With Mike Flynn seeking an immunity deal and evidence mounting that House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes coordinated with the White House to take pressure off Donald Trump—ostensibly a target of the committee’s current investigation into Russia’s election interference—Sean Spicer is desperate for the media to talk about anything else. And so on Friday, running out of excuses to defend the president’s unfounded claims that Barack Obama (or perhaps the British government) “wiretapped” him—both allegations denied by the directors of the F.B.I. and the N.S.A.—the White House press secretary began to volunteer a series of increasingly tangential and conspiratorial stories he suggested the press should be chasing instead.

The leaks are the real scandal

During his daily press briefing Friday, Spicer repeatedly pushed the White House press corps to ignore the potential intent, subject, or substance of surveillance that may have incidentally swept up Trump or members of his associates, and to focus solely on the fact that the information was leaked at all. “American citizens who were not government employees at the time potentially were surveilled, had their information unmasked, made it available, was politically spread. All this should be very concerning to people, that people serving in government, who are providing classified information, misused, mishandled, and potentially did some very, very bad things with classified information,” he said. “That astonishes me that that is not the subject of this. That all of this is happening in our country. The potential that that happened should concern every single America.”

Obama really did spy on Trump

Responding to questions about Nunes, Spicer attacked the media for not covering what he said was growing evidence to support Trump’s wiretapping claims. In particular, he pointed to statements made by a former Obama official who previously raised concerns about surveillance. “On March 2, the day before the president’s tweet, comments by senior administration official and foreign policy expert Dr. Evelyn Farkas, together with previous reports, raised serious concerns on whether there was an organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive intelligence information to political purposes,” Spicer asserted.

Farkas was indeed deputy assistant secretary of defense for Eurasia, Russia, and Ukraine, but she left the Obama administration in 2015—more than a year before Trump was elected president or the alleged wiretapping would have occurred. Recently, Farkas appeared on MSNBC, during which she said she’d urged then-president Obama to gather evidence of Trump’s ties to Russia. “I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more,” she said. She did not say that Obama or member of his administration had ordered surveillance of Trump Tower or leaked any classified information. But that didn’t stop Spicer from trying to forge the connection, even when a reporter directly pointed out that Farkas wasn’t working at the administration when Spicer suggests Trump was being spied on. “Dr. Farkas’s admissions alone are devastating,” Spicer said. “We’re committed to working with the House and Senate committees to get to the bottom of what happened here.”

Spicer later accused Obama, again, of illegally wiretapping Trump. “What continues to come to light in terms of Obama officials admitting off or on the record consistent with what Farkas says, that there was clearly an attempt to do something politically motivated with the intelligence out there and the question is, why,” Spicer said. “More and more the substance that continues to come out on the record continues to point to exactly what the president was talking about on March 5.” But he then walked back the claim after a reporter asked if he had evidence of wiretapping. “No, I don’t,” Spicer said.