Reading between the tea leaves

This one is straight out of the mouth of senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju on CNN’s Inside Politics, discussing who knew what about connections between Russia and the Trump campaign:

And then I asked Schiff the same question. He said he’s not willing to go there. So the question is perhaps is there any intelligence in that regard that they’re not sharing with the committee. With that — we don’t know that yet but reading between the tea leaves that suggests that. The question is the independent prosecutor, that’s something that Schiff called for yesterday.   http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1703/03/ip.02.html

This is a nice subtle mashup of “reading the tea leaves” (predicting on little bits of information) and “reading between the lines” ((perceiving an obscure or unexpressed meaning).  Both idioms pertain to perceiving or predicting, and both contain the word “reading”.   “Lines” and “leaves” are also similar sounding words.  A shout out to Barbara Artuso for hearing this one and sending it in!