President Donald Trump said he was initially tipped off to information that led to his tweets accusing his predecessor of wiretapping his campaign headquarters last fall by a story in The New York Times and reporting by Bret Baier on Fox News. But neither the New York Times nor Baier has reported that Trump Tower had been wiretapped.

"I read in, I think it was Jan. 20, a New York Times article where they were talking about wiretapping," Trump said in an interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson Wednesday night. "There was an article, I think they used that exact term."

Trump also referenced Baier's March 3 interview with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Baier asked if Ryan could confirm that two requests for warrants for electronic surveillance had been made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allegations credited to unnamed sources in a November article from the conservative website HeatStreet. Ryan said he was not aware of the report.

"I watched your friend Bret Baier the day previous where he was talking about certain very complex set of things happening, and wiretapping," Trump told Carlson said Wednesday. "I said, wait a minute, there's a lot of wiretapping being talked about."

The morning after Baier's interview with Ryan, Trump tweeted that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower.

"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" he wrote. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

Neither Baier nor the Times had reported Trump's campaign headquarters was the target of surveillance. In fact, the Times article said intelligence agencies were interested in associates of one of Trump's aides, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who were said to have ties to Russian intelligence.

Following Trump's allegations, both the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee have opened investigations in tandem with larger probes on Russia's efforts to intervene in the election and possible ties between Kremlin figures and people close to the president.

On Wednesday, Trump said he tweeted his accusations, rather than asking intelligence officials about them, because he didn't "want to do anything that's going to violate the strength of an agency."

Twitter, he explained was a way to circumvent the "fake press" and "despicable" mainstream media and speak directly to the "close to 100 million people watching me on Twitter" and other social media. Trump has 26.6 million followers on his personal account, and another 16.1 million on his official @POTUS account; another 23 million follow his personal and official Facebook pages. The wiretapping allegations were made from his personal Twitter account.

Trump brushed off Carlson's concern that he could "devalue" his words by going public with unproven claims, saying he meant not just wiretapping but surveillance more broadly.

"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 have mentioned it," Trump said. "And don't forget I say wiretapping, 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, but that's a very important thing."

Trump predicted that he would be vindicated by evidence and hinted that he has proof of wiretapping in hand, though he declined to reveal it.

"Let's see whether or not I proved it. I just don't choose to do it right now. I choose to do it before the committee, and maybe I'll do it before the committee," he said. "Maybe I'll do it before I see the result of the committee. But I think we have some very good stuff. And we're in the process of putting it together, and I think it's going to be very demonstrative."

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R.-Calif., on Wednesday said that his panel has thus far found no evidence to support the president's claims.