The second-ranking House Democrat charged that President Trump’s unproven accusation former President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign shows that the president is divorced from reality.
The allegations outlined in a Trump tweet on Saturday “paint a picture of someone obsessed with conspiracy theories and detached from reality,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the House Minority Whip, in a statement Sunday.
Hoyer’s comments about Trump being detached from reality come after he himself spoke with a statue of 16th president Abraham Lincoln in the Capitol on Wednesday. Hoyer was lamenting not being able to find the GOP replacement plan for Obamacare.
Hoyer told the statue that he must be as disappointed in his party as he is.
Hoyer added that the tweet shows a “basic misunderstanding of how our Constitution and justice system work. If President Trump had indeed been subject to a wiretap, as he alleges, it could only be because such a wiretap was approved by a court.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said early Sunday that the administration wouldn’t comment anymore on the accusations from Trump. It called for congressional probes into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to also look into any potential government surveillance of Trump, a call to which congressional Republicans quickly agreed.
Trump did not offer any evidence for his claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the election. Obama has denied that he ordered any wiretaps, though such an order would have been made by the Justice Department anyway.
