Jake Tapper slams White House defense of Trump's wiretapping allegations

It’s been nine days since President Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping Trump Tower phones during the election, and if there’s one person who is fed up with the lack of evidence provided to support the accusation, it’s CNN’s Jake Tapper.

On Monday, Tapper opened The Lead by unloading on the Trump administration for forcing the nation “to live in this farce for the last nine days.” As reported by Time, the House Intelligence Committee gave the Department of Justice until Monday to provide evidence supporting Trump’s claims; in the meantime, Trump’s claims have been called false by the director of the FBI and the former director of national intelligence.

“Not one credible, informed source that we could find in Washington has said that the president’s accusation is true, and I’m including Vice President Pence in that group,” said Tapper. “To say that members of the House Intelligence Committee are expecting reams of paper to prove this charge coming their way today, well that would be a disservice to the members of that select committee. And we as a nation have had to live in this farce for the past nine days.”

Tapper proceeded to accuse administration spokespeople of “rejiggering the facts of the tweets to make this wild and unfounded claim by the president seem to live in the somewhere in the vicinity of the neighborhood possible.” Then, the broadcast cut to a clip of today’s White House press briefing where press secretary Sean Spicer said that Trump used the word “wiretapping” to broadly mean all surveillance activities.

“To break out White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Trump-to-English dictionary: By Obama, Trump meant the Trump administration; by wiretap, he meant any kind of surveillance; and by surveillance of Trump’s phones at Trump Tower, he meant, apparently, surveillance of anyone who may have had any conversation with anyone who was part of the 2016 election,” said Tapper. “Sometimes revisionism is so blatant, it’s not revisionism, it’s just a complete rewrite.”

He ended the segment by broadly addressing the administration’s attempts to defend many of Trump’s unfounded claims, including about voter fraud and crime rates: “The White House is now spending its energy and your tax dollars trying to change demonstrably false assertions into perfectly understandable beliefs tangentially related to the original lie,” he said. “While doing so, they’re squandering their own credibility, and they’re wasting time defending the indefensible, instead of devoting time to, say, improving your lives.”

Watch the entire segment below:

Nine days ago, the former Celebrity Apprentice host tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!…How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”