GOP Rep. Tom Cole: Trump owes Obama an apology for wiretapping claim

Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said Friday that President Donald Trump should apologize to former President Barack Obama for accusing him of ordering an illegal wiretap of his phone lines, given that there is no public evidence to support it.

“I see no indication that that's true,” Cole told reporters. “And so it's not a charge I would have ever made. And frankly, unless you can produce some pretty compelling proof, then I think the president, you know, President Obama is owed an apology in that regard.”


“If he didn't do it,” Cole added, “we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did.”

Trump accused his predecessor of wiretapping his phones in early March and demanded that the House and Republican intelligence committees investigate the claim, but he has offered no proof to back it up. The theory had circulated on right-wing websites before he made the claim on Twitter.

Obama and his former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, both publicly denied the claim quickly after Trump raised it, while FBI Director James Comey, also saying it was not true, privately urged Trump’s Justice Department to refute it.

This week, the leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees have also come out and said they have found no evidence to suggest that the allegation is true.

But Trump has refused to back down. He stood by the theory in a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, spent almost eight minutes at Thursday’s afternoon briefing reading through a series of news reports that he asserted supported the president. Those reports, however, did not actually back up the claim.