When is a wiretap not a wiretap

What I have really enjoyed about the Trump administration so far are the different explanations for the presidential tweets. It must be a nightmare being Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway or anyone who gets shoved before the cameras to explain away their master's latest tweet utterance. The best of the lot has been the wiretap thingamabob. So Trump says Obama - yes Obama, not his plumber or next-door neighbour or some nameless flunky - wiretapped everything he said while sitting in his gold chair in Trump Tower dreaming of being president of the United States. Well, we all know that Obama's lot said this was "false", and most sensible people in Congress had their serious doubts. So up comes the first explanation. By wiretap he didn't mean wiretap specifically, just a sort of generic word meaning surveillance, watching through binoculars, peeping under doors, peering through keyholes, that sort of thing. Oh and Obama himself wasn't being accused of bending his knees to catch sight of Trump through a crack in the curtain. No no no, what the president meant was that he felt/knew/guessed that someone with an Obama label on his t-shirt was doing a bit of spying. So, no actual bugging then. No wiretapping per se. No Watergate plumbers. In fact, probably what Trump tweeted was based on a remark overheard on a bus spoken by the nine-year-old nephew of a man who voted Republican and once said over breakfast that he thought Obama was a bugger!