White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeated the report as a way to substantiate Trump's claims that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. | Getty White House reassures U.K. that wiretapping claim won't be repeated

The White House has given the U.K. government "reassurances" that it will not repeat press secretary Sean Spicer's claim that a British intelligence gathering agency spied on President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign at the request of the Obama administration.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman told reporters Friday that the U.K. government had told the White House that the claims were “ridiculous and should be ignored.”


“We’ve received assurances these allegations won’t be repeated,” the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the White House downplayed Spicer's comments in conversations with British officials on Thursday, insisting that his reference to the story did not constitute an endorsement of the allegations.

"British Ambassador to the U.S. Kim Darroch and Sir Mark Lyall expressed their concerns to Sean Spicer and General McMaster," a White House official said. "Mr. Spicer and General McMaster explained that Mr. Spicer was simply pointing to public reports, not endorsing any specific story."

A U.K. government source added the U.K. is in an intelligence-sharing agreement with the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and Canada that forbids them from using the surveillance capabilities of other countries to circumvent domestic laws on surveillance.

The typically close-lipped British spy agency was quick to correct the record, issuing a strong statement against the administration.

“Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense," a spokesperson for the British spy agency said after the briefing. "They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

Another U.K. government official said that the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters were quick to denounce Spicer’s claim in a statement because "the allegations are so patently ridiculous we thought it was important to be clear on that."

During the daily White House press briefing Thursday, Spicer repeated a claim by Napolitano, a FOX News pundit, that the Obama administration asked the British intelligence gathering agency to spy on then-candidate Trump so that his administration would have no fingerprints on the operation. Spicer repeated the report, and others, as a way to substantiate Trump's claims that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.

"Judge Andrew Napolitano made the following statement, quote, 'Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command [to spy on Trump]. He didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA ... he used GCHQ,'" Spicer told journalists during the briefing.

President Barack Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice suggested in a tweet that the statement may have irreversibly harmed the intelligence gathering relationship with America's greatest ally.

"The cost of falsely blaming our closest ally for something this consequential cannot be overstated," she wrote on Twitter.

Spicer's comments came hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday that they had no evidence of wire-tapping at the Trump Tower.

