18 March 2017 12:01 am
Britain’s GCHQ (Britain’s communications intelligence agency ) issued a rare public statement dismissing White House claims that the UK Intelligence agency may have helped Barack Obama spy on Donald Trump.
The White House latched onto a disputed Fox News report Thursday in its latest battle with the press to produce evidence of President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama wiretapped him.
Just before press secretary Sean Spicer was due to take questions from reporters on camera, the Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the panel’s top Democrat released a joint statement affirming a lack of evidence to support the president’s claim.
Responding to ABC News’ Jon Karl attempt to question Spicer on their statement, Spicer pointed to a March 14 Fox & Friends broadcast in which Judge Andrew Napolitano claimed he had three sources telling him that Obama used GCHQ to spy on Trump.
In a rare public rebuke, a statement from GCHQ said: ‘Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct “wire tapping” against the then President Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.’
Immediately after the broadcast a spokesperson for the British government told Fox that ‘no part of this story is true.’
A British security official told Reuters the same thing. The claim was ‘totally untrue and quite frankly absurd,’ the representative of the British government said.
(Daily Mail, US), 17 March 2017