President Donald Trump might have "overstated" his allegation President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on him during the election, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Monday.
The wiretapping probe poses risks for both Democrats and Republicans, McCarthy, a contributing editor at the National Review, told Newsmax TV's "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"Both sides stand to be embarrassed, and I also think the longer this goes on, the more damage it does – which is the important thing – to our capacity to do effective surveillance and intelligence in the context of the Russians, which is very important to our national security," he said.
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McCarthy thinks "we're really never going to get to the bottom of this – in some ways, for good reason."
"The people in the intelligence community who are working on Russia stuff, they're actually trying to protect the United States by finding out what Russia is up to – in terms of what our interests are," he explained. "And a lot of what's gone on here has a risk of compromising that."
"There's risk in it for both sides, because it looks like the president may well have overstepped and overstated what the nature of the surveillance was when he said that Obama had tapped him," he said.
McCarthy said, however, "in the broader story," Trump is "quite correct that the Obama administration did do an investigation on people connected to the Trump campaign to see what their connections to Russians were."
That's where "there's risk for the Democrats for having investigated the Trump campaign on what I think must have been a very low level of suspicion – at the very time they were applying an absurdly high level of suspicion to whitewash a criminal case against Hillary Clinton," he said.
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