Response to T-Rump's Claim Obama Tapped His Phone

Obama's former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, used Twitter to challenge Trump's claims.

"No president can order a wiretap," Rhodes, who continues to serve as a foreign-policy adviser to Obama post-presidency, said in one tweet. "Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you."

  ABC

Ouch!

In response to Trump's suggestion that a good lawyer could make the case that Obama tapped his phones, Rhodes tweeted, "No. They couldn't. Only a liar could do that."

[...]

A spokesman for former President Obama issued a strong denial to President Trump's unsubstantiated accusation that the former commander-in-chief wiretapped Trump Tower phones during the election campaign.

"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," Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement Saturday. "As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

Lindsay Graham says he's going to "get to the bottom of this."

UPDATE 3/5/17:

The Guardian‘s report alleges that initial applications submitted over the summer, naming “four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials,” were rejected by the FISC. But according to the BBC, a narrower order naming only the Russian banks as direct targets was ultimately approved by the FISC in October. While the BBC report suggests that the surveillance was meant to ferret out “transfers of money,” the Mensch article asserts that a “warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.”

[...]

It’s worth noting here that, contra Trump’s claim on Twitter, none of the articles in question claim that phones were tapped. 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. 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.”

[...]

Thanks to the Patriot Act, however, FISA authorities may be used in investigations that have a “significant” foreign intelligence purpose, even if the “primary” purpose is criminal prosecution—a change from the prior standard imposed by the courts, which had required that foreign intelligence be the “primary” purpose of surveillance under the aegis of FISA, precisely to prevent authorities from evading the stricter requirements imposed by Title III, the statute that covers wiretapping for domestic criminal investigations.

[...]

[T]here’s nothing here to suggest either the direct involvement of President Obama nor any clear indication of a violation of the law.

[...]

Neither is there any evidence that authorization was sought to collect on “the Trump campaign” per se.

[...]

In short, both Breitbart and Trump have advanced claims far more dramatic than anything the public evidence can support. That said, intelligence monitoring—whether direct or indirect—of persons connected with a presidential campaign inherently carries a high risk of abuse, and as Congress moves to launch its own inquiries into the Trump campaign’s Russian ties, it would be entirely appropriate to further scrutinize both the FBI’s initial surveillance and applications and the surveillance that was ultimately conducted for any signs of impropriety.

  Just Security

And now the Rooster himself has the top government position.

In the meantime, it might behoove the Commander in Chief to refrain from issuing serious and inflammatory accusations based wholly on “intelligence” gleaned from Breitbart News.

Yeah, that's not gonna happen.