The White House on Sunday requested the U.S. Congress examine whether the Obama administration abused its executive “investigative authority” during the 2016 campaign, as part of the ongoing congressional probe into Russia’s influence on the presidential election.
The request came a day after President Donald Trump alleged that then-President Obama ordered a wiretap of the phones in Trump Tower in New York, which was then Trump’s campaign headquarters.
Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said it had been a “cardinal rule” of the Obama administration that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.
“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false,” Lewis said in a statement.
However, Obama’s Justice Department did target journalists with wiretaps in 2013, such as Fox News’ James Rosen as part of an investigation into government officials anonymously leaking information to journalists. The Associated Press was also a target of surveillance.
According to the New York Times in May 2013, federal investigators secretly seized two months of phone records for reporters and editors of The Associated Press in what the news organization said was a “serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
“The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year,” the NYT said.