In partisan wars, both sides resort to fake narratives — ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON — Washington is on fire with rage and accusations. President Donald Trump poured oil on that fire Saturday when he went on Twitter to accuse former President Barack Obama of ordering illegal wiretaps on his campaign. To the frustration of Republicans weary of having to defend the social media devotee, Trump didn’t offer any evidence to his claim that he “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer is the man in the middle. At Tuesday’s briefing, a reporter asked him if the administration’s position is “that the President can make declarative statements about a former President basically committing a crime and then the congressional committees should look into that and basically prove it.”

Spicer took issue with the question. “It’s not a question of ‘prove it’,” said the spokesman. “It’s that (congressional committees) have the resources and the clearances and the staff to fully and thoroughly and comprehensively investigate this and then issue a report as to what their findings are.”

There are times when the partisan wars that consume Washington take on the feel of a decades-long marital grievance — with both spouses accusing the other of being the lowest form of smear artist.

The Democrats’ case predates Trump’s candidacy. It goes back to 2011, when the then reality TV star suggested Obama should produce a long-form birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States — not that Trump had any proof to the contrary.

After taking the presidential oath of office, Trump continued making baseless claims. In January, for example he told members of Congress that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election.

Team Trump complains that Democrats seized on intelligence analyses that found the Russians tried to influence the 2016 election with a clear preference for Trump to prop up the unsubstantiated claim that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians.

Each side has ammunition to bolster its beliefs.

Democrats point to the following.

— Trump team members have withheld information about meetings with Russian officials. Trump’s first pick to be his National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, had to resign after the Washington Post reported Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence about what Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and he discussed during a Dec. 29 phone call. Why didn’t Flynn — or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who also met with Kislyak — offer up all information about communications with Russian officials, Democrats ask, unless they had something to hide?

— White House officials will not say how Trump “found out” about the alleged wiretapping – whether he learned through an intelligence briefing or gleaned the information from a conservative news source.

— Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contradicted Trump’s claim Sunday when he told “Meet the Press” that he has no knowledge of any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorization to place a wiretap on Trump.

Team Trump has ammunition as well.

— If Clapper is to be believed when he said there was no wiretap warrant on Trump, then Democrats should acknowledge something else Clapper said. The former head of National intelligence, who had oversight of investigations until Jan. 20, told “Meet the Press,” “We had no evidence of such collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

— In February, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had arranged to pay Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent, so that he could continue his opposition research on Trump after the election. Steele is the author of a much discredited “dossier” on Trump.

— U.S. intelligence agents were aware of the content of the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak, probably because they were spying on the Russian diplomat. Democrats seized on the fact that Flynn talked to Kislyak — not a crime — to call for the FBI to rush to investigate “the full extent of Russia’s financial, personal and political grip on President Trump.”

“We don’t know what the Russians have on Donald Trump. And we need — and we need to see, if anything — we need to see his tax returns,” Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., told ABC News. Trump’s tax returns? Did the Russians prepare Trump’s taxes — or is Franken looking for any pretext to conduct a colonoscopy on the Republican president’s books?

Franken’s accusation presents the sort of argument that feeds Republicans’ suspicion that the Russian collusion angle is, as Spicer argued Wednesday, a “fake narrative.”

Trump’s way of fighting back apparently was to create his own fake narrative — an Obama-ordered wiretap on Trump Tower.

That’s how Washington works in 2017: Both sides make unsubstantiated allegations in order to make the other side prove they’re not true.

Contact Debra Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on Twitter.