A White House spokeswoman said Monday she doesn’t believe President Donald Trump accepts FBI Director James B. Comey’s reported denial about Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama ordered wiretaps on phones in Trump Tower during the election season.
“You know, I don’t think he does,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America.
She continued, “I think he firmly believes that this is a storyline that has been reported pretty widely by quite a few outlets,” citing wiretapping stories published in The New York Times, the BBC and Fox News.
Stephanopoulos pushed back, however, saying none of the stories she mentioned backed up Trump’s charge or her claims that the administration was wiretapping American citizens.
According to ABC News, Comey asked the Justice Department on Saturday to publicly refute Trump’s accusations because the claims are false and suggest that the FBI broke the law.
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In a series of Twitter posts early on Saturday, Trump tweeted out the accusation, writing, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Trump, 70, alleged that Obama bypassed a court rejection in order to carry out the alleged wiretapping, noting that “a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”
A spokesperson for Obama quickly denied the allegations, calling Trump’s claims “simply false.”
“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,” the spokesperson said. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White house official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”
Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who said he would have been in a position to know of secret wiretapping, denied a court ordered any surveillance of the then-GOP nominee.
Despite Comey’s request, the White House asked Congress on Sunday to investigate Trump’s claims against the former president.
Sanders said the president is the victim of a media-double standard as doubt is cast on the wiretapping claims, yet ties between Trump and the Russian government were continuously called into question.
“Frankly, George, I think if the president walked across the Potomac, the media would report he can’t swim,” she said. “This is a constant battle we’re having to fight. All we’re asking is that the double standard be washed away and we allow the Congressional committee to do their job.”
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