Donald Trump does not like taking responsibility for White House screwups. He'll blame anyone else he can think of -- even his friends at Fox News.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer set off an international incident when he suggested that British intelligence might have spied on Trump during the campaign in response to a request from President Barack Obama. Spicer made this remark while once again trying to defend his boss, who two weeks ago tweet-claimed -- without offering any evidence -- that Obama had "wiretapped" him at Trump Tower during the 2016 election. Since then the GOP chairs of the congressional intelligence committees (and many others) have declared there is no proof to back up Trump's reckless charge, which apparently was based on a Breitbart news story that itself was based on a statement (or rant) by right-wing radio talker Mark Levin.
Donald J. Trump" @realDonaldTrump
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
The obvious conclusion is that an angry Trump had tweeted out fake news falsely accusing his predecessor of criminal activity. But Spicer has continued to contend that Trump's allegations had a factual basis of some sort. And at the Thursday briefing he cited Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, who claimed on that network that Obama had used the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- the British version of the National Security Agency -- to eavesdrop on Trump with "no American fingerprints on this." (Napolitano is no credible source. Like Trump, he has appeared on the radio show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In 2010, Napolitano told Jones' audience that it's "hard for me to believe" that World Trade Center Building 7 "came down by itself" and that the 9/11 attacks "couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us.")
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