Why Is the Liberal Media Disregarding the Significance of President Trump's Quotation Marks?
It is hypocritical to ignore those quotation marks and charge that President Trump accused former President Obama with wire tapping as defined in the legal sense.
On March 4, 2017, President Trump tweeted: "Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"
Subsequently, President Trump noted that he put the words wire tapping in quotation marks, because they were downplayed, ignored or not understood.
Oxford Dictionaries states that a quotation mark is "each of a set of punctuation marks, single (‘ ’) or double (“ ”), used either to mark the beginning and end of a title or quoted passage or to indicate that a word or phrase is regarded as slang or jargon or is being discussed rather than used within the sentence."
It is hypocritical to ignore those quotation marks and charge that President Trump accused former President Obama of wire tapping as defined in the legal sense.
It is also...FAKE NEWS!
Merriam-Webster defines wire tapping as "interception of the contents of communication through a secret connection to the telephone line of one whose conversations are to be monitored usually for purposes of criminal investigation by law enforcement officers" (www.merriam-webster.com/legal/wiretapping).
President Trump obviously used "wire tapping" in a broad sense, to encompass surreptitious surveillance by any means, not the legal sense, or else he would not have devoted two characters to quotation marks.
Oxford Dictionaries also defines "slang" as "very informal usage in vocabulary and idiom that is characteristically more metaphorical, playful, elliptical, vivid, and ephemeral than ordinary language, as Hit the road."
President Trump was being "playful" and "vivid," not legalistic.
The liberal media blames Monica Crowley for not using quotation marks yet ignores the quotation marks that President Trump used.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.