FBI Director James Comey said Monday that the FBI has no evidence that former President Barack Obama or the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower.
Comey made the remarks when pressed by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He was responding to Trump’s tweets from March 4th, in which he claimed that Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower ahead of the November election and called Obama a “sick” guy.
“With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said.
“I’m not going to try and characterize the tweets themselves. All I can tell you is we have no information that supports them,” Comey said. “We have no information that supports them.”
Comey said later that neither the FBI nor the Department of Justice have any information to support Trump’s claim.
The FBI director also responded to Trump’s claim that the wiretapping constituted “McCarthyism,” which the he said he tries to avoid engaging in.
“I try very hard not to engage in any ‘isms’ of any kind,” Comey said to laughs in the hearing room, adding that this includes McCarthyism.
Comey said that “no president could” unilaterally order a wiretap on any individual and pointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process. National Securty Agency NSA Director Mike Rogers also broke with the president’s claims and said that the NSA has found no evidence on their end showing that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower.
Since Trump’s claim was made, the president and his staff have said “wiretap” meant surveillance more broadly, and have pointed to public reports indicating there were surveillance efforts against Trump before he took office.
