Robert Reich
18 mins ·

This morning Trump went berserk, tweeting a series of bizarre accusations charging that former president Barack Obama orchestrated a "Nixon/Watergate" plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. Citing no evidence, he said the former president was a "Bad (or sick) guy!"

Folks, we've got a huge problem on our hands. Either:

1. Trump is more nuts than we suspected -- a true paranoid.

2. Or he's correct, in which case there's probable cause that he committed treason. A president can't order a wiretap. For federal agents to obtain a wiretap on Trump's phone conversations, the Justice Department would first have had to convince a federal judge that it had gathered sufficient evidence that there was probable cause to believe that Trump had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal or foreign intelligence wiretap.

3. Or Trump's outburst was triggered by a commentary on Breitbart News reporting an assertion Thursday night by rightwing talk-radio host Mark Levin suggesting Obama and his administration used "police state" tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team's dealings with Russian operatives. If this was the source of Trump's ravings this morning, we've got a president willing to put the prestige and power of his office behind a baseless claim emanating from rightwing purveyors of lies.

So there you have it -- either he's paranoid, he likely committed treason, or he's making judgments based on rightwing crackpots. Each of them is as worrying as the other.