FBI reportedly rejects Trump’s claims of tapped phones

FBI Director James Comey has asked the Justice Department to reject US President Donald Trump’s claims of tapped phones at Trump Tower supposedly ordered by former POTUS Barack Obama. Comey allegedly considers the assertion untrue and has to be corrected.

The New York Times reports that according to senior American officials, Comey has argued that the claim is false. The Justice Department is yet to comment about the FBI director’s supposed request.

In a series of tweets, the president made the allegation of tapped phones at Trump Tower. No evidence has been presented by the president yet, but compared the move to the Watergate case.

Former US National Intelligence Director James Clapper said there was no such wiretap activity during Obama’s administration. “For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate, or against his campaign,” Clapper told NBC’s Meet the Press. He assured that he would “certainly have known” if such tapping was performed at Trump Tower, which served as the headquarters of the president’s campaign team.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer earlier said the president has ordered the Congress to probe whether Obama used his executive powers to allegedly order wiretaps during last year’s presidential campaigns. “President Donald J Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Spicer said in a statement shared by news.com.au.

White House’s deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders said the Americans have a right to know if the tapping really took place. A spokesman of Obama had already denied the accusation.

The former president’s spokesman clarified that a cardinal rule of the previous administration was to ensure that no official working for the White House can interfere with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. Therefore, Obama or any official under his presidency has not ordered surveillance on any citizen of the US.

Even former Attorney General Michael Mukasey believes that Obama did not order surveillance on Trump. If there was one, Mukasey said the US Justice Department would be been behind it and not Obama. “I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general at the Justice Department,” he told US ABC.