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Key US Senator Determined to Find Out Truth of Trump Wiretap Allegation

by Ken Bredemeier

   A key U.S. senator says he is determined to find out whether it's true,
   as President Donald Trump alleges, that former president Barack Obama
   ordered his Trump Tower phones tapped in the weeks before last
   November's election.

   Senator Lindsey 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.

   Graham is conducting a hearing later Wednesday on Russian meddling in
   the election, but said that Comey would not be among the witnesses.

   FILE - FBI Director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington
   before the House Oversight Committee.

   DNC hack
   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.

   The senator said, "I don't have political hate with the president" and
   had 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.

   Original allegation
   Trump first made the allegation March 4, saying, "Terrible! Just found
   out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the
   victory."

   But the president since then has provided no evidence for his claim and
   dodged reporters' repeated questions about the allegation.

   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.