Conway blames Trump's wiretap dust-up on 'double standard'

President Donald Trump is the victim of double-barrel double standards when it comes to his unsubstantiated allegation that his Manhattan skyscraper was illegally wiretapped by former President Barack Obama, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Monday morning, one from Democrats and another from the media.

Trump has faced withering criticism over the past two days over an allegation he leveled on Twitter Saturday morning, that he had “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.” The president offered no proof to substantiate his claim, nor has any other White House official in the 48 hours since he first made it.


Criticism directed at the president is unfair, Conway said, especially from the media that she complained has regularly cited anonymous sources in reports that have proven damaging to the Trump administration. Those same media outlets have too quickly dismissed Trump’s wiretapping allegation, Conway said.

“We have this double standard for anonymous sources. The media loves to use anonymous sources for anything and everything that could possibly be derogatory, negative for this president and his administration,” she told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. “And yet, they refuse to give any credibility to such sources when it may be something positive or exculpatory.”

It was just last month that Trump, who has yet to identify the source for his allegation against Obama, accused reporters of inventing sources cited in stories critical of his administration. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he condemned the use of anonymous sources and pledged to “do something about it.”

Conway explained the president’s unsourced allegation by telling Fox News that “He is the president of the United States. He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not [have]. That's the way it should be for presidents.”

The other double standard imposed upon the president, she said, comes from Democrats, who have been vocal through the opening weeks of the new administration that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate reported ties between individuals close to Trump and the Russian government. Those lawmakers, she said, so eager to dig deeper into connections between Trump and the Kremlin, have thus far not been equally vocal in calls to investigate the president’s allegation.

That ties between Trump allies and the Russian government have been steadily reported over weeks and months while there is not yet any proof of the president’s wiretapping accusation did not deter Conway from equating the two.

“The other double standard is investigations. You have Democrats every single day saying ‘investigate, investigate, special prosecutors, investigate,’” she said. “Well then, what are they afraid of here? Let's investigate this and see where it leads.”