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Republicans decline to back up Trump's unproven wiretapping claim
Mitch
McConnell and Devin Nunes said they hadn’t seen evidence to support
baseless allegations that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump during the
election
Sabrina Siddiqui and
David Smith in Washington
Wednesday 8 March
2017 01.22 GMT
While the White
House on Tuesday stood by Donald Trump’s assertion that he was
wiretapped by Barack Obama during the 2016 presidential campaign, top
Republicans on Capitol Hill provided little support to bolster his
explosive and unsubstantiated claim.
Mitch McConnell, the
Senate majority leader, said he had not seen any evidence to back up
a series of tweets by Trump on Saturday that accused Obama of
wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower.
“We have an
existing intelligence committee looking at all aspects of what may
have been done last year related to the Russians or the campaign and
we’ll leave it there,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters.
Devin Nunes, the
chairman of the House intelligence committee, also could not offer
any proof of Trump’s allegations while speaking at a separate press
conference.
“At this point, we
don’t have any evidence of that,” said Nunes, whose panel is
investigating Russian interference in the US election.
The reaction from
Republicans in Washington was the latest example of a familiar
pattern: forced to defend the unfiltered words of a president who has
a history of making false proclamations with significant
consequences. In the six weeks since Trump took office, Republicans
have struggled to make sense of claims that have ranged from his
false insistence that millions of illegal votes were cast in the
November election to now an unprecedented accusation against his
predecessor.
Nunes chastised the
media for taking Trump’s words at face value. The president had
merely posed a question about being wiretapped, Nunes argued, even as
reporters said Trump’s statement had been far more definitive.
“As you all know,
the president is a neophyte in politics. And I think a lot of the
things he says, you guys sometimes take literally,” Nunes said to
the press.
“Sometimes he
doesn’t have 27 lawyers and staff looking at what he does … I
don’t think we should attack the president for tweeting.”
But just hours
earlier, White House press secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on
Trump’s charge against Obama when asked if the president regretted
his attack on the previous administration.
“No. Absolutely
not,” Spicer said, adding, “Why would he withdraw it until it’s
adjudicated? It’s not that he’s walking anything back or
regretting.”
But faced with an
aggressive grilling from reporters during his first on-camera
briefing in more than a week, Spicer was unable to offer any evidence
or source of Trump’s accusation.
“That’s probably
a level above my pay grade,” Spicer said, while adding: “It’s
not a question of new proof or less proof or whatever.”
Members of the House
and Senate intelligence committees said they expected to investigate
Trump’s wiretapping claims as part of their separate, ongoing
inquiries into efforts by the Russian government to influence the
outcome of the US presidential election.
“We should be able
to determine in short order whether this accusation is true or
false,” said Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House
intelligence committee.
Republicans, who
were focused this week on the rollout of a plan to repeal and replace
the Affordable Care Act, appeared uncomfortable when pressed on
Trump’s latest controversial series of tweets. Trump’s comments
were not simply inflammatory – they alleged, without evidence, that
Obama had broken the law.
“I think that the
first thing has to happen”, Senator John McCain of Arizona said,
“is the president should tell the American people where he got the
information that the previous president of the United States was
violating the law.”
The severity of
Trump’s rant was underscored by a report that James Comey, the
director of the FBI, asked the Department of Justice over the weekend
to reject the president’s charge.
Spicer said Trump
had not discussed the matter with Comey, deeming it “a no-win
situation” that would be interpreted as the White House interfering
with the FBI’s independent investigation into potential links
between associates of Trump and Russian operatives.
“I think the
smartest, the most deliberative way to address this situation is to
ask the House and Senate intelligence committees, who are already in
the process of looking into this, to look into this and other leaks
of classified information that are troubling to our nation’s
national security,” Spicer said.
Schiff said he
expected to raise the wiretapping issue with Comey at the House
intelligence committee’s first public hearing pertaining to Russian
activities during the 2016 US election, scheduled for 20 March, where
the FBI director has been invited to testify.
Also on the list of
witnesses invited before the panel are National Security Agency chief
Mike Rogers, former CIA director John Brennan, former national
intelligence director James Clapper, former acting attorney general
Sally Yates, and two executives from the cybersecurity firm that
investigated the hacking of the Democratic National Committee by the
Russians.
Clapper has denied
that Trump was wiretapped before the election, saying he would have
been aware of such a warrant if it was granted.
Asked whether he
could confirm or deny if a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
Act warrant existed to engage in such wiretapping, Clapper again
rejected the notion.
“I can deny it,”
he said.
With additional
reporting by Lauren Gambino
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