Trump has not asked Federal Bureau of Investigation about wiretapping claims

“And the problem is when we’re diverted, when the president is diverted from paying attention to those crises, we pay a price”.

In an early Saturday tweetstorm, Trump added to his long list of illusory innuendoes by claiming – while offering not a shred of evidence – that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower before the November election. Moreover, it’s a lot easier to say that the ex is ruining things between Trump and America than to admit it’s been his own muddy shoes on the couch that has the US scrolling through NCAA prospects.

“Let me tell you something about this office that I’ve been in for eight years”, said Barack Obama in one of his final speeches as president.

Mr. Trump’s controversial tweets do more than just roil the political situation in the U.S., Panetta said – they also make the country “vulnerable” to enemies overseas. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”, Trump wrote in one tweet. The department has not made any statement. Not particularly enlightening, since such wiretapping could’ve occurred – and the former president could’ve known about it – even if no “White House official ever ordered surveillance on any USA citizen”.

President Donald Trump says that Russian Federation “ran over” President Barack Obama for years, calling it “weak!”

Why turn to Congress, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer was asked Monday. The president had merely posed a question about being wiretapped, Nunes argued, even as reporters said Trump’s statement had been far more definitive. “Absolutely I would know”.

He indicated that Trump was responding to media reports rather than any word from the intelligence community. Flynn was sacked after just 24 days on the job when information emerged that he had lied to top officials about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak. “The dimensions of this are huge”, McCain said. It means that the Russian scandal is serious and will likely result in some irreparable damage to the United States. “That’s never happened before”.

The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin of Maryland, said if the Obama administration did monitor activities at Trump Tower, it would indeed have needed authorization from the FISA court. This is another example of what should be a terrifying fact about the president: There is no independent truth for Trump. And were such a warrant to exist, he could theoretically move to make it public as well.

The White House has offered no evidence for Trump’s early morning Twitter tirade, despite being pestered all day to come up with some.

To obtain it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have had to prove to the court that it had “probable cause” to investigate activities by “agents of a foreign power”. If the FBI was primarily interested in obtaining financial transaction records, corporate documents, and (depending on both the facts and the FISC’s interpretation of the FISA statute) perhaps even some stored e-mail communications, that information might well have been obtainable pursuant to a §215 “business records” order, which imposes only the much weaker requirement that the records sought be “relevant to an authorized investigation”. “Present the facts as they know it”.

Trump, in this position as head prelate, directs us to “believe” any number of things: that manufacturers are returning to the United States, there will be a massive military expansion, that he “inherited a mess” from Obama and that his Supreme Court nominee is a “great writer”. Indeed, it’s not even entirely clear that the order the FISC finally issued in October was a full-blown electronic surveillance warrant requiring a probable cause showing.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz says it’s possible that federal employees could have used tactics other than a phone wiretap. The aides said any ambiguity surrounding the issue is all the more reason for Congress to investigate the matter.

Mr. Trump’s series of Saturday tweets came after conservative radio talk-show host Mark Levin made the case on his Thursday night show that the Obama administration requested FISA warrants on two separate occasions previous year to monitor Trump Tower over concerns about links to Russian banks.