Trump may have discussed classified info on Fox News, top Dem on House intel panel charges

Dylan Stableford
·Senior Writer

The ranking member of the House intelligence committee says it appears President Trump revealed classified information during a Fox News interview on Wednesday while refusing to disclose evidence that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.

In the interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Trump said that the Central Intelligence Agency had been hacked during Obama’s tenure.

“I just want people to know, the CIA was hacked,” Trump said. “That was during the Obama years. That was not during us.”

“In his effort to once again blame Obama, the President appears to have discussed something that, if true and accurate, would otherwise be considered classified information,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the committee, said in a statement Thursday. “It would be one thing if the President’s statement were the product of intelligence community discussion and a purposeful decision to disclose information to the public, but that is unlikely to be the case.”

Earlier this month, WikiLeaks published a trove of documents that it said were leaked from the CIA. But the agency did not publicly confirm the authenticity of those documents nor discuss how they were obtained. It’s not clear if Trump, or Schiff, was referring to the WikiLeaks documents or another incident.

Trump has repeatedly condemned the leaks coming out of the intelligence community, particularly when they involve him or his administration.

“For anyone else to do what the President may have done,” Schiff added, “would constitute what he deplores as ‘leaks.'”

Schiff’s comments came a day after he and Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Ariz., the House intelligence committee chairman, said they have yet to see any evidence of Trump’s wiretapping claim.

“That evidence still remains the same,” Nunes told reporters at a press conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “We don’t have any evidence that that took place.”

On Thursday, Schiff and Nunes’ counterparts on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a similar statement.

“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and vice chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a joint statement.

Addressing the wiretapping allegations, Trump told Carlson that he has “some very good stuff,” that the White House is “in the process of putting it together” and that “it’s going to be very demonstrative.”

The president said he may make a statement on the matter before or after the Senate and House committees conclude their investigations.

“Let’s see whether or not I prove it,” Trump said. “I just don’t choose to do it right now.”

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