In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement on Sunday
that said, “President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”
A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying
that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.
In one post, Mr. Trump said, “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!”
On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find
out what had really happened, calling it potentially the “greatest abuse of power” that the country had seen.
director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion
that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation
led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.
Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said
that there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump.