Trump claims Obama wiretapped him during campaign

An Obama spokesman denied Trump’s allegations that Obama wiretapped him towards the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.  

US President Donald Trump claimed that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had wiretapped him during the latter part of the 2016 presidential campaign, shortly preceding Election Day in November.

“Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday afternoon.

“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 another tweet, comparing the alleged wiretapping to the Watergate scandal in the 1970s that eventually led to President Nixon’s resignation.

A spokesman for the former president denied Trump’s allegations.

“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,” said Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis.

“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,” he stated.

This is not the first time Obama has been criticized for meddling in an electoral process. The Obama administration was accused of interfering in Israel’s 2015 parliamentary elections after it was discovered that a grant from the US State Department ended up in the hands of an Israeli NGO that was working to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By: Jonathan Benedek, World Israel News

Barack Obama