AP, Washington :
The House intelligence committee is asking the Trump administration for evidence that the phones at Trump Tower were tapped during the campaign as its namesake has charged.
President Donald Trump asserted in a tweet last week: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” He continued the allegation against former President Barack Obama in other tweets but offered no evidence.
On Saturday a senior congressional aide said the request for evidence by Monday was made in a letter sent by the committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., according to the aide, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the request by name and requested anonymity.
Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has said that nothing matching Trump’s claims had taken place, but that has not quelled speculation that Trump’s communications were monitored by the Obama administration. Trump has asked Congress to investigate.
Early this week, Schiff said the committee would answer the president’s call to investigate the claim. He also said that he would ask FBI Director James Comey directly when he appears later this month before the full committee, which is investigating Russian activities during the election.
“We should be able to determine in fairly short order whether this allegation is true or false,” Schiff told reporters Tuesday evening at the Capitol.
Nunes has said that so far he has not seen any evidence to back up Trump’s claim and has suggested the news media were taking the president’s weekend tweets too literally. “The president is a neophyte to politics – he’s been doing this a little over a year,” Nunes told reporters earlier this week. Other lawmakers have asked for similar evidence.
Declaring that Congress “must get to the bottom” of Trump’s claim, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Comey and Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente to produce the paper trail created when the Justice Department’s criminal division secures warrants for wiretaps.
Meanwhile, President Trump, who regularly argued that widely accepted government-compiled jobs figures under President Barack Obama were phony, now believes that upbeat employment statistics on his watch are “very real,” the White House said Friday.
Press secretary Sean Spicer, asked why Trump was so dismissive of the figures on the campaign trail and yet was so ready to celebrate the new jobs numbers released hours earlier, said he had discussed the matter with the president.
“He said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,'” Spicer said with a laugh at his daily briefing for reporters.
The spokesman’s comments came after the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, beating expectations. The figures were largely in line with the previous two Februarys.
When Obama was president, Trump regularly scoffed at jobs numbers released by the Labor Department, arguing that they underestimated economic suffering under Obama.
“Don’t believe these phony numbers,” the entrepreneur told supporters in early 2016. “The 5 percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics,” he said in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in August of last year, referring to the unemployment rate..
The House intelligence committee is asking the Trump administration for evidence that the phones at Trump Tower were tapped during the campaign as its namesake has charged.
President Donald Trump asserted in a tweet last week: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” He continued the allegation against former President Barack Obama in other tweets but offered no evidence.
On Saturday a senior congressional aide said the request for evidence by Monday was made in a letter sent by the committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., according to the aide, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the request by name and requested anonymity.
Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has said that nothing matching Trump’s claims had taken place, but that has not quelled speculation that Trump’s communications were monitored by the Obama administration. Trump has asked Congress to investigate.
Early this week, Schiff said the committee would answer the president’s call to investigate the claim. He also said that he would ask FBI Director James Comey directly when he appears later this month before the full committee, which is investigating Russian activities during the election.
“We should be able to determine in fairly short order whether this allegation is true or false,” Schiff told reporters Tuesday evening at the Capitol.
Nunes has said that so far he has not seen any evidence to back up Trump’s claim and has suggested the news media were taking the president’s weekend tweets too literally. “The president is a neophyte to politics – he’s been doing this a little over a year,” Nunes told reporters earlier this week. Other lawmakers have asked for similar evidence.
Declaring that Congress “must get to the bottom” of Trump’s claim, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Comey and Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente to produce the paper trail created when the Justice Department’s criminal division secures warrants for wiretaps.
Meanwhile, President Trump, who regularly argued that widely accepted government-compiled jobs figures under President Barack Obama were phony, now believes that upbeat employment statistics on his watch are “very real,” the White House said Friday.
Press secretary Sean Spicer, asked why Trump was so dismissive of the figures on the campaign trail and yet was so ready to celebrate the new jobs numbers released hours earlier, said he had discussed the matter with the president.
“He said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,'” Spicer said with a laugh at his daily briefing for reporters.
The spokesman’s comments came after the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, beating expectations. The figures were largely in line with the previous two Februarys.
When Obama was president, Trump regularly scoffed at jobs numbers released by the Labor Department, arguing that they underestimated economic suffering under Obama.
“Don’t believe these phony numbers,” the entrepreneur told supporters in early 2016. “The 5 percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics,” he said in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in August of last year, referring to the unemployment rate..
