The Trump Tower wiretap allegation
A president alleged in a Saturday-morning post that his predecessor had wiretapped his building before the election. The Justice Department subsequently told a court that no such records exist. The allegation nonetheless became the seed of a longer story.
Why this verdict
Debunked by the Department of Justice, which told a federal court it had no records of the surveillance alleged, and by the FBI director and the Senate Intelligence Committee, who stated no information supported it.
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01The claim
That President Barack Obama ordered surveillance of Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign — in the original formulation, that he 'had my wires tapped' — as an act of political sabotage against the opposing candidate.
02Where it came from
The allegation appeared in a series of posts by Donald Trump on 4 March 2017. It followed a radio segment and a Breitbart article the previous day compiling reports of intelligence activity around the campaign, which were themselves loosely drawn from British and American press coverage of intercepts involving foreign officials. No underlying document was ever cited. Within days the White House had recast the claim in broader terms — surveillance rather than wiretaps, the administration rather than Obama personally — which is the usual signal that the specific version cannot be defended.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The claim was tested quickly and at every level that could test it.
FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on 20 March 2017 that he had no information supporting the tweets, and that the Department of Justice had asked him to say the same on its behalf. The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a rare joint statement that they saw no indications Trump Tower had been under surveillance by any element of the United States government. In September 2017 the Justice Department filed a declaration in litigation under the Freedom of Information Act stating that both its National Security Division and the FBI had searched and had no records of the wiretaps described.
A legal point makes the original allegation incoherent independent of the evidence: a president cannot order a wiretap. Applications go through the Justice Department to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the record of such applications exists in a form that later inquiries did in fact obtain.
Which leads to the part that is true and is usually merged into the false part. Carter Page, a former campaign adviser, was the subject of FISA surveillance beginning in October 2016, after he had left the campaign. The Justice Department inspector general's 2019 review found seventeen significant errors and omissions in those applications, and an FBI lawyer later pleaded guilty to altering an email used in one of them. Those are real failures with real consequences. They are not the allegation made on 4 March 2017, which was about a predecessor tapping a building, and they were uncovered by the same institutions the allegation accused.
04What it cost
The allegation did not survive, but it established a frame — that the investigation into Russian interference was itself the crime — which outlived it by years and is treated separately in this archive. Its more concrete legacy is on surveillance law: the genuine FISA failures found while checking the false claim fed directly into the 2020 lapse of several Patriot Act authorities and into continuing argument over Section 702, an area where reform has generally required a scandal to make progress.