Intelligence committee wants evidence Trump’s phones were tapped

Combined dispatches

WASHINGTON

The House intelligence committee asked the executive branch to provide by Monday any evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claim that his phones were tapped at Trump Tower during the election, a senior congressional aide said Saturday.

The request was made in a letter sent by committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., according to the aide, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the request by name and requested anonymity.

In a tweet last weekend, Trump accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of ordering the tap. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has said that nothing matching Trump’s claims had taken place, but that has not quelled speculation that Trump’s communications were monitored by the Obama administration. Trump has not provided evidence to support his claim and has asked Congress to investigate.

Early this week, Schiff said the committee would answer the president’s call to investigate the claim. He also said he would ask FBI Director James Comey directly when he appears later this month before the full committee, which is investigating Russian activities during the election.

“We should be able to determine in fairly short order whether this allegation is true or false,” Schiff told reporters Tuesday evening at the Capitol.

Nunes has said that so far, he has not seen any evidence to back up Trump’s claim and has suggested the news media were taking the president’s weekend tweets too literally.

Travel ban lawsuit

Maryland’s attorney general says he plans to use newfound power to sue the federal government by joining a Washington state lawsuit trying to upend Trump’s new travel ban.

The General Assembly granted Brian E. Frosh, a Democrat, sweeping authority last month to file lawsuits against the Trump administration without first securing Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s approval. When Frosh joins Washington’s lawsuit Monday, he will use that power for the first time.

Maryland will join New York, Oregon, Massachusetts and Minnesota in the suit, which contends that both of Trump’s temporary travel bans for people from certain predominantly Muslim countries are unconstitutional.

Hacking suspect

A political consultant and former campaign adviser to Trump says he communicated last year with an individual involved in hacking Democratic National Committee emails.

But Roger Stone says the conversations were “completely innocuous.” Stone told The Washington Times in an interview that his private Twitter exchange with “Guccifer 2.0” was “so perfunctory, brief and banal” that he had forgotten about it.

Last summer, emails stolen from Democrats were posted by an online persona known as Guccifer 2.0. U.S. officials believe that individual is linked to Russia. Emails stolen from the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were later released by the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks.