Devin Nunes Finally Gives Up on the Trump Tower Wiretap

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The latest joke around the Drum household is a question: “Is there any evidence yet?” Marian asks whenever she comes home from an errand. She’s waiting diligently for someone to produce evidence that Trump Tower was bugged by President Obama. It looks like she’s going to have to wait a long time:

“I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) told reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “You have to decide, Are you going to take the tweets literally, and if you are, then clearly the president is wrong.”

….By Monday, the White House had walked back Mr. Trump’s allegation. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Mr. Trump didn’t believe that Mr. Obama had personally tapped his phone, but instead was talking broadly about surveillance.

“They’ve been all over the map,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel. “The reality is, I don’t think they have the foggiest idea of what was behind the president’s claim except maybe something he watched on TV. And I think the rest is designed to downplay, minimize or obfuscate the fact that the president said something that was patently untrue.

Schiff is obviously right. Trump just swatted out something he saw at Breitbart as a way of grabbing a news cycle, and after that he sat back to watch the chaos unfold. On his other Twitter account (the one just for close friends that you and I never get to see) he was probably tweeting something like this:

This is annoying enough even for liberal types, but I wonder how long it’s going to be until Republicans start to rebel at this idiocy? Democrats get to just sit back and throw brickbats, after all. It’s Republicans who have to waste their time pretending to investigate all this nonsense.

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And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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