US lawmakers find nothing to support Trump's wiretap claim

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that they have found no evidence to substantiate Republican President Donald Trump's claim his phones were tapped in 2016 on the orders of predecessor Barack Obama.

"Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the US government either before or after Election Day 2016," the committee's chair Richard Burr and Democratic member Mark Warner of Virginia, said in a joint statement Thursday.

Their respective counterparts on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff, made similar comments on Wednesday, Efe news reported.

Four congressional panels were already investigating alleged Russian interference in last year's presidential contest when Trump took to Twitter on March 4 to accuse the previous administration of spying on him.

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad guy!," Trump tweeted.

A spokesman for the former President dismissed the allegation as "simply false", while legislators from both parties called on Trump to produce evidence of the surveillance or retract the charge.

"The point is, the intelligence committees in their continuing, widening, ongoing investigation of all things Russia, got to the bottom...that no such wiretap existed," the Republican Speaker of the house Paul Ryan said Thursday.--IANS

vgu/