U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey has asked the Justice Department to publicly reject President Donald Trump's claim that his predecessor Barack Obama ordered wiretapping of his phones during last year's election, media reports said Sunday.
Comey made the request on Saturday after Trump criticized Obama for tapping his phones at the Trump Tower in New York just ahead of the Election Day last November, the reports cited senior U.S. officials as saying.
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Trump compared the alleged wiretapping to the Watergate political scandal in the 1970s that brought down former Republican President Richard Nixon for wiretapping the rival Democratic Party. But Trump did not provide any evidence to support his assertion.
Comey argued that Trump's claim was false and must be corrected, the senior officials were quoted as saying.
Obama has already refuted Trump's claim as "simply false."
Trump on Sunday also demanded Congress investigate the "potentially politically motivated" wiretapping of his phones by Obama during the 2016 presidential race.
The White House said in a statement that Trump requested that, as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees "exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016."
Trump's "wiretapping" accusation came after days of media reports about the contacts between some members of his campaign team and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday he will recuse himself from any current or future investigations into Russia's possible link with Trump's presidential campaign, after admitting that he met with Kislyak twice last year but did not reveal it at the Senate hearings for his confirmation.
There have been suggestions that contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russia were picked up by intelligence agencies as part of routine surveillance of the Russians.
Trump and his aides have denied there were any improper contacts. But the media reports about the phone talks between Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn with Kislyak during the transition period already led to Flynn's resignation last month.
Several congressional committees are currently investigating the Trump team's contacts with Russia, which was accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential race to help Trump through hacking activities.
Russia has strongly denied such accusations.
