President Donald Trump’s White House hunkered down unexpectedly Saturday to formulate a response to the president’s bizarre, unhinged tweets that morning accusing former President Barack Obama and members of the Obama administration of illegally “wire tapping” Trump Tower telephones in the weeks before the election. Suspicion quickly mounted that Trump lashed out after reading a Breitbart article, which amplified right-wing radio host Mark Levin’s call for Congress to investigate “Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’” against Trump.

Per an official, I've confirmed that several people at the White House have been circulating this Breitbart story. https://t.co/WT4bdWNhSK — Robert Costa (@costareports) March 4, 2017

Considering the explosiveness of Trump’s allegations, and the likelihood that they were created from whole cloth, his aides would have been well advised to begin the followup process by asking Trump, “Why did you tweet that? Was Breitbart your source?” Instead, Trump and his retinue have decided that the wisest course of action is to pretend the accusations may have merit, and ask Congress to get to the bottom of them.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t anywhere close to prepared to rebuff Trump, and have decided instead to pretend Trump’s allegations might be well-founded. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes promised in an official statement to “make inquiries into whether the government was conducting surveillance activities on any political party’s campaign officials or surrogates.”

Between Trump, who may have aided and abetted a Russian effort to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and Obama, who now stands accused of abusing his powers to lawlessly surveil a rival party’s standard bearer, only one of them is acting as if he knows he’s done nothing wrong. And it isn’t Trump.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis said in an official response—both an outright denial of the accusation that Obama ordered the FBI to wiretap anyone, and an implicit rebuke of the Trump White House’s breezy efforts to compromise FBI inquiries. FBI Director James Comey is reportedly pressuring the Justice Department leadership to correct the record.