Democrats sharply criticized President Donald Trump's calls on lawmakers to investigate his baseless claim that former President Barack Obama tapped h
Democrats sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s calls on lawmakers to investigate his baseless claim that former President Barack Obama tapped his phone while Republicans, have urged Trump to let the House and Senate intelligence committees do their jobs. Both parties made it clear that Trump’s allegation which the White House has not offered any evidence to support, and which Obama administration officials emphatically deny, won’t be dropped anytime soon, as even GOP lawmakers who have backed Trump said they’d investigate.
Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his committee would look into whether the federal government was conducting wiretapping of campaign officials as part of the panel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election. Democrats, meanwhile, accused Trump of advancing yet another unfounded conspiracy in an effort to distract from the issues dogging his administration in its early weeks.
“You make up something and then you have the press write about it, and then you say, ‘everybody’s writing about this charge,'” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“It’s a tool of an authoritarian, to just have you always be talking about what you want to be talking about.”
Their comments come after Trump’s aides asked Congress to look into whether the Obama administration abused its investigative powers during the 2016 election.
“Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.
While Spicer said “reports” prompted the call for a congressional investigation, the White House still has not provided any evidence to back up the President’s accusations. There are no publicly known credible reports to back up Trump’s claim that Obama ordered Trump’s phones be monitored.
Frustrated that the Russia stories have overshadowed a widely praised performance in his joint address to Congress on Tuesday, Trump angrily raised the wiretapping issue unprompted in conversations with friends and acquaintances at Mar-a-Lago, two people who have spoken with him at his Palm Beach resort over the last 24 hours. The President however didn’t specify what information he was basing his accusations upon, but told them he expected an investigation to prove him right.
Multiple former senior US officials have dismissed Trump’s allegations, however, calling them “nonsense” and “false.” Obama, through a spokesman, also rejected the claim that he ordered Trump’s phones tapped. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a career intelligence official who had oversight of the US intelligence community in that role, said that Trump was not wiretapped by intelligence agencies nor did the FBI obtain a court order through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor Trump’s phones.
“For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no wiretap activity mounted against the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign,” Clapper said.
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff called Trump’s claims as “destructive as it was baseless,” but tied the President’s call to the California Democrat’s criticism of FBI Director James Comey for not being forthcoming about any investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump administration.
“If the administration truly believes that President Obama illegally eavesdropped on the Trump campaign and wants our committee to investigate the matter, they should join my call on Director Comey to answer any question put to him that is pertinent to the Russia investigation,” Schiff said in a statement.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, said his panel would follow the evidence trail in its investigation of Russian intelligence activities.
“As I’ve said since the beginning and have repeated since, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will follow the evidence where it leads, and we will continue to be guided by the intelligence and facts as we compile our findings,” Burr said. Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted at Spicer that he looks forward “to seeing your evidence,” calling the allegations a “mess.” Himes also mocked Trump’s claim in a tweet.
“BREAKING: HIMES ADMITS TO TAPPING. ‘I know this will end up being sticky, but yes, I did the tapping’ #maplenotwire” he tweeted with a picture of him tapping a tree for syrup.
