Former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich is standing by Donald Trump’s claim that he may have been wiretapped. As Kucinich writes at Fox News:

President Trump’s assertion that his phones at Trump Tower were tapped last year has been treated as hilarious—and in some circles as beyond contempt. But I can vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur, regardless of whether it is officially approved. I was wiretapped in 2011 after taking a phone call in my congressional office from a foreign leader.

That a secret recording had been made of this call was revealed to me by the Washington Times in 2015, a full two years after I left office.

The newspaper’s investigative reporters called me, saying they had obtained a tape of a sensitive telephone conversation that they wanted me to verify.

When I met them at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, they played back audio of a call I had taken in my D.C. congressional office four years earlier.

Kucinich goes on to note that he believes an intelligence agency made the tape and leaked it to the Times to serve political purposes. This makes some sense. Recall a few months back, the deeply troubling moment when Senator Chuck Schumer openly acknowledged that Trump’s “war on the intelligence community” would result in some sort of retaliation. 

This is of course a terrifying prospect, but it’s what happens when you have an intelligence community that’s not answerable to anyone.