'We've had to live with this farce for nine days': Tapper shreds Trump for keeping wiretap lie alive

CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday unloaded on the White House for failing to provide evidence for Donald Trump’s “demonstrably false” lie insisting former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election, charging defenders of the president with “twisting themselves into pretzels” and “wasting time defending the indefensible.”

Discussing the House Intelligence Committee’s March 13 deadline to the Department of Justice to provide any documents to the president’s claim earlier this month that his predecessor engaged in “Nixon/Watergate”-style surveillance of Trump Tower, Tapper noted that he and his colleagues were unable to find one person who could substantiate the president’s claim.

“To recap, since those tweets nine days ago, this charge by the president has been called ‘false’ by the director of the FBI, ‘false’ by the former director of national intelligence, and not one credible, informed source that we can find in Washington has said that the presidents’ accusation is true, and I’m including Vice President Pence in that group,” Tapper said on CNN’s “The Lead.”

“We as a nation have had to live in this farce for the last nine days, where defendants of the president have twisted themselves into pretzels to try to suggest the possibility that the tweets weren't preposterous by rejiggering the facts of the tweets to try and make this wild, unfounded claim by the president seem to live somewhere in the vicinity of the neighborhood of possible,” the CNN anchor continued, playing footage of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer using what Tapper called a “Trump-to-English-dictionary” to make the charge seem plausible.

“Sometimes revisionism is so blatant, it’s not revisionism, it’s a complete rewrite,” Tapper noted, adding that “other than the word ‘Obama,’” Spicer’s interpretation of the president have little in common with Trump’s actual words.

“This White House is now spending its energy and your tax dollars trying to change demonstrably false assertions into perfectly understandable beliefs tangentially related to the original lie,” Tapper explained. "And while doing so they’re squandering their own credibility and they’re wasting time defending the indefensible, instead of devoting time to, say, improving your lives.”

Watch the full video below, via CNN: