A spokesman for Barack Obama on Saturday rejected claims from US President Donald Trump that the former president had wiretapped him in October during the late stages of the presidential election campaign.
“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false,” Obama Spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement, Reuters reported.
Trump had suggested Obama tapped his phones, without citing evidence, in a series of tweets on Saturday morning.
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!,” Trump said in a series of tweets on his Twitter account early on Saturday.
Lewis also said “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”.
The statement raised the possibility that a phone tap of the Trump campaign could have been ordered by Justice Department officials.
The White House did not respond to a request to elaborate on Trump’s accusations.
A Trump spokeswoman said the Republican president is “having meetings, making phone calls and hitting balls” at his golf course in West Palm Beach.
Earlier, former Obama adviser, Ben Rhodes, strongly denied Trump’s allegations.
“No president can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you,” Rhodes wrote on Twitter.
