ASSOCIATED PRESS, WHOSE REPORTERS OBAMA TAPPED,* leaps to Obama’s defense over claims he tapped Trump.

Plus, why we need a special prosecutor:

This scandal cries out for aggressive investigation. Let’s see the initial FISA application, and the court order denying it. Then let’s see the second application, and the order that approved it. Let’s put the Obama administration officials who signed the applications under oath, and find out who put them up to it. Let’s find out what judges denied the first application, and what judges granted the second one. Let’s get the details on the Obama administration’s spying. Did they tap the Trump campaign’s telephones? If so, which lines? Did they hack into the Trump campaign’s servers? If so, which ones?

Obviously, as President Trump said, the Obama administration learned nothing of significance from its spying on the Trump campaign. But it now appears that the election of 2016 may have been hacked after all, in a far more meaningful way than an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s email account. It may have been hacked by the Obama administration. We need to find out what happened. Congress should give top priority to this investigation.

Absolutely.

Flashback: New York Times: “The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers. On Friday, Justice Department officials revealed that they had been going through The A.P.’s records for months. The dragnet covered work, home and cellphone records used by almost 100 people at one of the oldest and most reputable news organizations. James Cole, a deputy attorney general, offered no further explanation on Tuesday.”

So, yeah, it’s crazy talk to suggest Obama might have been spying on Trump.

Related: 64% of investigative journalists say Feds spying on their email, calls, online searches. More here: “Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists. Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.”

Plus: Ex-CBS reporter: Government agency bugged my computer. More here. (Bumped).

UPDATE: Technically, the phones weren’t “tapped” (a term that has no real meaning in today’s digital era anyway, since it refers to a parallel connection made to electrical wires, to extract an analog signal in the case of phone wires) but rather the phone calls were monitored, to see who was calling who, how often, etc. As far as we know, the calls weren’t actually recorded, though who can say for sure.