ABC News(NEW YORK) — Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Elizabeth Huckabee Sanders said Monday that she “doesn’t think” President Trump would accept the FBI’s denial of his claims about being wiretapped at Trump Tower, adding that she didn’t know whether he had spoken to the law enforcement agency about the matter.
FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department to publicly refute Trump’s assertion that his predecessor, President Obama, ordered a wiretap of Trump’s phones prior to the November 2016 election, government sources familiar with Comey’s thinking told ABC News Sunday.
Comey expressed concerns that the president’s tweets created the impression that the FBI acted improperly, and he wanted to set the record straight, the sources said.
Sanders suggested to ABC News’ Good Morning America Monday morning that Trump’s accusations could be right, and seemed to be referencing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass collection of telephonic metadata from millions of Americans as evidence to support the claim, although she did not mention it directly.
“The administration was wiretapping American citizens,” Sanders said. “His administration could have done this.”
A spokesman for former President Obama issued a strong denial to President Trump’s accusation, and said that no White House official had ever ordered surveillance on a U.S. citizen.
“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,” Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement Saturday. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
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