Dennis Kucinich on Trump’s wiretap charge: ‘It happened to me’

Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is defending President Trump’s claims about being wiretapped by the Obama administration, saying during an appearance on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor” that his own phone had been tapped.

Kucinich told Bill O’Reilly Monday night that a phone call to his congressional office from a foreign leader was tapped in 2011. Kucinich said he listened to the recording after leaving office in 2015.

“I had a resolution in the House to try to stop the war and [Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and son of President Moammar Gadhafi] called me to talk about it,” Kucinich said.

“I cleared the discussion with House attorneys, and a member of Congress is not supposed to be listened to by the executive branch,” he continued. “The director of national intelligence under President Obama was tracking my resolution, and I didn’t find out until two years after I had left Congress.”

{mosads}Kucinich revealed in a Friday FoxNews.com column that investigative reporters from the Washington Times contacted him after obtaining the tape to verify his voice on the recording.

“When I met them at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, they played back audio of a call I had taken in my D.C. congressional office four years earlier,” he told O’Reilly.

Kucinich said because of that experience, he doesn’t dismiss Trump’s claim that he was bugged.

“I heard a lot of people laughing about it, but I had something happen to me. If a member of Congress can have his phone tapped, this can happen to anybody.”

Kucinich was a member of Congress from 1997-2013. He joined Fox News as a contributor after shortly after leaving office.

The Trump administration asked for more time on Monday evening to comply with a House Intelligence Committee request for evidence substantiating the president’s claims of wiretapping.

The request came hours before the committee-set midnight deadline.

“This afternoon, the Department of Justice placed calls to representatives of the Chairman and Ranking Member of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 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,” the letter from Department of Justice read.