FBI director rejects Trump’s wiretapping claim,
Comey asks Justice Dept. to publicly dismiss allegation by the president
WASHINGTON — FBI Director James B. Comey asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Donald Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Trump’s phones, senior U.S. officials said Sunday. Comey has argued the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.
Comey, who made the request Saturday after Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates the FBI broke the law, the officials said.
A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.
Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation underscores the high stakes of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s administration.
The White House showed no indication it would back down from Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.
Along with concerns about the potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior FBI officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election.
One problem Comey has faced is that there are few senior politically appointed officials at the Justice Department who can make the decision to release a statement, the officials said. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself Thursday from all matters related to the federal investigation into connections between Trump, his associates and Russia.
Comey’s behind-thescenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.
In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement Sunday that said, “President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”
Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter messages, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”
A spokesman for Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Trump completely false, saying Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a U.S. citizen.
“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,” Kevin Lewis, Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement Saturday.
Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based, at least in part, on unproven claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.