Privacy advocate Sen. Rand Paul told a national TV audience Sunday that President Donald Trump’s claim to have been wiretapped may be explained by “a backdoor search” of records taken through surveillance ostensibly targeting foreigners.

About that, the Kentucky Republican could be correct, according to legal experts and dissident former National Security Agency officials. Authorities can store and search without warrants the communications of Americans if they were not targeted.

But in making his point, Paul said that authorities had in this manner listened to the conversations of President Barack Obama hundreds of times.

“And so they did this to President Obama. They 1,227 times eavesdrop[ped] on President Obama's phone calls,” Paul said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

Paul’s office says the figure comes from a 2014 article in The Washington Post that analyzed a sample of thousands of intercepts from 2009-2012, many involving Americans, that were provided by exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The article reported Obama's name was redacted, or minimized, repeatedly. “A ‘minimized U.S. president-elect’ begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current ‘minimized U.S. president’ appear 1,227 times in the following four years," it said.

That line led many readers to believe that 1,227 communications directly involving Obama were intercepted. In fact, the redactions were applied to communications in which other people mentioned Obama.

Rand Paul: President Obama was eavesdropped on 1,227 times by the CIA, without FISA court warrants. pic.twitter.com/QvkO1BSX8e — NoriNY (@Nori_NYC) March 12, 2017

“If he's relying on our story, he misread it,” says former Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman, co-author of the article and many others based on Snowden documents.

Gellman, now a fellow at the The Century Foundation, first clarified this point shortly after the 2014 article’s publication.

“A lot of close readers misunderstood a passage, deep in our story, that referred to President Obama,” he wrote in a subsequent article, which explained: “None of these were conversations in which Obama took part. We checked carefully. The statistics refer, instead, to conversations in which someone else mentioned the president’s name.”

Gellman says he did not see Obama calls in files provided to him by Snowden.

Spokespeople for Paul did not respond to a request for comment on whether he misspoke.

Trump’s allegation to have been wiretapped by Obama before the November election was made with one typo and no evidence in a series of March 4 tweets. With no criminal wiretap warrant or intelligence court order emerging, "incidental" collection followed by warrantless "backdoor" searches has emerged as a possible alternative explanation.

At a Monday press conference, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump's claim “was referring to surveillance overall” rather than wiretaps in a strict sense, though no evidence has emerged that would support even a generous reading of Trump's claim.

Some mass surveillance opponents have used speculation about Trump's assertion to raise awareness about what the government can do – ahead of a fight later this year on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for use of intercepted U.S. communications when a foreigner is targeted.

But former officials say Paul and others are making claims as unfounded as Trump's.

“Absolutely false and irresponsible claim,” former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow, tweeted in response to Paul's suggestion on "Face the Nation" that authorities “are targeting foreigners. But they are doing it purposefully to get to Americans.”

“Reverse targeting is explicitly banned under procedures. Paul is accusing [the intelligence community] of a grave violation," Hennessey tweeted, clarifying in a subsequent tweet she believed Paul may be conflating the issues of "backdoor" searches and reverse targeting to cause alarm.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, who broke many stories based on Snowden documents, however, defended Paul.

“The only thing here that’s 'false and irresponsible' is Hennessey’s attempt to deceive the public about the domestic spying powers of her former employer,” he fired back.