White House spokesman Sean Spicer has sought this week to walk back Trump’s contention, saying that the wire tapping allegation was meant to refer to a broader allegation of surveillance of the Trump campaign at its skyscraper headquarters in New York and not wiretapping specifically, even though that is what the president alleged.

Yet Spicer said Tuesday that Trump is “very confident” that in the end he will be vindicated about the claim.

Schiff assailed the “irresponsibility of the president and his spokesman” in making the wiretapping claim.

Meanwhile, a key U.S. senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, says he is determined to find out whether the wiretapping claim is true.

Graham, who lost last year’s Republican presidential nomination to Trump, told CNN on Wednesday, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Congress is going to flex its muscle.”

He vowed, if need be, to subpoena the country’s top law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to determine whether any U.S. judge issued a secret wiretapping edict that the FBI carried out.

Graham, voicing his doubts about Trump’s wiretapping claim, has sought answers from FBI Director James Comey about the president’s allegation. But the South Carolina lawmaker said that so far Comey has not disclosed any information about the purported wiretap or whether the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of links between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials in the months before the election and after Trump won.[xyz-ihs snippet=”Adsense-responsive”]Graham is conducting a hearing later Wednesday on Russian interference in the election, but said that Comey would not be among the witnesses. Comey, however, is set to brief a group of senators.

Russian interference

The U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that Moscow interfered in the election, with Russian President Vladimir Putin ordering the hacking of the computer of John Podesta, the campaign chief for Democrat Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state Trump defeated in the election.

Subsequently, the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks released thousands of Podesta’s emails in the weeks before the election showing embarrassing behind-the-scenes efforts by Democratic operatives to help Clinton win the party’s presidential nomination.

“I don’t have political hate with the president,” the senator said, adding he has had recent pleasant conversations with Trump on other issues.

But Graham said the Trump wiretap allegation is “something very, very serious” and needs to be determined one way or another.

Source: VOA

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