Trump says Obama tapped his phones
Former president’s spokesman calls claim ‘simply false’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday angrily accused former President Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.
While citing no evidence to support his allegation, Trump said in a series of tweets Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”
Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting the Obama administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team.
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/ Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” he tweeted, misspelling “tap.”
The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump’s senior staff, according to a White House official.
Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said Saturday: “A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
Trump’s claims drew rebukes from Democrats and Republicans alike who find his habit of venting on social media to be beneath the office of the president.
After delivering a wellreceived speech to Congress on Tuesday night, the tweets may reflect the president’s growing frustration with the swirling allegations about his advisers’ ties to Russia, which are under FBI investigation, and his team’s inability to overcome them. Trump lashed out at his senior team during an Oval Office meeting Friday, according to one White House official.
The White House did not respond to questions about what prompted the president’s accusations against Obama. Presidents cannot legally order wiretaps against U.S. citizens.
Officials at the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Trump has been feuding with the intelligence community since before he took office, convinced that career officers as well as holdovers from the Obama administration have been trying to sabotage his presidency. He has ordered internal inquiries to find who leaked information regarding communications during the election between Russian officials and his campaign team and allies, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Some current and former intelligence officials cast doubt on Trump’s assertion.
“It seems unthinkable,” said one former senior intelligence official familiar with surveillance law who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity. “If that were the case by some chance, that means that a federal judge would have found that there was either probable cause that he had committed a crime or was an agent of a foreign power.”
A wiretap cannot be directed at a U.S. facility, the official said, without finding probable cause that the phone lines or internet addresses were being used by agents of a foreign power — or by someone spying for or acting on behalf of a foreign government.
“You can’t just go around and tap buildings,” the official said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chastised Trump for leveling a “spectacularly reckless allegation” against Obama without evidence.
Referencing Trump’s description of Obama as a “bad (or sick) guy,” Schiff said, “If there is something bad or sick going on, it is the willingness of the nation’s chief executive to make the most outlandish and destructive claims without providing a scintilla of evidence to support them.”
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., called on Trump to explain what he knows about the wiretapping allegations “ideally to the full public, and at a bare minimum to the U.S. Senate.”
Trump sent the tweets from Palm Beach, Fla., where he is vacationing this weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate. It has long been his practice to stir up new controversies to deflect attention from a damaging news cycle.
Trump’s tweets took numerous top White House aides by surprise, according to a second White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Saturday was expected to be a “down day, pretty quiet,” this official said, and there was little, if any, attempt to coordinate the president’s message on the wiretapping allegations.
About an hour after his Obama tweets, the president revived another one of his favorite feuds, this one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie star-turnedformer-California-governor has been hosting “The New Celebrity Apprentice,” the NBC reality franchise that Trump once hosted and is still listed as an executive producer of.
Schwarzenegger announced Friday that he would not return to the show for another season because, he said, the show had too much “baggage.”
But Trump insisted on Twitter that there is more to the story than that:
“Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me.
“Sad end to great show,” he added.