The UK Security Minister rejects the idea of ​​spying on the Trump campaign

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Wallace made these comments during an interview with CNN during US President Donald Trump's official visit to the UK. Trump and his allies once said, originally quoting an uncorroborated account of Fox News, that Britain had listened to Trump Tower phones at the request of President Barack Obama.

Asked about this statement, Mr. Wallace explained that the United Kingdom traditionally responded by not confirming or refuting intelligence questions before suggesting that the statement was false and that their intelligence officials had more urgent problems.

"I do not think our intelligence services have enough capacity to spy on our friends and allies," Wallace said. "You know, if you want to know what's going on in American politics, turn on the news, attend a press conference, and you can find out what's going on."

The controversy over the espionage claim appeared at the beginning of Trump's tenure as president when, in 2017, the White House quoted Fox News's report to a rare denial of the GCHQ, the equivalent British NSA, who called the accusation "nonsense".
CNN later reported that British and European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between Trump's associates, Russian officials, and other Russian personalities during the campaign and that they transmitted them to their counterparts. US. CNN had stated at the time that agencies, including GCHQ, had captured communications during routine surveillance of Russian nationals and did not target members of the Trump team, who were intercepted through to an "accidental collection".

Trump repeated a version of the initial claim on social media since the exchanges of 2017, including in a tweet last April.

Pressed during his interview with CNN on Tuesday, Wallace refused to "speculate on intelligence issues" before further downplaying the spying claim.

"In the era of social media, there is a lot of speculation about these things," Wallace said. "There is no big conspiracy, and the idea that I would take an intelligence officer for, I do not know, target Al Qaeda in a place of interest to us (the interest) , to put him in the spying of a campaign, a presidential candidate, I think that's just not – it's not going to be the reality. "

Allison Malloy from CNN contributed to this report.

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