There's no doubt that since Devin Nunes revealed the details of the intelligence he received on the morning of Wednesday, March 22, that the intelligence supported President Trump's conspiracy that the Obama administration had wiretapped phones at Trump Tower. Prior to this, Nunes himself has said that he saw no evidence that it happened, leaving open the chance to convince him otherwise.
The response from most lawmakers and the intelligence community has been that it didn't happen. But the narrative from the White House continues to support the conspiracy theory and now has an intelligence report -- which the New York Times revealed this week was given to him by two members of the Trump's own National Security Council Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis -- to back it up.
Initially, before this was revealed, critics appropriately assumed ahead of time that Nunes' information was entirely created by the Trump administration, while we still have to see how credible that information is.
Adam Schiff's White House trip
Democrats including Adam Schiff have been calling for Devin Nunes to recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee's Russian investigation on Trump. So far, Nunes has refused and House Speaker Paul Ryan -- who is apparently the only power that can replace him -- refuses to do so. Blasting News reported on the fact that the Republican senator went to the White House with new intelligence before turning it over to the investigating committee.
The other body conducting an investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee, held hearings this week with those who had other information on Russia's interference and declared their separation from the problems within the House Intel Committee; whose ranking member Adam Schiff got an invite to the White House to look at the intel reports.
After seeing them, Schiff did not change his stance that they should have gotten the reports first.
President, prosecutor, judge and detective Trump
Many of the reports and journalists who have been breaking these stories over the past few weeks were on Washington Week on Friday discussing these issues where Dan Ballz of the Washington Post said: "The White House has compounded the problem by now, with their handling of what they did with Devin Nunes.
I mean they've now opened a new front on the investigation which is, what did White House officials do, why did they do it, who else knew about it; all of that still remains to be figured out."
Alexis Simendinger of Real Clear Politics who is often at the press briefings asking the Press Secretary Sean Spicer questions about the controversies was asked by Robert Costa -- who has received some calls from the President himself -- how the White House was handling the situation.
She said that in light of everything that's going on, she wonders where all of this will go when the President is always at the podium wanting to be the prosecutor, the judge, and the investigator. She says that these are the reasons the conspiracies and scandal survive well past how presidential advisors and attorneys would advise the President to react.
Completing the cycle of self-propaganda
Dan Ballz said that he spoke with a Democratic pollster who told him that the accusations against former President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower seemed to be the only thing that broke through to the general public. He also added that it's become a headache for the Trump administration and that they have gone to great lengths to prove what cannot be proved, using Nunes to create that narrative.
During Friday's White House Press briefing, Press Secretary Spicer again doubled-down on the "evidence" that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower after the legislative branch had been swamped with reports about their investigations on Trump's connections with Russia. Thus, it appears that the Trump administration has completed the cycle of durability, stress testing various bodies with a wiretapping story they created themselves.
