Trump claims Obama Admin tapped Trump Tower phone lines
President Trump went to twitter on Saturday morning to state an alarming accusation that Barack Obama, ordered his phones to be tapped during the election campaign.
Trump also tweeted about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to leave “The New Celebrity Apprentice”.
And 10 minutes after that: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” he tweeted, misspelling ‘tap’. Trump tweeted from Mar-a-Lago at 4:02 a.m. “All I saw was a published news report“.
The relationship between Trump and Obama has soured and with good reason. If so, Trump did not have FISA court material to back his claim when he made it; nor did the White House.
For Congress, getting to the bottom of this should not be hard, said Dan Jones, a former Senate investigator and now president of the Penn Quarter Research and Investigations Group. There are also some who believe the wiretap accusation itself is a way to distract people from the story about Russian Federation, and the media effectively supports the strategy by reporting it.
“No President can order a wiretap”, he said. Who or what was the source that told Trump Obama had wiretapped his phones in the first place?
White House sources acknowledge that Trump had no idea whether the claims he was making were true when he made them.
Trump’s next tweet concerns Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “pathetic” ratings on “The Apprentice”.
Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said Saturday that a “cardinal rule” of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered in Justice Department investigations, which are supposed to be conducted free of political influence.
Spicer’s chief deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said she thinks Trump is “going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential”.
Apart from the server story, news reports have suggested, as a TIME story did, that “as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organisation was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. I was talking w/ someone who had a wiretap on them”, Kayyem said.
“Unfortunately, the public has never seen an actual FISA application over almost 40 years, so we don’t know exactly how the FISA Court has applied or interpreted the probable cause standard in this context”, Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney specializing in national security, said in an email.
And not that it should come as a surprise, but: The president’s tweets appear to be based on incorrect and/or incomplete information. “That’s the way it should be for presidents”. He promoted the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
Priebus declined to comment on the record about the meeting.
On the same program, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper dismissed Trump’s wiretapping allegations. “These are pursued by the Department of Justice in accordance with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and signed off on by a judge”. Leftists want to keep President Trump so embroiled in faux scandal that it’s impossible for him to govern.
“I think that’s what we need to find out”.
When pressed about wire-tapping at the daily news briefing, Mr Spicer said the president has “absolutely” no regrets about the explosive claims.
“One of the focus points of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation is the USA government’s response to actions taken by Russian intelligence agents during the presidential campaign”, Nunes said. That is a virtual admission that his administration did, probably Justice Department, meaning the “apolitical Loretta Lynch” who just called for “blood and death” in the streets to stop Trump, much to the approval of Senate Democrats. Meanwhile, the BBC’s reported that officials from the Department of Justice got a secret intelligence FISA warrant back in October to look into two Russian banks (though Trump wasn’t named). “I’m not aware that that occurred”.