(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Ret. U.S. Army Intelligence Officer Tony Shaffer said that wiretapping by a sitting U.S. president is "Soviet-level wrongdoing" with "the potential for indictments" if President Trump's allegations are true.
On "Fox & Friends Weekend" Saturday morning, Shaffer shared his thoughts on Trump's early-morning tweets accusing the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower prior to the 2016 election.
Although Obama, through his spokesman Kevin Lewis, denied the allegations, Shaffer said it is "very likely" he authorized the wiretapping.
"President Obama has moved into his Potemkin Village and moved in Valerie Jarrett. We have to understand that it's very likely that he did authorize this," he said.
"Simply because you don't like someone doesn't give you the right as the sitting president to do something like this," he continued.
"The Trump Tower to the best of the Obama administration's ability, was wired for sound," Shaffer said. "There were reasons why Mr. Trump did not want to give up his own personal security -- because he knew that people very close to him may very well become collectors of this sort of thing."
Shaffer emphasized the seriousness of the allegations. "This is completely insidious," he said. "This is an order of magnitude worse than Watergate -- where you've actually used the mechanisms of state, the power of the state to go after a candidate of presidency."
He added, "This is Soviet behavior. This is the very thing the Soviet Union would have engaged in back during the Cold War."
Shaffer predicted that there will be some whistleblowers coming forward now to talk about wiretaps.
Asked if he though that enough evidence had been produced to prompt the president to go public with his accusation, Shaffer said, "I don't doubt for a minute that Mr. Trump has sufficient -- I would say a critical mass of evidence saying there's something really wrong, here.
Shaffer earlier noted that a "paper trail" implicating Obama must have "finally shown up."
"We're talking about the potential for indictments of a former sitting president and his staff," Shaffer said. "And that's unheard of."
Trump seemed to be hinting at that possibility with this tweet:
A liberal journalist who worked in the Bush administration told Fox News Saturday evening that a source who worked in the (Obama) White House for seven and a half years told her that she believes the allegations.
"She thinks it's all true," said Washington insider and owner of Catalina magazine Cathy Areu.
Areu said her source told her that "there were concerns that Trump and his surrogates may have been colluding with the Russians as a possible bargaining chip to influence the election. Therefore, a wiretap was conducted."
She added that her source told her that "she was not sure who secured the warrant but the White House and the administration were concerned and they did discuss the wiretapping."
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