White House tells Britain it will drop spy claims

WASHINGTON — The White House assured U.K. officials that it won’t continue to repeat allegations that former President Barack Obama had enlisted British intelligence to spy on his successor, a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said yesterday.

That pledge came after British officials lodged a high-level diplomatic complaint over White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s citation of a disputed Fox News commentator’s report suggesting the U.K. helped Obama spy on President Trump before his election, as first reported Thursday by Bloomberg. Spicer was attempting to bolster Trump’s unsubstantiated Twitter claims that he had been wiretapped by the previous administration.

“We have received assurances that these allegations won’t be repeated,” James Slack, a spokesman for May, said yesterday. He added that allegations that British intelligence had aided Obama in an off-the-books espionage effort were “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

Andrew Napolitano, a legal pundit for Fox News who has advised Trump, claimed during a March 14 telecast that three intelligence sources told the network that Obama personally appealed to the British Government Communications Headquarters, known as the GCHQ, to spy on Trump. Spicer highlighted the report in a list of media accounts he read to reporters during his briefing on Thursday, arguing that the stories helped validate Trump’s allegation.

The Telegraph reported yesterday that Spicer and U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster personally apologized to the British government over the flap.