President Donald Trump took to Twitter very early Saturday to accuse former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the very contentious final weeks of last year's presidential campaign.
Trump tweeted:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election! How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
The president did not immediately provide any evidence or additional context to explain his tweets.
Trump's tweets follow comments from conservative radio host Mark Levin, who said Thursday that Obama's administration operated a "silent coup" to undermine Trump's campaign for the White House in the run-up to the election last November.
Breitbart News followed Levin's comments with a report Friday that detailed the allegation timeline, including information on multiple FISA court requests from the Obama administration to tap communication lines in Trump Tower.
Breitbart reported:
In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.
According to the Washington Post, Breitbart's report was circulated among senior White House staff on Friday.
Still, a former senior government official familiar with surveillance law told the Post that it's "highly unlikely" that Trump Tower was wiretapped.
"It seems unthinkable. If that were the case by some chance, that means that a federal judge would have found that there was either probable cause that he had committed a crime or was an agent of a foreign power," the official told the Post.
