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2 Top Senators Dismiss Trump Wiretap Claim 2 Top Senators Dismiss Trump Wiretap Claim
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The top two senators overseeing the intelligence community joined on Thursday the chorus of lawmakers debunking President Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones last year, issuing a bipartisan statement that they had seen no evidence supporting the accusation. WASHINGTON — The former president denied it. So did the former national intelligence director. The F.B.I. director has said privately that it is false. The speaker of the House and the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — all three Republican — see no indications that it happened.
“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. But President Trump insists he is right. No matter how many officials, even in his own party, dismiss his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama secretly tapped his phones last year, the White House made clear on Thursday that it would stand by the assertion.
The blunt statement by the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee means that all four congressional leaders who oversee intelligence-based surveillance by the government have rejected Mr. Trump’s claim. On Wednesday, their counterparts on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Devin Nunes, a Republican, and Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat, made similar statements; both are from California. Ultimately, it insisted, the president will be proved correct.
Later on Thursday, in a set of testy exchanges with reporters, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said Mr. Trump still “stands by it,” while arguing, as he has in recent days, that Mr. Trump meant wiretapping in a broad sense, that there had been some kind of surveillance-related activities. Nearly two weeks after Mr. Trump first accused his predecessor in a series of Saturday morning Twitter posts, the standoff between the president and the available record has come to shadow the White House even as it tries to overhaul the nation’s health care system and drastically rewrite the federal budget.
“The bottom line is the investigation by the House and the Senate has not been provided all the information,” Mr. Spicer added. Much like his longstanding assertion that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, Mr. Trump dismisses contrary information with undiminished surety.
But a spokeswoman for Mr. Warner, Rachel Cohen, replied, “The bipartisan leaders of the Intelligence Committee would not have made the statement they made without having been fully briefed by the appropriate authorities.” Indeed, the White House even added a fresh assertion on Thursday during a fiercely combative and sometimes surreal briefing by the press secretary, Sean Spicer, who berated reporters and read from news accounts that either did not back up the president’s claims or have been refuted by intelligence officials.
Mr. Trump made his claim in a series of Twitter postings on March 4, announcing that he had “just found out” about the wiretapping by Mr. Obama, whom he called “a bad (or sick) guy” whose purported campaign surveillance was comparable to Watergate. One report that Mr. Spicer read contended that Mr. Obama used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as GCHQ, to spy on Mr. Trump. In effect, the White House was embracing a claim that America’s closest ally collaborated with a president against a presidential candidate.
But the president offered no evidence for his claims, and suspicion quickly emerged that he had based it on a theory — circulating in some conservative circles — that Mr. Obama had conspired to sabotage Mr. Trump using government surveillance. “There’s widespread reporting that throughout the 2016 election, there was surveillance that was done on a variety of people,” Mr. Spicer said. Asked if the president stood by his original allegation, Mr. Spicer said, “He stands by it.”
As days passed without evidence emerging to back Mr. Trump’s assertion, his administration first asked Congress to investigate his allegation, then refused to comment on it, and then tried to redefine what he said to have been merely a reference to some kind of general surveillance activity by investigators last year. The White House defiance came shortly after the top two senators overseeing the intelligence community joined the chorus of lawmakers debunking the claim.
Mr. Trump made similar comments on Wednesday evening in an interview on Fox News, when the host, Tucker Carlson, pressed him about why he had made his statements without offering evidence. Mr. Carlson suggested that the president was devaluing his own words. “Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said in a statement.
Mr. Trump said the word wiretapping “covers surveillance and many other things.” He also said that his administration “will be submitting things before the committee very soon that hasn’t been submitted as of yet — but it’s potentially a very serious situation.” The blunt conclusion by the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee means that all four congressional leaders who oversee intelligence-based surveillance by the government have rejected Mr. Trump’s claim. On Wednesday, their counterparts on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives Devin Nunes, a Republican, and Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat, both from California, made similar statements.
In the same interview, Mr. Trump cited news reports that he said supported his claim, including a Fox News segment on March 3 that discussed months-old reports that there had been a Trump-related surveillance order in October; reporters from The New York Times have been unable to corroborate the existence of such an order. For the president’s staff, the continuing furor over his claim has produced mixed responses. Some advisers privately recognize that there is no evidence to support it, and are increasingly frustrated that it continues to dominate the conversation in Washington and wish Mr. Trump would find a way to let it go.
Mr. Trump also brought up a January article in The Times about surveillance data being used in an investigation into possible links between his aides and Russian officials. At the same time, they feel besieged by what see as a hostile Washington establishment and resent the carping. In some cases, as Mr. Spicer did at his briefing, they argue that the news media has cherry-picked information to make the president look bad.
“I’ve been reading about things,” Mr. Trump said. “I think it was a Jan. 20 article in The New York Times — they were talking about wiretapping.” But they assume that Mr. Trump will stick by his assertion no matter what comes out of an emerging congressional investigation. After all, he refused to back off his “birther” allegation — and then only grudgingly — until five years after Mr. Obama produced a birth certificate showing that he had been born in Hawaii.
That Times article, however, did not discuss Mr. Obama ordering the wiretapping of Trump Tower. Nor did it say whether the intercepted conversations in question were the result of surveillance targeting Mr. Trump’s aides, as opposed to surveillance that targeted Russian officials but incidentally picked up conversations with Mr. Trump’s aides. In this case, Mr. Trump sees the surveillance allegation as a way to push back against what he considers the unfair insinuation that he somehow colluded with the Russians during last year’s election — another assertion for which intelligence committee leaders have said they so far have found no evidence.
In recent days, the president and his aides have tried to recast his original assertion to make it more defensible. Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer have both noted that in one of his tweets the president used quotation marks around the phrase “wires tapped,” which they said indicated that it was not meant to be taken literally.
“That really covers surveillance and many other things,” Mr. Trump told Tucker Carlson in an interview on Fox News on Wednesday night. “Nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing.”
That, however, ignores the fact that other tweets Mr. Trump posted that morning did not use quotation marks and were pretty specific. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process,” he wrote in one, misspelling the word tap. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Mr. Trump also suggested that he had secret evidence no one else had seen. He told Mr. Carlson that he “will be submitting things before the committee very soon that hasn’t been submitted as of yet — but it’s potentially a very serious situation.” Mr. Trump added, “You’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”
The White House staff took its cue from that interview and mapped out an aggressive defense on Thursday. Mr. Trump was already angry that two courts had blocked his temporary travel ban even though he had been assured by his staff that his latest one would pass judicial muster. So Mr. Spicer headed to the lectern on Thursday primed for a fight and armed with a stack of news clippings that he read at length to justify the president’s claim.
“The bottom line is the investigation by the House and the Senate has not been provided all the information,” Mr. Spicer said.
But Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Warner, later responded: “The bipartisan leaders of the Intelligence Committee would not have made the statement they made without having been fully briefed by the appropriate authorities.”
At the White House briefing, among the articles Mr. Spicer read from were several from The New York Times. However, none of them actually reported that Mr. Obama had authorized surveillance of Mr. Trump or that Mr. Trump had been eavesdropped. The Times has reported that law enforcement agencies are investigating contacts between some associates of Mr. Trump and Russian figures and had access to intercepted communications.
Other news reports cited by Mr. Trump on Wednesday night and Mr. Spicer on Thursday repeated months-old claims that a secret foreign intelligence court had approved a surveillance order involving Mr. Trump in October. Reporters from the Times have not been able to corroborate the existence of such an order.
The British assertions came from a Fox News commentator, Andrew Napolitano. A spokesman for the British agency dismissed them as “nonsense,” adding, “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”
Mr. Spicer complained that reporters had not focused on a comment by Mr. Nunes, the House intelligence chairman, that “it’s possible” that intelligence agencies could have swept up others in the course of their surveillance, including Mr. Trump. Mr. Nunes did note that Mr. Trump was concerned about “other surveillance activities looking at him and his associates” and said his committee would find out.
But Mr. Nunes was firm in saying that Mr. Trump’s original Twitter post was not borne out by the facts. “I don’t believe there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” he said on Wednesday. If Mr. Trump’s posts were to be taken literally, “then clearly the president was wrong,” Mr. Nunes said.
That was not a word the White House was willing to use on Thursday. Asked if Mr. Trump would apologize to Mr. Obama if it turned out he was wrong, Mr. Spicer demurred.
“We’re not going to prejudge what the outcome of this is,” he said. “I think we’ve got to let the process work its will, and then when there’s a report that comes out conclusive from there, then we’ll be able to comment.”