WASHINGTON — Sitting atop that vast apparatus of institutional knowledge, hard-won intelligence and data known as the U.S. government, President Donald Trump forms some of his most contentious opinions from other sources entirely. It could be a pundit’s half-remembered comment on TV, a single word in a newspaper headline or the most self-persuasive source of all — his own instinct.
Such visceral information-gathering led Trump to accuse his “bad (or sick)” predecessor, Barack Obama, of tapping his phone.
It helps explain why a rare riot in Sweden, concerning a drug-crime suspect and resulting in no injuries, became a “massive riot, and death” linked to refugee extremism, in Trump’s retelling. And why he insists he will someday be proved correct that millions voted illegally in the election that made him president but gave Hillary Clinton more votes.
“I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,” he told Time magazine. “I’m quoting highly respected people from highly respected television networks.”
The Time interview was about Trump’s relationship with the truth. It became a forum for Trump to misstate the truth about various episodes he has misrepresented before.
It also showed how a nugget about surveillance developed into a series of howitzer-scale tweets from the president about being wiretapped by Obama, which the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, said “never happened.”
A WORD IN A
HEADLINE
On Jan. 19, The New York Times reported on the FBI’s investigation into suspected contacts between Russian interests and members of Trump’s team, a probe that continues. In the next day’s print edition, the story’s headline read: “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aide.”
Weeks later, columnist Andrew McCarthy of the conservative National Review accused the newspaper of going back and changing “wiretapped” to “intercepted” on the online story to play down the level of snooping by the Obama administration.
McCarthy later said his accusation was wrong, apologized to the paper and asked to retract the column.
But Trump continued to repeat the error in the Time interview, conducted Wednesday. “The New York Times had a front-page story, which they actually reduced, they took it, they took it the word wiretapping out of the title, but its first story in the front page of the paper was wiretapping,” he said.
VINDICATION?
The president claimed vindication from Nunes’ statement this week that U.S. surveillance of foreign entities might have picked up communications involving Trump aides or Trump himself through “incidental” collection. That happened earlier when Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a target of U.S. surveillance, communicated with Michael Flynn, who was fired as national security adviser when that episode emerged.
But Nunes said Wednesday that Obama did not target Trump or Trump Tower with wiretaps. “That never happened,” he said. “That never happened.”