Sponsored by SEIU | By midnight tonight, President Trump's administration is supposed to provide Congress evidence that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. It's a claim that Trump's aides struggled to back up. And nine days later, they're still struggling. Which suggests what many nonpartisan security experts have said: There is no concrete evidence. “I'm …
 
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By midnight tonight, President Trump's administration is supposed to provide Congress evidence that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign.

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It's a claim that Trump's aides struggled to back up. And nine days later, they're still struggling. Which suggests what many nonpartisan security experts have said: There is no concrete evidence.

“I'm not in the job of having evidence,” Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway literally said on CNN Monday.

Conway said that as she defended an equally odd comment she made in an interview Sunday with the Bergen Record columnist Mike Kelly about potential wiretapping:

KELLY: Let me ask you about one of the things that seems to be dogging, at least this past week, is the wiretaps — the allegation that Trump Tower was wiretapped. What can you say about that? Do you know whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?

CONWAY: What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately.

KELLY: Do you believe that was …

CONWAY: There was an article that week that talked about how you can surveil people through their phones, through their — certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways. And microwaves that turn into cameras, et cetera. We know that is just a fact of modern life.

Conway

Kellyanne Conway (The Bergen Record)

Later Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer made headlines for his creative effort to walk back Trump's claim: “The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, 'wire tapping' — that spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”

“Ah, the old air-quotes defense,” writes The Fix's Callum Borchers. “According to Spicer's new argument, Trump didn't necessarily mean wiretapping when he said 'wire tapping' — and reporters should know this because he put the phrase in quotation marks.”

Apparently we missed the note on that.

But what's unmistakable is the sense that no concrete evidence will be coming on alleged Obama wiretapping of Team Trump. That likely means no congressional investigation, as Trump wanted.

A similar fate befell Trump's claims that millions of people voted illegally in the presidential election (remember that?).

VoterFraud

The unanswered question to Trump's accusations falling flat in the face of evidence is: What does this mean politically for him? TBD ...

Trump, the king of flip flops

(The Washington Post)

(The Washington Post)

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There's no rule that politicians have to pick a policy position and marry it. But Trump is exceptional in the number of times he's picked a position then totally reversed it, writes Glenn Kessler of The Post's nonpartisan Fact Checker. (During the campaign, Trump once changed his position on whether to accept Syrian refugees the very next day.)

Kessler says that pattern has continued into Trump's presidency, including:

No 'cuts' to Medicaid: Despite asserting he'd keep the low-income health care program, Trump now supports a GOP proposal that would limit its expansion by 2020.

'Phony' employment numbers: Even before he ran for president, Trump doubted the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment numbers. On Friday, Trump embraced January's numbers. Spicer said of the president's reversal: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

The question GOP leaders dread: How many people will lose health insurance under the GOP plan?

House Speaker Paul Ryan likes his charts. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The answer is: We don’t know. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just announced the GOP replacement plan would mean 14 million fewer people would have health insurance next year, and as many as 24 million less by 2026.

You could be confused if you thought the answer was much less, even zero. To hear GOP leaders talk about their plan over the weekend was to hear an entirely different framing, points out The Post’s Philip Bump:

“If you’re on Medicaid, you’re going to stay on Medicaid,” said Gary Cohn, chief economic adviser to Trump, on Fox News.

“I can’t answer that question,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said when asked on CBS. “It’s up to people.”

It's evidence that selling a plan that cuts health care for millions — even one that also cuts the deficit by billions — is going to be a tough sell. There are already enough skeptical Republicans in Congress to doom the plan.

A note about The Fix

Fix

Fix Boss Chris Cillizza is leaving The Fix at the end of this month to join CNN. He started this political blog about a decade ago, astutely recognizing readers' hunger for context and nonpartisan analysis in our political news diet. Today, The Fix has grown into a team of reporters — yours truly included — that strives to carry out his mission. The blog and this newsletter will continue uninterrupted, and we wish Chris all the best!

(giphy.com)

(giphy.com)

 
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