TAPPED OUT
Pols hear nothing in hunt for tower spy proof
I’ve seen no evidence of any illegality pertaining to electronic surveillance. REP. ADAM SCHIFF, RANKING DEMOCRAT ON HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE Are you going to take the tweets literally? If you are, then clearly the President was wrong. DEVIN NUNES, COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN
THE CHAIRMAN of the House committee investigating President Trump’s still unproven accusation that former President Barack Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower said Wednesday he has seen “no evidence” supporting the claim.
“We don’t have any evidence that that took place,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said during a briefing with reporters.
“In fact, I don’t believe just in the last week of time, the people we’ve talked to, I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” Nunes said.
Trump tweeted on March 4, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Nunes said, “Are you going to take the tweets literally? If you are, then clearly the President was wrong.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, agreed.
“Neither one of us have seen any evidence to support what the President tweeted,” Schiff said at the briefing. “I’ve seen no evidence of any illegality pertaining to electronic surveillance.”
Trump has so far provided no evidence, either publicly or to either of the congressional committees probing the claim at his request, and has not elaborated on how or where he received the information that led him to make the accusation in the first place.
“Wiretap covers a lot of different things. I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The House Intelligence Committee — which, like the Senate Intelligence Committee and the FBI, is investigating the claim — was supposed to receive evidence from the administration Monday, but the deadline came and went after the Justice Department asked for more time to respond. Nunes and Schiff, however, indicated Wednesday there was a possibility that surveillance from Trump Tower may have been collected incidentally, as part of efforts to spy on foreign targets. The duo sent a letter Wednesday to the FBI, CIA and NSA requesting they turn over, by Friday, the names of anyone from the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns “whose identities were disseminated in response to requests from” law enforcement.
Nunes added that more information was likely to emerge Monday, when FBI Director James Comey is slated to testify at the committee’s first public hearing on the matter.
Comey (photo below) privately briefed the chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), about the matter Wednesday afternoon.
Both lawmakers refused questions from reporters as they left the briefing, explaining that all information discussed was classified.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday he was not the source behind Trump’s still unproven accusations.
Sessions told CBS News that he “never briefed” Trump “on campaign investigations or gave him any reason to believe Obama wiretapped him,” a reporter for the network tweeted.