Following an early morning tweetstorm in which a vacationing Pr*sident Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him, Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama has issued the following statement:
“A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion other wise is simply false.”
Michael D. Spear and Michael D. Schmidt at The New York Times report:
Without offering any evidence or providing the source of his information, Mr. Trump fired off a series of Twitter messages [Saturday morning] claiming that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped.’ ” He likened the supposed tapping to “Watergate/Nixon” and “McCarthyism.”
Mr. Trump’s aides declined to clarify whether the president’s explosive allegations were based on briefings from intelligence or law enforcement officials or on something else, like a news report.
Philip Rucker, Ellen Nakashima and Robert Costa at The Washington Post report:
Some current and former intelligence officials cast doubt on Trump's assertion.
“It's highly unlikely there was a wiretap,” said one former senior intelligence official familiar with surveillance law who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity. The former official continued: “It seems unthinkable. If that were the case by some chance, that means that a federal judge would have found that there was either probable cause that he had committed a crime or was an agent of a foreign power.”
A wiretap cannot be directed at a U.S. facility, the official said, without finding probable cause that the phone lines or Internet addresses were being used by agents of a foreign power — or by someone spying for or acting on behalf of a foreign government. “You can't just go around and tap buildings,” the official said.