“I know what went on in the White House and we stand by the work that we did,” Denis McDonough says. Denis McDonough: Obama cannot, does not and did not order wiretap

Denis McDonough, the former White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said Thursday that he does not “have any idea” what the current president was talking about when he accused his predecessor of tapping the phones inside Trump Tower.

Neither President Donald Trump nor any of the officials from his administration have yet been able to offer proof backing his claim that Obama ordered a wiretap of the Manhattan skyscraper that played host to the Trump campaign offices. Obama himself denied it, via a spokesman for his post-presidential office, and lawmakers from both parties have said that they’ve seen no evidence to support Trump’s allegation.


“I simply don’t have any idea,” McDonough said when asked on “CBS This Morning” what Trump might have been referring to with his accusation. “We had a cardinal rule ... in the White House, which is we would not under any circumstances get involved in any investigations one way or the other.”

McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff from 2013 until he left office last January, told the panel of “CBS This Morning” anchors that “I know what went on in the White House and we stand by the work that we did.”

“The president cannot order a wiretap. The president does not order a wiretap. The president did not order a wiretap,” McDonough said.