No evidence Obama wiretapped Trump: Republican intelligence committee chair

WASHINGTON— In a striking repudiation of President Donald Trump, the Republican chairperson of the House intelligence committee said on Wednesday that he had seen no indication of Trump’s claim on Twitter that former president Barack Obama wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“We don’t have any evidence that that took place,” Rep. Devin Nunes said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “In fact, I don’t believe — in the last week of time, people we’ve talked to, I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower.”

If Trump’s Twitter claim is to be taken literally, Nunes said, “then clearly the president is wrong.”

Even a member of Trump’s cabinet, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, raised questions about the claim. In Richmond, Va., he told reporters that he had never given Trump any reason to believe he had been wiretapped.

Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, said the FBI director, James Comey, would testify Monday at the committee’s first public hearing on its Russian interference investigation. Comey could presumably resolve the wiretap question.

Schiff challenged statements by press secretary Sean Spicer, who had said that while he was not aware of any investigation targeting Trump, the president spoke accurately when he said he had been wiretapped by Obama. “Those two things cannot both be true,” Schiff said.