Trump claims Watergate plot
"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is Mccarthyism!" Donald Trump tweet
STATES: Donald Trump’s relationship with Barack Obama hit a new low yesterday after the US president made explosive accusations that his predecessor orchestrated an illegal Watergate-style bugging operation at Trump Tower.
In an unprecedented attack by a sitting president on a former occupant of the White House, Trump called Obama ‘‘sick’’ and suggested he should be criminally prosecuted for ‘‘wiretapping’’ his New York base during the election campaign.
Trump unleashed his astonishing allegations on Twitter from his Mar-a-lago estate in Florida, where he was spending the weekend, but offered no proof and it was believed he may have based them on media reports.
In the series of tweets beginning at 6.26am, Trump:
Accused Mr Obama of having his phones tapped.
Claimed his predecessor stooped as low as Richard Nixon during Watergate Called Mr Obama a ‘‘bad guy’’. Suggested the former president had overseen a Mccarthy-style witch hunt. Last night Mr Obama’s closest allies hit back, saying Trump’s
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behaviour was not presidential, labelling the president a liar and calling the allegations ‘‘simply false’’. One Democrat dismissed the explosive allegations as ‘‘just the president up early doing his routine tweeting’’.
In the series of six tweets sent out over 36 minutes, Trump hinted at legal action.
‘‘Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is Mccarthyism!
‘‘Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!’’
Trump added: ‘‘How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/ Watergate. I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October just prior to Election.’’
President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after a long scandal that began with the discovery of a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington and involved the bugging of political opponents.
A spokesman for Obama said the allegations were ‘‘simply false’’.
‘‘A cardinal rule for the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,’’ said Kevin Lewis. ‘‘As part of that practice neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.’’
Ben Rhodes, Mr Obama’s former national security adviser, strongly denied the allegations.
Rhodes, addressing his comments to Trump, said: ‘‘No president can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.’’
In response to Trump’s suggestion that a lawyer could make a ‘‘great case’’ against Obama, Rhodes said: ‘‘No. They couldn’t. Only a liar could do that.’’
Rhodes added: ‘‘Is it still ‘presidential’ to call your dignified predecessor ‘Bad (or sick) guy!’?’’
CNN reported it had been told by a former senior Obama official that Trump’s allegations were ‘‘false and wrong’’.
As the furore unfolded, a spokesman for Trump said he was busy ‘‘having meetings, making phone calls and hitting balls’’ at his Florida golf course.
Trump’s all-out attack on Obama came five days after he accused his predecessor of being responsible for leaks suggesting links between Trump officials and Russia, and internal conflict in the new administration.
It marked a breach with previous assessments Trump had made of his relationship with Obama.
Last month Trump said: ‘‘We had a rough campaign, he was vicious during the campaign toward me and I was vicious to him. We said horrible things about each other. But it’s a very strange phenomenon, we get along, I don’t know if he’ll admit this but he likes me.’’
The only publicly available evidence that communications at Trump Tower were monitored came from media reports.
In November, Louise Mensch, the former British Conservative MP, reported that she had been told by counter-intelligence sources that the FBI was granted a warrant by a secret court in October to examine the activities of people in Trump’s campaign.
The warrant was said to have been granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows a clandestine court to authorise electronic surveillance in cases involving agents of foreign powers.
The so-called FISA warrant had reportedly been initially denied by the court in June but was granted in October after the FBI presented evidence of a server that was allegedly communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank.
Later, the New York Times reported that the FBI investigation into the Trump Tower server had not led anywhere.
On Friday, suggestions that Trump Tower was the subject of a FISA warrant were repeated by Mark Levin, a prominent US conservative radio host, who said it was evidence that Obama had been running a ‘‘police state’’.
- Telegraph Group