Two senior White House officials on Monday suggested that US President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that former US president Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during last year’s presidential campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.
“He doesn’t really think that president Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.
When Trump in a Twitter post last weekend said that Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” he was referring generally to surveillance activities during the campaign — not to an actual telephone wiretap, Spicer said.
“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Spicer said, using his fingers to make a gesture suggesting quotation marks. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”
There have been “numerous reports from a variety of outlets over the last couple months that seemed to indicate that there has been different types of surveillance that occurred during the 2016 election,” Spicer said.
The remarks were the first time the White House sought to explain the accusation Trump made in a series of posts on Twitter saying Obama “was tapping my phones” and calling the former president a “bad (or sick) guy.”
The explanations came as the US Department of Justice asked the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who had given a Monday deadline to produce proof of Trump’s claim, for more time “to determine what if any responsive documents exist.”
Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on Sunday said in an interview that Obama could have employed any number of devices other than a traditional telephone wiretap, even including a microwave oven.
Conway on Monday clarified that she was not accusing the former president of snooping via a kitchen appliance, arguing that her comments had been taken out of context.
“I’m not Inspector Gadget,” she said on Monday on CNN. “I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign.”
However in an interview with a columnist for the New Jersey-based Record the day before, she said Obama’s alleged spying efforts against Trump could have been far more extensive than a telephone wiretap.
“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway told the newspaper. “You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”
Surveillance can even be carried out with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” she said. “We know this is a fact of modern life.”
The unusual and shifting explanations from Spicer and Conway reflected the contortions that members of Trump’s inner circle have employed to explain the president’s explosive accusation, which he has yet to address personally.
Neither Trump nor anyone at the White House has presented any evidence for the claim, instead asking US Congress to investigate it as part of its inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.
However, the US House Intelligence Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee have requested that the Justice Department provide evidence it might have for Trump’s charge, but Spicer on Monday said that the president had not instructed the department to furnish any.
He suggested that Trump had relied on multiple news reports, including in the New York Times, to make his charge.
“It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity was taking place during the 2016 election cycle, and now are wondering where the proof is,” Spicer said.
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