DONALD TRUMP AND ROALD AMUNDSEN

As the dust settles a week after President Trump accused former President Obama of spying on him, it’s clear:

The president’s tweets shifted the focus from “Are Trump and Sessions in bed with the Russians?” to “Did Obama spy on Trump?

When the attorney general flipped the special prosecutor meme on Democrats, we got an indication of how profound the shift has been:

Congress now will investigate Russian meddling in our election, AND surveillance of Mr. Trump.

Since there isn’t evidence Russian meddling affected the outcome of the election, or that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Russkies, the president can only benefit from having Congress spell that out.

If Congress should find surveillance of Mr. Trump or associates was incidental to legitimate spying on shady foreign characters (as it very well may), that’s okay too.

The people who are indignant Mr. Trump accused a beloved (by some) former president of spying are, essentially, the same people who were outraged by Mr. Trump before his tweetstorm.  Normal people who think President Trump may have gone too far will move on long before investigations are completed.

If intelligence officials didn’t suspect Mr. Trump or his associates of wrongdoing, and didn’t target them, every leak-based story implying that is bogus.

Democrats and the Lying Swine are backpedalling furiously. Matt Taibbi warns them in Rolling Stone (!) of the minefield they’ve wandered into.

“Even some Democrats on the (Senate) Intelligence Committee now quietly admit… they don’t expect to find evidence of active, informed collusion between the Trump campaign and known Russian intelligence operatives,” wrote Buzzfeed.

There’s no evidence of “inactive, uninformed” collusion either.

There is no conclusive evidence, the New York Times said in its now infamous story Jan. 19.

What FBI Director James Comey and James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, said is no evidence has been found – as in zero, zip, zilch, squat, squiffo, nada, nichts.

A reasonable person who focused on what Comey and Clapper actually said might wonder what probable cause there was for wiretapping Mr. Trump and/or associates (if that happened), and why, after no evidence of wrongdoing was found, it was continued (if it was).

President Trump launched his tweetstorm after reading in Breitbart News radio talk show host Mark Levin’s charge Obama was mounting a “silent coup,” several news organizations said.

This could be true. Press Secretary Sean Spicer walked back the president’s tweets yesterday (3/13).

Mr. Levin, who used to be an aide to Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, makes a powerful case – provided the “facts” reported in the “mainstream” media articles he cites are true. Some may not be.

Most critical are reports the Obama administration sought FISA warrants.

No FISA warrant was issued, former DNI Clapper told an astonished Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”

Clapper left himself lots of wiggle room. No FISA order with regard to Trump or his campaign had been issued “to my knowledge.” As DNI, he was “absolutely” in a position to know if a FISA warrant had been issued “for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw;” he would “certainly hope” he would have been aware of it. But he might not have been.

Then Clapper said: “I can’t speak for other authorized entities in the government.” Andy McCarthy writes here how Obama Justice could have obtained a FISA warrant without the DNI knowing.

Surveillance of Mr. Trump without a FISA warrant could be legal if the president ordered it on national security grounds – but if that happened, it would be hard for Mr. Obama to deny knowing about it.

If CIA techs were listening in on Mr. Trump, would CIA inform DNI it was breaking the law? The Wikileaks Vault 7 document dump suggests this may not be a hypothetical question.

As investigations proceed in secret, and Dems and the Lying Swine go into Emily Littella mode, I expect the furor to quiet down.

We must distinguish between speculation, however informed, and what we know for certain. Which at this point isn’t very much.

FISA applications – if they exist – would reveal who made them, when, and the rationale for them. There may be national security grounds for not making them public, but the House and Senate Intelligence committees will demand to see them. We’ll have to wait and see.

But whether we learn the Obama administration weaponized intelligence agencies against a political opponent, or the Trump/Russia connection was a scam concocted after the election, President Trump already has won. The only question is how bigly.

Did The Donald sandbag the Lying Swine? We don’t know. Maybe he just got lucky after a reckless tweet. But if I had that kind of luck, I’d buy lottery tickets every day.

For as famed polar explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), the first man to reach the South Pole, was fond of observing: “There are those who say I have had good luck.  But what some call ‘good luck,’ I call ‘good planning’.”

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.