United States President Donald Trump has defended some of the most controversial claims of his young political career in a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine.
“I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right... I guess I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m President, and you’re not,” he told Time ’s Washington Bureau Chief, Michael Scherer on Thursday.
Offering simple and absolute defence of his methods, in the interview about his falsehoods, Mr. Trump offered new ones, CNN reported.
The discussion for the Time cover story — titled “Is Truth Dead?” — covered subjects that ranged from Mr. Trump’s wiretap accusations to the 2016 campaign trail conspiracy theory in the National Enquirer falsely connecting Senator Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination.
Says Obama ‘wiretap’ is surveillance
Mr. Trump appeared unrepentant about his charge that former President Barack Obama “wiretapped” his phones at Trump Tower during the 2016 election — an allegation soundly refuted by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee earlier this week.
Mr. Trump defended the claim by shifting its focus: “When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know, today it is different than wire tapping.”
“It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes. What I’m talking about is surveillance,” Mr. Trump told Time .
He also pointed to a stunning news conference on Wednesday from Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in which the congressman unilaterally revealed that communications of Mr. Trump and associates may have been picked up after the election by intelligence agencies conducting surveillance of foreign targets.
The President, however, dismissed the key distinction between his claim and the type of legal and incidental intercepts Mr. Nunes had suggested.
“Just today I heard, just a little while ago, that Devin Nunes had a news conference,... where they have a lot of information on tapping. Did you hear about that?” Mr. Trump said. “Wow. Nunes said, so that means I’m right, Nunes said the surveillance appears to have been ... incidental collection, that does not appear to have been related to concerns over Russia.”
Ditto British ‘espionage’
Trump also defended his administration’s controversial assertion that the British spy agency GCHQ surveilled his campaign at the request of the Obama administration.
The allegation that the agency has fiercely denied, and which prompted a diplomatic incident that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was drawn in to defuse.
Mr. Trump seemed to concede that the information might have been bad, but would not admit fault for repeating it.
“I quoted the judge the other day, Judge Napolitano,” Mr. Trump told Time , referring to the Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano, who reported the information on Fox News using anonymous sources, on which Mr. Trump’s White House based the claim.
“I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano, and he said that three sources have told him things that would make me right. I don’t know where he has gone with it since then,” he said. “But I’m quoting highly respected people from highly respected television networks.”
Nonchalant rebuttal
Presented with a litany of other falsehoods and mischaracterisations, Mr. Trump offered this nonchalant rebuttal to his critics: “What am I going to tell you? I tend to be right... I happen to be a person that knows how life works.”
As for evidence, Mr. Trump repeatedly returned — unprompted — his prediction that the Brexit vote would succeed, something many predicted wouldn’t happen, CNN reported.
“Brexit, I predicted Brexit, you remember that, the day before the event. I said, ‘No, Brexit is going to happen,’ and everybody laughed, and Brexit happened. Many many things. They turn out to be right,” he said.
