TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): On March 4th, 6:45 in the morning, you are down in Florida, and you tweet “The former administration wiretapped me, surveilled me at Trump Tower during the last election.” How did you find out? You said “I just found out,” how did you learn that?

DONALD TRUMP: I had been reading about things. I read in -- I think it was January 20th, a New York Times article where they were talking about wiretapping. There was an article, I think they used that exact term. I read other things. I watched your friend Bret Baier the day previous, where he was talking about certain, very complex sets of things happening, and wiretapping. I said “Wait a minute, there's a lot of wiretapping being talked about.” I have been seeing a lot of things -- now, for the most part, for the most part I'm not going to discuss it because we have it before the committee, and we will be submitting things before the committee very soon that have not been submitted as of yet. But, it's potentially a very serious situation.

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CARLSON: Why not wait to tweet about it until you can prove it? Don't you devalue your words when you can't provide evidence?

TRUMP: Because -- well, because The New York Times wrote about it. You know, not that I respect the New York Times, I call it the failing New York Times, but they did write on January 20th, using the word “wiretap.” Other people have come out with --

CARLSON: Right, but you are the president. You have the ability to gather all the evidence you want.

TRUMP: I do, I do, but I think that frankly, we have a lot right now, and I think if you watch -- if you watched the Bret Baier and what he was saying, and what he was talking about and how he mentioned the word wiretap, you would feel very confident that you could mention the name.

He mentioned it, and other people mentioned it, but if you take a look at some of the things written about wiretapping and eavesdropping -- and don't forget, when I say “wiretap,” those words were in quotes. That really covers -- because wiretapping is pretty old-fashioned stuff, but that really covers surveillance and many other things, and nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, that's a very important thing. But wiretap covers a lot of different things, I think you are going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.