In his latest early-morning Twitter storm, President Donald Trump on Saturday accused Barack Obama of “wire tapping” his phones in Manhattan’s Trump Tower prior to last November’s election.
The president offered no evidence to substantiate his explosive allegation but claimed in a series of tweets that his predecessor ran a “Nixon/Watergate” plot “during the very sacred election process.” He also called Obama a “bad (or sick) guy!” and likened the unfounded efforts to “McCarthyism.”
He also said the supposed surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”
The president provided no substantiation or credible sourcing for his claims, but the tweets followed allegations made by conservative radio host Mark Levin this week that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics to monitor the Trump campaign team last fall prior to the election.
Levin’s unsubstantiated claims were picked up by other right-leaning media outlets, notably Breitbart News, the operation formerly run by Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon.
“Neither @barackobama nor any WH official under Obama has ever ordered surveillance on any US Citizen,” Kevin Lewis, spokesman for Obama tweeted. “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no WH official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the DOJ.”
One day before Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times reported that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of an investigation into possible ties between Russian officials and associates of Trump.
But there has been no definitive evidence offered that any phone lines belonging to the Trump presidential campaign were tapped.
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