Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

Former vice president Joe Biden was back at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday to talk about the Affordable Care Act when an NBC reporter got him off-topic with a question about whether the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower.

“Yeah, five or six times,” Biden fired back. “Are you joking?”

The comment follows President Trump's unsubstantiated allegation that President Obama illegally wiretapped his phone during the 2016 presidential campaign and FBI Director James Comey's confirmation that the agency is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.

Biden, taking questions from a gaggle of reporters outside the Capitol, said he couldn’t comment on the FBI probe because he had been “briefed extensively.”

But he expressed frustration over the notion that “there’s still this romance with Putin” and the idea that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would skip a meeting with foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization next month and travel to Moscow in mid-April.

“What in the hell are we doing?” Biden said. “I don’t know whether it’s a lack of understanding of government and how international relations works and the body language is read or whether it’s policy prescription that’s changing.”