White House dances around Trump wiretap claim as Justice Department seeks more time for evidence

The White House said Monday that President Trump was referring to broader surveillance issues when he accused former President Obama of wiretapping the phones at Trump Tower last year, as the Department of Justice asked for more time to see whether they can find any evidence to back up the claims.

Capitol Hill lawmakers had given the DOJ a Monday deadline to provide any evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s charges, but the administration late Monday said it had asked for more time to review the request.

At the White House, press secretary Sean Spicer qualified Mr. Trump’s explosive claim on Twitter earlier this month that Mr. Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped at the height of the presidential campaign.

“I think if you look at the president’s tweet, he said very clearly, quote, wiretapping — in quotes,” Mr. Spicer said.

“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was ’wiretapping,’” Mr. Spicer said, making quotation marks with his fingers. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”

Only two of the president’s four Twitter messages included the quotes, and Mr. Trump did twice say that it was his phones that were tapped.

Mr. Spicer said Mr. Trump does not believe Mr. Obama personally wiretapped his phone.

The chairman and ranking member of the House intelligence committee had sent a letter to the Department of Justice last week requesting whatever evidence it could muster — such as applications for a surveillance warrant — that would indicate surveillance was being conducted on the president or his associates during the campaign.

Reps. Devin Nunes, California Republican, and Adam Schiff, California Democrat, had asked for a reply by Monday.

But the DOJ said it phoned representatives for the congressmen Monday afternoon “to ask for additional time to review the request in compliance with the governing legal authorities and to determine what if any responsive documents may exist.”

A committee spokesman said the panel has asked the department to provide the information before the panel’s first public hearing on Russian interference in last year’s election. That hearing is scheduled for March 20.

“If the committee does not receive a response by then, the committee will ask for this information during the March 20 hearing and may resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered,” the spokesman said.

FBI Director James B. Comey is among those invited to testify.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday she didn’t have any updates on the investigation, but Mr. Burr said recently he hadn’t yet seen evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s wiretapping claims.

Democrats and some Republicans said it should be easy for Mr. Trump to prove his claims if they were true.

“The president could release this information,” Rep. Chris Stewart, Utah Republican and a member of the House intelligence committee, said Monday on CNN.

But Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, said he’s inclined to believe Mr. Trump on the matter.

“I’ve watched as the intelligence community has lied not only to me but other members of Congress, even in classified settings,” Mr. King told The Washington Times. “And so I have my suspicions.”

He said he didn’t want to make a broad indictment, but also said he believes some people in the intelligence community had their “long knives out” for Mr. Trump and are still there looking for other ways to “draw some blood.”