A normal administration would take heed from the type of rebuke delivered Monday by FBI Director James Comey, who testified to Congress that there was no evidence for President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama had him wiretapped last year. “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey testified Tuesday. “The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets.” Equally troubling was Comey’s affirmation that there is an ongoing investigation, dating back to last July, into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Yet neither Trump nor his team took Comey’s words as a setback or even a reason to retreat from the accusation against Obama. When Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked in his daily briefing if Trump was prepared to apologize to Obama, he responded, “No, we started a hearing. It’s still ongoing.” Spicer also maintained that “following [Comey’s] testimony, it’s clear that nothing has changed. Senior Obama intelligence officials have gone on record to confirm that there is no evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion. The Obama CIA director said so, Obama’s director of national intelligence said so, and we take them at their word.”



Spicer’s words were backed up by Trump’s own tweets, from two separate accounts, which similarly tried to dishonestly spin the day’s news in a way that supported the president’s narrative:

James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017

FBI Director Comey refuses to deny he briefed President Obama on calls made by Michael Flynn to Russia. pic.twitter.com/cUZ5KgBSYP — President Trump (@POTUS) March 20, 2017

Taken together, these tweets suggest that nothing will convince Trump to walk back his allegations against Obama. One reason might be that Trump sincerely believes these allegations. “People close to the president say Mr. Trump’s Twitter torrent had less to do with fact, strategy or tactic than a sense of persecution bordering on faith,” The New York Times reported. “He simply believes that he was bugged in some way, by someone, and that evidence will soon appear to back him up.”

But Trump’s allegations might also be a deliberate strategy to counter a long siege on the Russia story. The best way to shore up support for his presidency in the face of scandal is to cast the issues in as partisan a light as possible, so as to make it an issue about party loyalty rather than the truth.