Under pressure to explain why President Trump accused the Obama administration of wiretapping his campaign headquarters during the presidential election, White House press secretary Sean Spicer asserted Tuesday there are certain limitations to what he can and cannot say.
“There’s a separation of powers aspect here. It’s not a question of wasting [resources], it’s a question of appropriateness,” the administration’s top spokesman responded when asked why Trump “would want Congress to probe information he already has.”
The White House issued a statement on Sunday urging congressional intelligence committees to investigate “whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”
“Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted,” Spicer said in the statement. He has since repeated that pledge during both daily briefings this week.
As reporters continue to pepper Spicer with questions about who or what led Trump to believe that his predecessor had wiretapped members of his campaign, the press secretary has remained adamant that such information must come out through a congressional investigation.
“There’s a difference between directing the Department of Justice, which may be involved in an ongoing investigation, and asking Congress as a separate body to look into something and add credibility,” he told reporters.
Various officials from the previous administration has cast Trump’s allegations as being categorically false while simultaneously refusing to rule out whether someone else in the executive branch ordered that such surveillance methods be used to collect sensitive information on candidate Trump and his associates in the months leading up to the election.
“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen,” a spokesman for Obama said in response to Trump’s tweets on Saturday.
