U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 7, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Longtime investigative reporter Ken Dilanian, who typically covers justice and intelligence, called out the Republican talking point that they were "wiretapped" by President Joe Biden's administration.
White House call logs were obtained as part of the investigation into the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, revealing who President Donald Trump called, when the calls occurred, and when they ended. Such call logs were public as part of the House Subcommittee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. However, the call logs published as part of special counsel Jack Smith's final report included the name of the phone number's owner.
Republicans have called that a wiretap and alleged it's "worse than Watergate."
Dilanian made it clear on MSNBC that it's simply false.
"Those investigations were conducted based on the facts and the law by career FBI agents and career prosecutors," said Dilanian. "All of the arguments that Donald Trump made about weaponization — he tried to make two judges in courtrooms, and none of them worked. Even Judge Aileen Cannon didn't throw out the search at Mar-a-Lago — didn't decide that it was illegal. She ended up throwing out the case on a technical ground. So, it's totally different. There's no comparison to what happened and there's no evidence."
He said that he keeps repeating himself that if Trump had evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, demanding that the DOJ and FBI were weaponized, he could release all of the documents around the investigation. But over the course of the eight months that Trump has been in office, Dilanian said, they have "not produced a scintilla of evidence that anyone from the Biden administration, any political appointee, had any influence over that investigation."
"That's what weaponization would be. That's their argument. They're saying Biden sicced the Justice Department on his political opponent. There's just no evidence of that. They haven't produced any. They just keep saying it. And lots of people believe it," he closed.