Trump accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ wiretap

President Donald Trump angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters in the run-up to last fall’s election, providing no evidence to support his explosive claim and drawing a flat denial from Obama’s office.

Leveling the extraordinary allegation about his predecessor in a series of four early morning tweets, Trump said Obama had been “wire tapping” his New York offices and suggested that the former president had meddled with the “very sacred election process.” Obama’s supposed actions, Trump said, amounted to McCarthyism, according to The Washington Post on Sunday.

“Bad (or sick) guy!” the 45th president tweeted about the 44th, insisting that the surveillance efforts resulted in “nothing found.”

Senior U.S. officials with knowledge of a wide-ranging federal investigation into Russian interference in the election, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said that there had been no wiretap of Trump.

Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement: “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. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Officials at the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Source: MENA