A Republican lawmaker says it’s important that President Donald Trump apologize to the United Kingdom for pushing the unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama asked British spies to wiretap Trump Tower.
“It never hurts to say you’re sorry. And I think it’s more important to say that to our foreign partners, where there was some intimation that they were involved in potentially tapping the building in New York City,” Rep. Will Hurd told CNN’s Chris Cuomo Tuesday on “New Day.”
At a news briefing last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer read out uncorroborated allegations originally made by an analyst on Fox News that the United Kingdom’s GCHQ — the equivalent of the US National Security Agency — had spied on Trump.
Spicer’s comments from the podium triggered fierce denunciations from many British officials, and multiple lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for the White House to apologize or retract the words.
A senior administration official told CNN Friday that Spicer and national security adviser H.R. McMaster offered what amounted to an apology to the British government for Spicer’s comments on Thursday. Spicer, however, later disputed that an apology took place.
Asked Monday at a congressional hearing if the NSA would have asked its British counterparts to spy on Trump, NSA Director Mike Rogers flatly said no, saying it would violate an intelligence-sharing agreement with the British government.
Later Monday, Spicer was asked about the “GCHQ thing” at a White House briefing and if the administration had vowed to the British it would not raise the issue again. Spicer said the discussions with the British were “merely an explanation of what we did and why we did it … and that was it. Simply that.”
