Spokesman: Obama Never Ordered Surveillance of American Citizens

Hours after accusations from Donald Trump, the current President of the United States, against former President Barack Obama, Mr. Obama's spokesman officially stated that the accusation is baseless and "completely false," asserting that he never issued an order to surveil American citizens. According to AFP, Kevin Lewis, spokesman for Barack Obama, denied in a brief statement on Saturday, March 4, that the former president had given any order for the surveillance of Donald Trump's conversations. He stated: "President Obama or other White House officials [during his time] never issued an order to surveil American citizens." The British newspaper The Guardian noted that while the existence of surveillance was not denied, only the order from Obama for such action was refuted. The U.S. President accused his predecessor early Saturday in several tweets of having surveilled his conversations in October 2016, just a month before the presidential election. Trump claimed this occurred late in his campaign, but he did not provide any evidence to support his claim. The White House has not provided any evidence to the media to substantiate this accusation. In one of his tweets, Donald Trump wrote: "What level has President Obama descended to that he was surveilling my phones during the sacred election process? This is Nixon/Watergate scale scandal. What a bad (or sick) guy!" Before the official statement from Barack Obama's spokesman, Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security advisor, also responded sharply to Trump in a tweet, stating: "No president can legally issue a surveillance order. These restrictions are in place to protect American citizens from people like you." Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States and a close ally of Trump, was forced to recuse himself from overseeing the investigation into "the Trump campaign's connections with Russia" after a report surfaced in the media. The Washington Post reported that the Attorney General met with the Russian ambassador twice during the 2016 campaign, in July and September. This was despite Sessions having firmly denied any contact with Russia during his confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate. This led Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, to call for Sessions' resignation over "lying under oath." The Attorney General's spokesman responded that "there was certainly nothing misleading in Sessions' statements." Sessions himself had previously stated that his recusal from overseeing the investigation did not imply "accepting any wrongdoing." However, this is not the first time Donald Trump has blamed his predecessor for his recent troubles. Last week, Trump, in an interview with Fox News, suggested that President Obama was involved in protests across the U.S. against Republican lawmakers, claiming that individuals associated with him were certainly involved in these protests. Trump later provided no evidence for this claim, and Barack Obama did not respond. Meanwhile, The Guardian quoted an unnamed American official stating that "there is no evidence to support the claim" that Obama ordered surveillance of Trump.