New claim: Brits spied on Trump
UNITED STATES: Britain’s GCHQ spy agency may have helped former US president Barack Obama spy on Donald Trump, the White House’s press secretary has suggested.
Sean Spicer, communications director for Trump, yesterday repeated a claim - initially made by an analyst on Fox News - that the agency was used by Obama to spy on Trump Tower, noting: ‘‘He’s able to get it [covert intelligence] and there’s no American fingerprints on it.’’
Trump is under increasing pressure to justify the claims. Critics have said that if they turn out to be baseless, it would call the integrity of his administration into question.
Obama is said to have greeted the flurry of tweets from Trump on March 4 that contained the allegations of spying with ‘‘a deep eye roll’’.
His spokesman has denied that the former president ordered any surveillance. However, Trump has stood by the accusation.
In an attempt to provide credibility to the claims, Spicer quoted from a series of articles which discussed surveillance.
Most of the articles detailed how US intelligence agencies were looking into unusual communications between a computer server in Trump Tower and a Russian bank.
But one of the articles used to build Spicer’s case was a transcript from a Fox News report on Wednesday in which a political commentator and former New Jersey judge, Andrew Napolitano, alleged British involvement.
Napolitano said that rather than ordering US agencies to spy on Trump, Obama obtained transcripts of Trump’s conversations from Britain’s GCHQ, which monitors overseas electronic communications.
Spicer read out the report, quoting Napolitano as saying: ‘‘Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command - he didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI and he didn’t use the department of justice - he used GCHQ.’’
GCHQ has a close relationship with its American equivalent, the NSA, as well as with the eavesdropping agencies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a consortium called ‘‘Five Eyes’’.
British officials were quick to rubbish Napolitano’s claims earlier this week. A government source reportedly said the claim was ‘‘totally untrue and quite frankly absurd’’.
The British official told Reuters that under British law, GCHQ ‘‘can only gather intelligence for national security purposes’’, and noted that the US election ‘‘clearly doesn’t meet that criteria’’.
The senate intelligence committee has found no evidence for Trump’s claim that Obama ordered wiretaps on Trump Tower.