White House revives claim of wiretaps by Obama
Without proof, predecessors are accused of doing ‘very bad things’
WASHINGTON — The White House on Friday revived President Donald Trump’s unproven wiretapping allegations against the Obama administration, insisting that there is new evidence that it conducted “politically motivated” surveillance of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Senior government officials, including James Comey, the FBI director, and lawmakers from both parties have repeatedly and forcefully rejected the president’s claim, saying they have seen no evidence of direct surveillance. A spokesman for former President Barack Obama has denied that Obama ever ordered surveillance of Trump or his associates.
‘Who else did it?’
But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, asserted to reporters during his daily news briefing that members of Obama’s administration had done “very, very bad things,” just as Trump alleged without proof on March 4 when he posted messages on Twitter accusing Obama of “wire tapping” his phones at Trump Tower.
“The question is why? Who else did it? Was it ordered? By whom?” Spicer said. “But I think more and more the substance that continues to come out on the record by individuals continues to point to exactly what the president was talking about that day.”
Spicer appeared to be basing his assertions on reports from right-wing news outlets that took out of context a month-old interview with a former Obama administration official.
Spicer’s remarks Friday seemed designed to give new life to the allegations against Obama after weeks of trying to focus attention on the damage that Spicer said had been caused by leaks from the investigations into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign.
A non-signing
The allegations dominated his briefing, crowding out other parts of the White House agenda, including the president’s signing of two executive orders on trade and meeting with manufacturing executives.
Trump hastily left that signing ceremony without adding his signature to the trade orders as a reporter shouted a question about possible testimony in the Russia probe by Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser. The White House said Trump had signed the directives later.
At Spicer’s news conference, the press secretary chastised reporters for failing to accept that Trump had been right all along.
“The substance we are talking about continues to move exactly in the direction that the president spoke about in terms of surveillance that occurred,” Spicer said, even as he deflected questions about the White House’s role in providing intelligence reports to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Schiff sees documents
The senior Democrat on that committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, arrived later in the day at the White House to view the intelligence reports. In a statement, Schiff confirmed that they were the same materials Nunes had seen, and said nothing justified Nunes’ failure to share them with the entire committee.
“The White House has yet to explain why senior White House staff apparently shared these materials with but one member of either committee, only for their contents to be briefed back to the White House,” Schiff said in a statement.
Spicer provided no evidence of the surveillance allegations. But he pointed several times to news reports that he claimed backed up the president’s accusations.
One was a March 2 interview with Evelyn Farkas, a who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration until leaving the government in September 2015.
TheGatewayPundit.com, a right-wing site, called it a “notorious” interview and said it proved that Obama administration officials had disseminated “intel gathered on the Trump team.” Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that Farkas had made “just an incredible statement.” Breitbart News reported on Priebus’ comments.
Questionable evidence
The comments by Farkas, Spicer said, were evidence that Trump or his associates “were surveilled, had their information unmasked, made it available, was politically spread.” He said that such stories were proof that Obama administration officials had “misused, mishandled and potentially did some very, very bad things with classified information.”
In fact, the reports do not back up the allegations that Trump or any officials in his campaign were ever under surveillance. In the March 2 interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Farkas said she had expressed concern to her former colleagues about the need to secure intelligence related to the Russian hacking of the U.S. election.
Farkas was commenting on a New York Times article a day earlier that documented how in the days before Trump’s inauguration, Obama administration officials had sought to ensure the preservation of those documents in order to leave a clear trail for government investigators after Trump took office.
In a statement she gave to the American Spectator, a conservative publication, Farkas said the furor over her remarks was “a wild misinterpretation of comments I made on the air in March.” She added, “I was out of government, I didn’t have any classified information, or any knowledge of ‘tapping’ or leaking or the NYT article before it