U.S. President Donald Trump is attacking former president Barack Obama, accusing him of tapping Trump Tower and his phone during the “very sacred election process.”
In a series of tweets Saturday morning, Trump accused Obama – without evidence – of wiretapping Trump Tower and meeting with Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak.
“Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump wrote.
Trump offered no evidence for his claim, but there was an investigation into Russian ties to Trump’s campaign at that time.
A spokesman for Barack Obama on Saturday rejected the claims.
“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false,” Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement.
Lewis also said that “a cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.”
That could mean the Justice Department had ordered the wiretap, but clarifies that Obama didn’t approve the wiretap himself.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Russia influenced the election to help Trump win. A report from the New York Times last week said American Intelligence had caught Russian officials discussing contacts with Trump associates. British and Dutch intelligence too had observed meetings between the two parties in Europe.
He also questioned the legality of the action, saying that a lawyer “could make a great case” against Obama, saying it was a new low for the former president.
The timing of the attack against Obama is also significant, because it comes just three days after Trump’s appointed attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation because of two meetings with the Russian ambassador.
Other Trump advisors have also been accused of meeting with Kislyak, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn was fired after not properly disclosing the topic of his conversations with Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence earlier this yer.
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But Saturday, Trump had his own views on that as well.
“Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone,” Trump wrote, while also noting that Sessions’ first meeting with Kislyak was “set up by the Obama Administration.”
Again, no proof was offered for the statements.
Calls for counter-investigation
The deflection is not the first time Trump’s tried to push some blame onto the Democrats.
On Friday, Trump called for investigations into former Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer for their own ties to Russia.
Trump’s evidence? A 14-year-old photo of Schumer and Putin holding coffee and doughnuts in a New York City gas station.
The president on Friday tweeted a photo of the two men, calling for a probe into Schumer’s “ties to Russia and Putin” and called the New York senator “A total hypocrite!” Trump did not say where the photo came from, but Schumer quickly pointed out that it was taken in 2003 when Putin ventured to New York to celebrate the opening of a Russian-owned Lukoil gas station on Manhattan’s west side.
Schumer, in his own tweet, said he would “happily talk” under oath about his meeting with Putin, which took place “in full view of press and public.” He then challenged Trump to do the same. And, a short time later, he posted a follow-up in which he further poked fun at the photo, noting “And for the record, they were Krispy Kreme donuts.”
In Pelosi’s case, Trump linked to a Politico report in which a group photo of her across the table from Kislyak contradicted her earlier statement that she had never met the Russian ambassador.
Pelosi’s team told Politico she meant she’d never met one-on-one with him.
Pelosi was a vocal proponent of the movement calling for Sessions to be investigated.
*With files from the Associated Press and Reuters
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