Donald Trump stands by wiretap claim despite no proof
WASHINGTON: The former president denied it. So did the former national intelligence director. The FBI director has said privately that it is false. The speaker of the House and the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — all three Republican — see no indications that it happened.
But President Trump insists he is right. No matter how many officials, even in his own party, dismiss his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama secretly tapped his phones last year, the White House made clear on Thursday that it would stand by the assertion.
Ultimately, it insisted, the president will be proved correct.
Nearly two weeks after Trump first accused his predecessor in a series of Saturday morning Twitter posts, the standoff between the president and the available record has come to shadow the White House even as it tries to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system and drastically rewrite the federal budget.
Much like his longstanding assertion that Obama was not born in the United States, Trump dismisses contrary information with undiminished surety.
Indeed, the White House even added a new assertion on Thursday during a fiercely combative and sometimes surreal briefing by the press secretary, Sean Spicer, who berated reporters and read from news accounts that either did not back up the president’s claims or had been refuted by intelligence officials. One report that Spicer read contended that Obama used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as GCHQ, to spy on Trump.
However, GCHQ dismissed the claim terming it “utterly ridiculous”. “There’s widespread reporting that throughout the 2016 election, there was surveillance that was done on a variety of people,” Spicer said. Asked if the president stood by his original allegation, Spicer said, “He stands by it.”
The White House defiance came shortly after the top two senators overseeing the intelligence community joined the chorus of lawmakers debunking the claim.
“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” senator Richard M Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said in a statement.
The blunt conclusion by the leaders of the Senate Intel ligence Committee means that all four congressional leaders who oversee intelligence-based surveillance by the government have rejected Trump’s claim. On Wednesday, their counterparts on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Devin Nunes, a Republican, and Adam B Schiff, a Democrat, both from California, made similar statements.
But President Trump insists he is right. No matter how many officials, even in his own party, dismiss his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama secretly tapped his phones last year, the White House made clear on Thursday that it would stand by the assertion.
Ultimately, it insisted, the president will be proved correct.
Nearly two weeks after Trump first accused his predecessor in a series of Saturday morning Twitter posts, the standoff between the president and the available record has come to shadow the White House even as it tries to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system and drastically rewrite the federal budget.
Much like his longstanding assertion that Obama was not born in the United States, Trump dismisses contrary information with undiminished surety.
Indeed, the White House even added a new assertion on Thursday during a fiercely combative and sometimes surreal briefing by the press secretary, Sean Spicer, who berated reporters and read from news accounts that either did not back up the president’s claims or had been refuted by intelligence officials. One report that Spicer read contended that Obama used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as GCHQ, to spy on Trump.
However, GCHQ dismissed the claim terming it “utterly ridiculous”. “There’s widespread reporting that throughout the 2016 election, there was surveillance that was done on a variety of people,” Spicer said. Asked if the president stood by his original allegation, Spicer said, “He stands by it.”
The White House defiance came shortly after the top two senators overseeing the intelligence community joined the chorus of lawmakers debunking the claim.
“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” senator Richard M Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said in a statement.
The blunt conclusion by the leaders of the Senate Intel ligence Committee means that all four congressional leaders who oversee intelligence-based surveillance by the government have rejected Trump’s claim. On Wednesday, their counterparts on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Devin Nunes, a Republican, and Adam B Schiff, a Democrat, both from California, made similar statements.
