Yesterday it was the Republican head of the House Intelligence committee, Devin Nunes, who repeated what he first said last week, namely that his panel has still not received any evidence that President Trump was wiretapped during the election campaign. "As I told you last week about the issue with the president talking about tapping Trump Tower, that evidence still remains the same, that we don't have any evidence that that took place." Nunes told reporters.
Today, it was the Senate's turn, when the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican senator from North Carolina Richard Burr, and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, jointly said they had not seen evidence that the Obama administration “wiretapped” Trump Tower, according to a brief statement issued Thursday.
“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Burr said, providing no other details.
Burr is the latest Republican to contradict President Trump’s explosive claims that he was surveilled during the campaign. The bipartisan leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that no evidence exists for President Trump’s claim that Trump Tower was wiretapped by his predecessor during the 2016 presidential election.
And so with both the House and the Senate denying Trump's claim, it is up to the Justice Department which has been under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to disclose whether there is any truth to the president's claims. White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday said Trump is "extremely confident" that the Justice Department will produce evidence to back up his assertion. He said Trump believes the evidence will “vindicate him.”
“I think there’s significant reporting about surveillance techniques that existed throughout the 2016 election,” Spicer said. According to Fox News' Judge Napolitano, three intelligence sources believe that former President Obama veered ‘outside the chain of command’ and employed British surveillance agents to conduct surveillance on Donald Trump’s team prior to the election, according to a legal analyst. Judge Andrew Napolitano revealed on ‘Fox & Friends’ yesterday that the sources spilled the details to him as the controversial case continues to dominate headlines.
Meanwhile, Trump stood by the assertion in an interview this week, telling Fox News that his administration would be submitting evidence of a wiretap or other surveillance by his predecessor to lawmakers “very soon.”
So while we wait for the DOJ to either drop the whole affair or provide the missing link, meanwhile both Burr's and Nunes's committees continue to investigate Russian interference in the U.S. election, including any links between Trump campaign officials and Moscow.