Claims by President Donald Trump that his predecessor ordered he be wire-tapped at the Trump Tower during the run-up for the 2016 general elections are “simply false”, says Obama’s spokesman.
Trump issued the stunning accusations on Saturday via a Tweet that left social media exploding.
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” read a 2:35 a.m. Tweet.
This was followed by another tweet, barely some 10 minutes apart in which Trump appeared to inquire the public opinion on whether it is “legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election.”
Prior to this, the President had attacked the former President saying that he “stooped too low” by tapping his [Trump’s] phones, an act that he compared to Nixon/Watergate.
Trump Wiretap Claims are lies
According to a dismissal statement by Obama’s spokesman, Kevin Lewis, neither Obama nor the White House have ever triggered the surveillance of an American citizen.
Lewis said that there isn’t any White House official who has ever “interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice”.
With such a statement, the possibility of a judicial investigation being in progress was laid bare. ‘
Trump did not offer any backing of his accusations that were dismissed by two former senior US officials.
One senior United States intelligence official termed the accusations nonsense and was backed by another who said that such a thing never took place, reports CNN.
Are the accusations True?
Many Republicans feel that Trump is laying bare the ills committed during the Obama era now that President Trump is in control.
The President from time and again insisted that he would “clean the drain” a term meant to imply eradicating corruption and other false doings. Thus, this is seen as one such an action.
But Trump failed to provide any supporting evidence to his accusations, casting doubt on his claims. The two senior officials who spoke to CNN are amongst the first to dismiss the allegations.
In the argument of the former senior US official with direct knowledge of the Justice Department’s investigations, such an order would have required the investigators to obtain a warrant for monitoring Trump’s phones.
This request would only be approved by the federal judge if he or she saw the need to do so. Some circumstances under which the warrant would have been issued include if Trump was a foreign agent or found to have committed a federal crime.
Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser during the Obama era, said that no U.S. President has the powers to issue such an order, these are restrictions that were implemented for the safety of each citizen.
The Department of Justice, whose investigations are not impacted by the White House and the President, is the only body mandated to seek for a warrant to tap any given phone.
If the allegations are false, then one may easily argue that Trump is attempting to divulge attention from his Russian ties by attacking the former President.
The President’s tweets come at a time when Mark Levin called for investigation into what Obama may have done in his last days in office to undermine trump’s campaign in favor of Hillary Clinton.
