President Trump’s administration asked Monday for more time to comply with a House Intelligence Committee request for evidence substantiating Trump’s claim of wiretapping.
But according to CNN, the Senate Intelligence panel has received a response to its inquiry into the president’s allegation.
“I’ve talked to all the appropriate people,” Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told CNN. He said he has received “sufficient” responses about the wiretapping claim.
{mosads}”I would say from our conversations, what we’ve gotten are sufficient answers,” he added, though he would not confirm if there was evidence backing Trump’s claim.
The Department of Justice was supposed to share evidence with the House Intelligence panel by the end of Monday, but asked “for additional time to review the request in compliance with the governing legal authorities and to determine what if any responsive documents may exist.”
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) office confirmed the request in a statement, and said the delay could force the committee to “resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered.”
Last Wednesday, Nunes and the top Democrat on the committee sent the White House a request to provide evidence that, as Trump tweeted on March 4, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”
They asked the White House to send over any information backing up those accusations by Monday.
It is unclear why Trump believes he might have been tapped, but his statement came soon after a conservative radio host detailed allegations about the Obama administration surveilling Trump, which were then published by Breitbart News.
Many Republicans have denied seeing any evidence, including House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Oversight member Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), and Senate Intelligence Committee members Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.).
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper outright denied the allegation. FBI Director James Comey was reportedly outraged by Trump’s statement and pressed the Justice Department to debunk the claim right away.
While there are a variety of legal ways Trump may have had some calls recorded during the campaign — if the Department of Justice received a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept all the now-president’s calls or was tapping someone else who spoke with Trump — Obama would not have been directly involved.
Nunes said the investigation into the wiretapping would be part of the Russian election tampering investigation his committee will begin next week with a hearing of intelligence officials, including Comey and Clapper.