Donald Trump Was Seething With Rage Over Reception of Wiretapping Claims
A friend of Donald Trump‘s says the president was more angry this weekend than he had seen him “in a long time.”
Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of right-wing magazine and website Newsmax and a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, wrote that he spoke to Trump twice on Saturday. The conversations followed Trump’s explosive and unsubstantiated Saturday claim that President Barack Obama had Trump Tower’s “wires tapped” before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has not given any evidence to back up the claim, while a spokesman for Obama has denied that he ordered wiretapping of Trump. Still, Trump believes his accusations will eventually be proven, Ruddy noted in a Newsmax post.
“I spoke with the president twice yesterday about the wiretap story. I haven’t seen him this p—– off in a long time. When I mentioned Obama ‘denials’ about the wiretaps, he shot back: ‘This will be investigated, it will all come out. I will be proven right,” Ruddy wrote.
Ruddy told CNN that Trump did not go into detail about his sources for the claim. The network previously reported that Trump got the accusations from right-wing media reports, not government sources.
Trump’s accusations followed the latest backlash about his top advisors’ contacts with Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator who advised the Trump campaign, said last week he would recuse himself from all Trump campaign related investigations after he appeared to mislead senators during his January confirmation hearing about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
The president argued that Sessions should not distance himself from any Russia-related probes.
Ruddy, a Florida resident and longtime Mar-a-Lago member, also donated the maximum $2,700 to Trump’s campaign committee and $100,000 to a joint fundraising effort with the Republican Party.
(h/t CNBC)