Trump slams Obama’s Guantanamo releases

NEW YORK — U.S. President Trump used Twitter on Tuesday to again bash predecessor Barack Obama — this time in a false claim about Guantanamo Bay prisoner releases.

Trump said that “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”

However, more more than 90 per cent of those detainees were released during the George W. Bush administration, not that of Obama.

The tweet appears to be a response to reports of a military strike in Yemen that killed a fighter who had been imprisoned at Guantanamo.

A report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that of the 122 Guantanamo detainees who returned to the battlefield, nine were released after Obama took office in January 2009.

During the weekend, Trump accused Obama of tapping his telephones in the run-up to the presidential election in November election.

The wiretap claim came in connection with an ongoing investigation over Russia — another subject on which Trump attacked his predecessor Tuesday, with a reference to Fox News.

“For eight years Russia ‘ran over’ President Obama, got stronger and stronger, picked-off Crimea and added missiles. Weak! @foxandfriends,” Trump said.

The FBI and various congressional committees are investigating Russian efforts to influence last year’s election by hacking Democratic Party officials, and whether Trump campaign associates had contacts with Russian officials during the election year.

The top Republican on the House of Representatives intelligence committee said Tuesday that he has not seen any evidence to back Trump’s claim that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the 2016 campaign and suggested the news media were taking the president’s weekend tweets too literally.

“The president is a neophyte to politics — he’s been doing this a little over a year,” Devin Nunes, who was a member of Trump’s transition team, told reporters Tuesday.

“I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally.”

FBI Director James Comey has privately asked the U.S. Department of Justice to dispute Trump’s wiretapping allegations as false.