Sean Spicer says Trump 'doesn't really think' Obama 'personally' wiretapped Trump

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March 13, 2017 9:06 PM

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that President Donald Trump "doesn't really think" former President Barack Obama "personally" wiretapped Trump Tower, altering Trump's unsubstantiated claim.

Sean Spicer

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Monday that President Donald Trump "doesn't really think" former President Barack Obama "personally" wiretapped Trump Tower, altering Trump's unsubstantiated claim that Obama directed an illegal wire tap during the presidential election.

Trump made these explosive accusations without offering any evidence in a series of tweets on March 4, in which he called Obama a "bad (or sick) guy" and compared him to former President Richard Nixon.

Spicer claimed that Trump had accused Obama of general surveillance, rather than a literal wire tap of Trump's phones, arguing that Trump put quotation marks around "wire tapping" in two of his four tweets, thus indicating the term should not be taken literally. But Trump explicitly accused Obama of "

Spicer accused the media of ignoring proof of surveillance allegations that he said had been reported during the election.

“It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity was taking place during the 2016 election cycle, and now we're wondering where the proof is," Spicer said. "It is many of the same outlets in this room that talked about the activities that were going on back then.”

While intelligence agencies have reportedly intercepted communications between the Trump campaign and Russian officials through an investigation into Russian attempts to interfere in the US election, no credible mainstream news outlets have reported that Obama or his administration conducted surveillance on Trump or the campaign.

Spicer and Trump may have been referring to a Breitbart report concerning conservative radio host Mark Levin's allegations that Obama sought to "undermine" Trump's campaign in the final days of the presidential election.

Obama and his former

Jeremy Burke contributed to this report.

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