A spokesman for Barack Obama on Saturday rejected claims from US President Donald Trump that the former president had wiretapped him in October during the late stages of the presidential election campaign. “Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false,” Mr Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement.
Mr Trump had suggested that Mr Obama had improperly tapped his phones, without citing evidence, in a series of tweets on Saturday morning.
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!,” Trump said in a series of tweets on his Twitter account early on Saturday. “I’d bet 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!”
Mr 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.” The statement raised the possibility that a wiretap of the Mr Trump campaign could have been ordered by Justice Department officials.
