White House defends wiretap claim
grown visibly frustrated at having to answer questions about the claim, which the White House defended even after leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees said this week that they had seen no evidence to substantiate it.
In reviving the sore point with Merkel, Trump risked upsetting a delicate relationship with an important partner, which was already frayed by insults Trump lobbed at her during the presidential campaign in which he said she was ruining Germany by accepting too many refugees.
The controversy caused a separate rift with Britain, another close ally.
The British were ruffled after Trump spokesman Sean Spicer read from news stories while mounting a vigorous defense of Trump’s wiretap accusation during Thursday’s White House briefing. One story included an allegation from Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano that Obama had used British spies to snoop on Trump at his New York high-rise.
The British government was not happy.
The allegations are “nonsense” and “should be ignored,” said an official for Britain’s General Communications Headquarters, its secretive signals intelligence agency, in a rare statement.
British media reported that Spicer and H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor, issued a formal apology. A White House official who declined to be named pushed back against that characterization. The official acknowledged that British Ambassador Kim Darroch and Mark Lyall Grant, Britain’s national security advisor, “expressed their concerns to Sean Spicer and Gen. McMaster.”
“Mr. Spicer and Gen. McMaster both explained that he was simply pointing to public reports and not endorsing any specific story,” said the White House official, who would not be named while describing private discussions between U.S. and British officials.
Trump also brushed the issue aside at his news conference. “That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox,” he said. “And so you shouldn’t be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox. OK?”
But even Fox News, the conservative network that Trump considers a media ally, was unwilling to stand behind the commentary. Within minutes of Trump’s comments, anchor Shepard Smith attempted to distance the network from Trump’s allegations.
“Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time in any way, full stop,” he said.
Despite all the blowback, Spicer made no effort to retract his efforts at defending his boss.
“I don’t think we regret anything,” he told reporters Friday. “We literally listed a litany of media reports that are in the public domain.”
One House Republican called on Trump to apologize to Obama.
“Frankly, unless you can produce some pretty compelling proof, then ... President Obama is owed an apology in that regard,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “Because if he didn’t do it, we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did.”
Obama, who has previously denied ordering a wiretap of Trump, stayed silent. But his former aides fumed.
“Spicer’s slam against the British yesterday and the president’s snide reference to a sticking point in modern U.S.-German relations, which the Obama administration worked assiduously to overcome, is just another indication that this administration prioritizes the president’s personal vanity over our broader national interests,” Ned Price, a former CIA analyst and spokesman for the National Security Council during the Obama administration, wrote in an email.
Despite the raw nerves, the impact on the relationship with Britain will probably be short-lived and limited to top diplomats. U.S. and British intelligence agents have worked side by side for decades, and those relationships are unlikely to be derailed.
Officers and investigators with the two countries’ spy agencies work daily at the ground level to share information on moves by China and Russia, dismantle international criminal networks and stop terrorist attacks, among other operations. They are among the so-called Five Eyes nations, along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, that have an expansive intelligence-sharing agreement.
But there is a concern that if unfounded accusations are repeated, the confidence that close allies have in Trump’s judgment could erode. U.S. and British intelligence officers are still bruised by the series of misjudgments over former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that then-President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair used to justify the Iraq invasion.