Kellyanne Conway said she was "not Inspector Gadget" or "in the job of having evidence" when quizzed on television about wiretapping claims.

In a bid to make light of her suggestion that Barack Obama could have spied on Donald Trump using a microwave, she referenced the 1980s cartoon character who had thousands of high-tech gadgets installed in his body.

"I’m not Inspector Gadget," she told CNN. "I don’t believe people are using their microwave to spy on the Trump Campaign. However, I am not in the job of having evidence. That’s what investigations are for."

She added that she "was making a comment about the articles from this past week where it is revealed that one can be surveilled through any number of techniques, through microwaves, through the cameras, through televisions."

And she insisted that she "wasn’t talking about anything specifically."

Mr Trump has claimed that Barack Obama had ordered wiretaps be placed in Trump Tower during the presidential election. He has not provided any evidence to back up his suggestion.

Mr Obama's spokesman has strenuously denied the claims and FBI director James Comey has privately urged the Justice Department to dispute Mr Trump's claim, although has not come forward to do so himself.

In a separate interview with NBC News's Today programme, Ms Conway said that there was “a lot of fakery going on” when asked about a Mr Trump U-turn on employment statistics.

Kellyanne Conway: “There’s a lot of fakery going on"

The US President had celebrated data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which revealed 235,000 new jobs were created in his first full month in the White House.

But during Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure, the billionaire businessman called them "phoney".

Pressed to explain why the statistics were now worth taking seriously, Ms Conway said: “There is a lot of fakery going on for people who were promised something that never came to be."

She added that healthcare was "the best example of that", which is why it was Mr Trump's "first major legislative priority".