Trump's infamous tweets

NBC's Chuck Todd had Breitbart News editor Joel Pollak on Wednesday's Meet the Press Daily, and they discussed President Trump's victory and why the president is supporting the unpopular House Republican health-care bill — "Trump has allowed Congress just enough rope to hang itself," Pollak theorized. "He kind of, I think, anticipates that this is going to run into problems and that then the stakeholders will come back to him for his own version of the solution."

Near the end of the interview, Todd asked Pollak about the article he wrote at Breitbart that is believed to have inspired Trump to tweet that former President Barack Obama had tapped his Trump Tower phones during the election — tweets that are still causing the White House headaches. "Did you over-write that?" Todd asked.

"The story about how this article was written is very simple," Pollak said: "It was late at night and I was washing dishes, listening to Mark Levin's show from earlier in the day, and I thought, 'Wow, that's amazing.' I had seen all these articles, but nobody had actually put the case together the way Levin had. And so I reported the way he put it together and I added some of the historical events that happened in between, to basically show that the government under the Obama administration had done some surveillance of individuals close to Trump or a computer server in Trump Tower."

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Pollak and Todd argued for a bit over whether any of those stories of government surveillance had ever been confirmed, then Todd returned to Trump's reaction. "Should your article have been interpreted by the president as fact-based, or you were basically laying out a potential scenario?" he asked. Pollak replied that it was a scenario. "It's a set of facts lined up to make an argument about what happened, which is how many legal arguments are crafted," he said. "And the sources, in this sense, were unimpeachable because they were from the mainstream media — it wasn't, you know, a conspiracy website here or there." You can watch the discussion about the tweet-sparking article starting at the 7:50 mark. Peter Weber