WASHINGTON // President Donald Trump on Saturday accused his predecessor Barack Obama of “tapping” his phone during last year’s White House campaign.
“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!” he wrote on Twitter.
Another tweet read, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Mr Trump provided no evidence to support the allegation, and Mr Obama’s office last night denied it.
His spokesman said: “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.”
Mr Trump claims come amid an avalanche of recent revelations about communications between Russian officials and some of his senior aides, including attorney general Jeff Sessions.
President Trump has repeatedly denied having any personal ties to the Kremlin, and his aides have denied or played down contacts with Russian officials.
But the accusations have continued through almost daily leaks to the press that have revealed new details about links between Moscow and senior Trump officials.
One such revelation earlier this week in the Washington Post about a meeting between Mr Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak prompted the Republican former US senator to recuse himself from any investigations into the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia.
Mr Sessions had told a Senate committee under oath that he “did not have communications with the Russians,” but reporters found that he had actually met the Russian ambassador twice in the months before taking up his post as attorney general, America’s top law enforcement officer.
Mr Trump has expressed his displeasure over the charges, branding them “a total witch hunt”. He is equally furious about the barrage of leaks that led to the charges, lashing out in tweets directed initially at the most senior Democrats in the Republican-led Congress and then, on Saturday, at his Democratic predecessor.
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Mr Trump wrote a day after leaving Washington for a weekend getaway at his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort for the fourth time in five weeks.
Since US intelligence took the unprecedented step of publicly accusing Russia of trying to swing the November election in Mr Trump’s favour, questions have swirled about possible collusion between some of his campaign team and Moscow. Former president Obama imposed sanctions on Russia and expelled Russian diplomats. in December over the country’s involvement in hacking political groups in the presidential election.
It has now emerged that as well as Mr Sessions and Michael Flynn – already dismissed as national security adviser – numerous associates met ambassador Kislyak before Mr Trump took office. The meetings have raised red flags for Democrats, who have called for Mr Sessions to resign and be investigated for perjury.
It is not the first time Mr Trump has used Twitter to castigate Mr Obama. For years he alleged Mr Obama was not bon in the US, although he later retracted the accusation.
Mr Obama has so far not responded to the phone-tapping allegations. “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.
Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
* Reuters
