The Trump administration has until the end of the day Monday to produce evidence that former President Obama ordered surveillance on President Trump during last year’s election, as Trump has claimed.
The House Intelligence Committee set the deadline in a letter to Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente last week in which it asked for proof of the claim, which Obama and others have said is baseless.
Committee chairman Devin Nunes and ranking Democrat Adam Schiff requested any applications for surveillance of Trump or his associates that were made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any court orders supporting such surveillance made by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, NPR’s David Welna reports.
Welna adds that a copy of the letter also was sent to FBI Director James Comey, who has asked the Justice Department to publicly deny the president’s claims.
Trump’s claims came as the House Intelligence Committee was already in the process of looking into U.S. allegations that Russia sought to influence last year’s presidential election — allegations that have also included ties between those in Trump’s camp and Russian officials. Nunes has said the panel will also look at the president’s accusation.
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Sen. John McCain is among those who’ve asked for proof of Trump’s claim, telling CNN on Sunday, “I think the president has one of two choices: either retract or to provide the information that the American people deserve, because, if his predecessor violated the law, President Obama violated the law, we have got a serious issue here, to say the least.”
Monday’s deadline comes more than a week after Trump said Obama “was tapping my phones in October,” in a series of tweets that accused his predecessor of “McCarthyism” and called Obama a “Bad (or sick) guy!”
Trump did not provide any evidence to bolster his claim; instead, the White House released a statement calling for Congress to investigate the allegations made by one president against another.
As NPR’s David Folkenflik has reported, Trump’s claim is seen as having its origins in a March 2 broadcast by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, who accused Obama “and his surrogates” of using “intelligence activities to surveil members of the Trump campaign” in order to help Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton After that, David said, the claim was repeated by the Breitbart website.
“That seems to have inspired, very directly, a series of tweets,” Folkenflik said.
Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis says the Obama White House observed a policy against interfering with “any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.”
Lewis added, “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
The morning after Trump made his claim, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked about it on ABC’s This Week; here’s what she said: “Look, I think he is going off of information that he’s saying that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential.”
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