Former Director of National Intelligence Knocks Trump's Baseless Wiretapping Claim

Alexandra Rosenmann
,
AlterNet
and
Alexandra Rosenmann
March 06, 2017Video

President Trump made an unprecedented and baseless claim Saturday, tweeting that his predecessor President Obama had wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.

"Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling," Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in a statement. "President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016."

President Trump will not be commenting further until the investigation is complete. However, according to the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, such an investigation is completely unnecessary. 

"For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign," Clapper told Chuck Todd on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Clapper still believes that the Russian government worked to throw the presidential election to Trump. He said he hopes to "completely clear the air on this subject" through the bipartisan effort of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence.

According to former President Obama's spokesman Kevin Lewis, "Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

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