President Donald Trump accused Barack Obama of having him wiretapped, and the media cannot talk about much else. The debate has mostly revolved around whether trump is talking out of his hat or rather there is something to the allegations. According to Hot Air, NBC News, which tends to take the former view, is speculating that the current President libeled his predecessor and therefore is open to a lawsuit.
Let us leave aside what that would do to political speech, with politicians accusing one another of all sorts of nefarious things. And leave aside also the notion, as suggested by the Obama administration seeking a FISA warrant against Team Trump that the current president may not be speaking out of turn.
The libel accusation not only overturns decades of precedent in libel law but also smacks of a double standard that is positively outrageous.
Mind, the media and the Democrats (but one repeats oneself here) have been accusing the president of being some kind of Manchurian Candidate, having plotted with the Russians to seize the presidency for its rightful candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Team Trump, not without justification, has called the idea McCarthyism. In fact, the current behavior of the Democrats goes beyond the rantings of Tail Gunner Joe. The good senator may have mused about numbers of “card-carrying Communists” in the State Department, but he never suggested that either Truman or Eisenhower were in bed with Stalin.
Trump is a public figure and, though he might desire to sue his enemies into the ground, he is not able to do so. The implication that he is a Russian agent can only be answered in the court of public opinion and not in an actual tribunal.
Obama, on the other hand, may be in some trouble. If Trump has some evidence, as Kellyanne Conway suggested, that ties the former president to a politically inspired investigation, he could be called to account.
Remember, Trump runs the federal judiciary now and things that got slipped under the rug during the Obama years will likely to dragged out in due course to be seen in the light of day. When that happens, watch out.
