President Obama Accused of Wiretapping; Lawmakers Call for Wiretap Proof.
KING: Welcome back. Donald Trump, as a candidate and as president, has said so many provocative, at times outlandish things, that sometimes the gravity of his statements get lost in the drama surrounding his statements. So let's stop and make sure we get the gravity here. The sitting president of the United States is accusing his predecessor of a Nixonian abuse of power. This all starts with a serious -- a series of pre-sunrise tweets Saturday morning. Just the timing is important. It gives us a glimpse of how this president operates. His staff learned about the Obama wiretapping allegation the same way all of us did, by seeing it on Twitter. "McCarthyism," he claimed in one tweet. "Nixon," "Watergate" was his tag in another. We are 50 plus hours later now, and the White House has provided no evidence to support the president's allegation. We know the FBI thinks it's not only wrong, but reckless, and asked the Justice Department to publically repute the president, but the department has been silent. And we know the man who was director of national intelligence during last year's campaign says there was no wiretap.</s>JAMES CLAPPER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: I will say that for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president- elect at the time or as a candidate or against his campaign.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At this point you can't confirm or deny whether that exists?</s>CLAPPER: I can deny it.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is no FISA court order?</s>CLAPPER: Not -- not to my knowledge.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of anything at Trump Tower?</s>CLAPPER: No.</s>KING: Now, if you believe Mr. Clapper there, that was one of the big questions in the weekend, did the president know something we don't know? Does the president have access to intelligence that says there was, because we do know the Justice Department was investigating alleged contacts, maybe contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Was there some wiretap approved by a court to listen in on some conversation? He says no. Mr. Clapper says no. If that's -- now, Mr. Clapper is also part of an intelligence community that Donald Trump has said was acting like Nazis. And so if you're a Trump supporter, you probably don't believe Jim Clapper, who happens to be a career public servant from Democrat and Republican administration. But if that's the truth, and there's no FISA court that the Obama Justice Department, not the president -- the president does not have the legal authority to order a wiretap on anybody. But the justice -- if that's true and the Justice Department didn't approve one, then what is the president talking about?</s>HENDERSON: Nobody knows.</s>KING: The current -- the current president.</s>HENDERSON: Yes.</s>ZELENY: It's a great question. And they said that they aren't going to have any more discussions about this, but then Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, has been on morning shows the past couple of mornings, you know, saying if this is a possibility, we need to look at it. Our friend Martha Raddatz at ABC News, I think, had a good rejoiner yesterday saying if, if, if. The president did not say if in his tweets.</s>KING: Right.</s>ZELENY: He stated it as fact. So the reality here is, the White House has the ability to hold a news conference, the ability to get anything out there. The reality is -- the administration is trying to follow his lead.</s>KING: Right.</s>ZELENY: He sent out this message on Saturday, and now they're trying to sort of get behind what he said, but no one knew what he was talking about.</s>KING: And their --</s>TUMULTY: And beyond --</s>KING: I'm sorry.</s>TUMULTY: Beyond stating it is a fact. He stated it as a fact that he had just learned.</s>HENDERSON: Just -- yes.</s>KING: Just learned, right.</s>TUMULTY: And so as we see his aides say, well, maybe he was referring to press reports back in the fall. That is not what the president said.</s>KING: Right.</s>TUMULTY: He said he had just learned as a fact that he had been wiretapped.</s>KING: It is --</s>RAJU: And there are a lot of reasons why that doesn't make a lot of sense because one of which is that if there is an investigation -- and we know that there is an FBI investigation that is going on in Russia -- over Russia, over Russia's meddling in the elections. We are pretty certain it's looking into these alleged contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russia officials. Trump would not be briefed on these wiretaps if he was being wiretapped in the middle of an ongoing investigation.</s>KING: Right.</s>RAJU: That makes very little sense. Typically I have talked to members -- sources on the various committees in Congress, and they said that you'll be briefed maybe after an investigation is concluded, but you not during an investigation.</s>KING: Right.</s>RAJU: So even if the wiretap thing was accurate, there's really no way of Trump to be briefed on that. And so it makes you think that perhaps he did learn it from some of these conspiracy theories online.</s>KING: Well, in the initial moments and hours after the president's tweets on Saturday morning, again, his senior staff was caught completely off guard by this. They had no idea it was coming. You would think if a president was going to accuse his predecessor of a possible crime, he would tell the rest of the staff. But a lot of the staff, this is senior aides paid by the president of the United States, hired by the president of the United States, said they thought the information came from this, a Breitbart news story that was about a Mark Levine radio program in which Mark Levine said there's a deep state of intelligence community and otherwise in the federal bureaucracy conspiring against the president of the United States and Obama is now part of it. President Obama is now part of it. That's what he said. Kellyanne Conway, counsel to the president, went on television today and said, no, she says the president has access to information that we don't get, which of course he does. That's back to the intelligence part of it. A number of Republicans are seizing on this. General -- former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, who served in the George W. Bush administration, was on ABC this week and he did say that the believed there was a warrant. Now you just heard Jim Clapper saying there was not. Mike Mukasey says he believes there might have been during the investigation. So conservative outlets are saying former Bush AG says Trump is right. But what those conservative outlets are passing on is this part.</s>MICHAEL MUKASEY, FORMER BUSH ATTORNEY GENERAL: It means there was some basis to believe that somebody in Trump Tower may have been acting as an agent of the Russians for whatever purpose, not necessarily the election, but for some -- some purpose.</s>KING: That's a Republican who spoke at the Trump convention saying that if there was a wiretap, it was because they had evidence of something pretty serious. So has the president opened a box here he may regret opening?</s>HENDERSON: Yes. I mean typically, you know, one of the theories about Donald Trump and his sort of Twitter tantrums is that he wants to throw people off the trail. And in this case he seems to have thrown people on a trail and opened up --</s>KING: Right.</s>HENDERSON: This Pandora's box of investigations and scrutiny into either his behavior or the behavior of folks around him. It is also true that I think, you know, he has been a conspiracy theorist. He has this history, whether it was about birtherism, or it was about Ted Cruz's father supposedly being involved in the JFK assassination, and there is an appetite on the far right for this kind of stuff. I mean in the far right's imagination, Obama is this all- powerful sort of dictator sympathizer with terrorists. And so I think he senses that. So you have had some folks who come out and are going to give him some cover, but largely that has been absent on The Hill.</s>KING: And is he undermined in his own cause. We just saw the secretary of state, the attorney general, and the secretary of homeland security come out to unveil a key policy initiative and they didn't take questions. They walked off stage. They need to explain this to the American people. They need to explain this to the world. They need to explain it to Congress. It's controversial. But they wouldn't take questions because they know what the first question is going to be. They president of the United States signed this in secret in the Oval Office because they don't want him to be in a position -- again, he doesn't have to answer them -- of reporters shouting questions at him. You mentioned the Sean Spicer statement, which is both clever and laughable at the same time, in the sense that we were asking them, please give us evidence of what the president is saying about the former president. And so they -- he tweeted and then put out a statement saying the reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election. Reports. So they linked this alleged Obama conspiracy, Nixonian kind of to, quote, reports, it's not responsible, this is the White House, neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted. Essentially saying, well, Congress needs to look into Obama.</s>HENDERSON: Right.</s>KING: Well, number one, those investigations on Capitol Hill were already ongoing. Somebody here at the table tell me, if the Republican House Intelligence Committee, Republican-led, or the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee came across evidence of a Nixonian abuse of power by Democrat President Obama during their investigation, before Sean Spicer's statement that gave them an excuse not to comment any more, don't we think they would tell us?</s>RAJU: And we know that they haven't seen anything --</s>ZELENY: Yes.</s>RAJU: According to Susan Collins of Maine, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and said explicitly yesterday, she has seen no evidence. And if the White House has the evidence, to provide it to the committee. So they're waiting for that evidence. And we know the House Intelligence Committee, they are saying that they will look into this now. New -- chairman Devin Nunes suggesting that they will, but a lot of people, like Adam Schiff, who's the top Democrat on that committee, think that they're not going to find anything.</s>TUMULTY: But</s>I -- KING: And so he puts Republicans again in a very tenuous position. I -- you know, it's Republicans like Marco Rubio, went down with the president to Florida the other day, was at his education event with him, sent out a great, supportive tweet after the education event, but he's on the Sunday shows yesterday being asked, what does the president mean here, and --</s>SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R), FLORIDA: So, obviously, I have no -- I'm not sure what it is he is talking about. Perhaps the president has information that is not yet available to us or to the public. And if it's true, obviously we're going to find out very quickly. And if it isn't, then obviously he'll have to explain what he meant by it. So I don't -- I'm not sure what the genesis of that statement was, but -- well I imagine we're going to learn more about it here over the next few days one way or the other.</s>KING: I imagine.</s>TUMULTY: Right. Look -- look, I think a key part of this puzzle, something that this has to be put in context against, was the president's frame of mind over the weekend. And my colleagues, Bob Costa and Phil Rucker (ph) and Ashley Parker (ph) did some amazing reporting about what it was like in Mar-a-Lago and in the -- in the Oval Office on Friday. The president goes into the weekend absolutely livid that he believes Jeff Sessions should not have recused himself, that there has not been a strong enough defense of him, that they should be pushing back. And so, you know, against that we have these four really incendiary tweets. I think that ultimately, if it turns out there is no evidence of wiretapping, that is going to be our explanation as to why all this happened.</s>KING: You should work in television, that's the art -- the art of the segue. Up next, the president of the United States is described by friends and aides, as Karen just noted, as angry, frustrated, and convinced, the president believes, there's a coordinated campaign to undermine him.