White House aides try to justify Trump's explosive wiretapping claim Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump doesn't believe Comey's assertion that Obama didn't wiretap Trump Tower phones.

The White House on Monday pushed back against FBI Director James Comey, with spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying President Donald Trump does not accept the assertion from Comey that former President Barack Obama did not order an illegal wiretap of Trump Tower.

White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, meanwhile, hinted that Trump may have intelligence backing up his explosive claim that Obama had tapped Trump’s phones in the lead-up to the November election. Like Trump, Conway did not provide any specific evidence.


When asked on “Fox & Friends” about how Trump knows his phones were tapped, Conway responded, “He’s the president of the United States. He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not, and that’s the way it should be for presidents.”

Neither Conway nor Sanders, the two White House officials who have offered the most prominent defenses of Trump, offered any proof of the president’s claim, nor has any other Trump administration official. Obama, through a spokesman from his post-presidential office, flatly denied Trump’s allegation, as did former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who appeared Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Comey’s denial of Trump’s allegation has not yet taken a public form but instead came via multiple media outlets who reported that the FBI director asked the Justice Department to publicly knock down the president’s claim because it insinuated that the bureau had broken the law. At his daily press briefing Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was unwilling to concede even that Comey had asked the Justice Department to refute Trump's claim, telling reporters that "aside from anonymous sources ... I'm not aware that occurred."

In her interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Sanders said she did not know whether Trump had reached out to Comey or anyone else within the intelligence community seeking verification of his claim. But asked by anchor George Stephanopoulos whether Trump accepted Comey’s reported denial, Sanders responded, “You know, I don't think he does, George.”

Asked Monday afternoon whether Trump had spoken with Comey since leveling the wiretapping allegation, Spicer said, "I'm almost 100 percent certain he has not." But the press secretary stood behind the president's accusation, telling reporters that "there's no question something happened. The question is — is it surveillance, is it a wiretap, or whatever?"

It was Sanders’ second appearance on ABC in as many days. On “This Week,” the network's Sunday-morning political talk show, Sanders sought to characterize Trump’s allegation only as an act that may have occurred, a departure from the certainty with which the president leveled the charge on Twitter. On Monday, Sanders said it should be up to a congressional investigation to get to the bottom of it.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, on Monday morning newly criticized Trump’s accusation.

“We must accept possibility that @POTUS does not know fact from fiction, right from wrong. That wild claims are not strategic, but worse,” Schiff wrote in a pinned tweet. He also wrote, “If Director Comey asked Justice Dept to reject @POTUS claim of illegal wiretap, did Attorney General Sessions decline, or recuse himself?”

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Both Sanders and Conway said the president is the victim of a double standard, in which reporting on ties between individuals close to Trump and the Russian government is allowed but the allegation of illegal wiretapping by Obama is dismissed and criticized. Conway complained that anonymous sources are too often given credence in negative stories about the president and then ignored “when it may be something positive or exculpatory.”

Democrats, too, are guilty of imposing a double standard on the president, according to Trump’s aides. Conway equated Trump’s as-of-yet unsubstantiated claim of Trump Tower wiretapping with the widely reported controversy tying individuals close to the president to the Kremlin and said Democrats should be calling for an investigation into the former just as loudly as they are for the latter.

“You have Democrats every single day saying ‘investigate, investigate, special prosecutors, investigate,’” she said. “Well then, what are they afraid of here? Let's investigate this and see where it leads.”

In his own TV appearance Monday morning, House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said his colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee would indeed investigate Trump’s claim but admitted that “thus far I have not seen anything directly that would support what the president has said.” The oversight committee, Chaffetz said, “will play a supporting role.”

Chaffetz also acknowledged that as president, Trump has the authority to prove his allegation true by declassifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order that presumably would have been needed to authorize a wiretap on Trump Tower. If Trump’s allegation is true, Chaffetz said, “the paper trail should be there.”

“Look, it’s a very serious allegation. The president has at his fingertips tens of billions of dollars in intelligence apparatus,” he said. “I’ve got to believe — I think he might have something there, but if not, we're going to find out.”