On Monday, the Justice Department requested more time to comply with a request from the House Intelligence Committee to turn over any evidence to back up President Trump's unsupported accusation that former President Barack Obama tapped his Trump Tower phones during the election. The House committee agreed, giving the Justice Department until March 20, threatening to use its subpoena power if the DOJ misses its deadline again.
On CNN Monday afternoon, Jake Tapper threw up his hands. While the House Intelligence Committee waits, he said, "we as a nation, we've had to live in this farce for the last nine days, where defenders of the president have twisted themselves into pretzels to try to suggest the possibility that the tweets weren't preposterous by rejiggering the facts of the tweets to try to make this wild and unfounded claim by the president seem to live somewhere in the vicinity of the neighborhood of possible."
Specifically, Tapper was talking about Monday's White House briefing, and he broke out "Press Secretary Sean Spicer's Trump-to-English dictionary" to translate the latest attempt to gingerly walk back Trump's explosive tweets. Trump "'didn't mean Obama had his wires tapped at Trump Tower, he meant the Obama administration may have conducted surveillance during the election of some people, including some who may have spoken to people on campaigns or had communication with those campaigns,'" Tapper translated. "Those are two completely different things. One is false, and one is true, but other than the word 'Obama' they have little in common." Sometimes, he added, "revisionism is so blatant it's not revisionism, it's just a complete rewrite."
"The White House is now spending its energy and your tax dollars trying to change demonstrably false assertions into perfectly understandable beliefs tangentially related to the original lie," Tapper concluded. "And in doing so, they're squandering their own credibility and they're wasting time defending the indefensible instead of devoting time to, say, improving your lives."