Trump accuses Obama of 'treason'

President Trump long has charged that the federal officials who surveilled his 2016 presidential campaign based on now-debunked charges of collusion with Russia committed "treason."

"My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on," he wrote in May Twitter at the time. "Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!"

Now he's accusing Barack Obama of the same.

The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard reported President Trump made the charge in an interview with author Doug Wead in the upcoming book "Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency."

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"The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election," said Trump. "They were spying on my campaign. So you know? What is that all about? I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying."

Trump then named Obama as a culprit, the report said.

The president said it turned out he was right about his claim that the Obama administration spied on him.

"By the way. In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said, 'Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.' Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?"

Trump said, according to excerpts from the book given to Bedard, the resulting Russia investigation hurt his presidency.

"Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn’t get anything done. No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something up," he said.

In a Senate hearing in April, Attorney General William Barr explained he was reviewing how the Obama administration launched the investigation of now-debunked claims of Trump collusion with Russia because he believed "spying did occur."

.@SenatorShaheen asks Barr about reports he's launched an investigation into officials who investigated Trump

"I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal," he says, echoing baseless right-win conspiracy theories. "I think spying did occur."

Shaheen is left speechless pic.twitter.com/G1fcAF2Irh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 10, 2019

The counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign by the FBI and DOJ turned into a special counsel probe by Robert Mueller, who concluded there was no collusion.

Justice Department and FBI officials presented a salacious, unverified opposition research document funded partly by Hillary Clinton to a secret FISA court as evidence to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz has completed an investigation of potential FISA abuse, and the release of his report is expected soon. Meanwhile, the Justice Department's review of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, has turned into a full-fledged criminal investigation, according to sources. That means Durham now can subpoena witnesses and impanel a fact-finding grand jury.

Barr explained at the Senate hearing in April that the Obama-administration investigation was being reviewed for "the same reason we're worried about foreign influence in elections."

"We want to make sure that during … I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal, a big deal. The generation I grew up in which was the Vietnam war period people were all concerned about spying on antiwar people and so forth by the government. There were a lot of rules put in place to make sure there's an adequate basis before our law enforcement agencies get involve in political surveillance," he said.

"I'm not suggesting that those rules were violated but I think it's important to look at that, and I'm not just talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly."

A Senator asked, "You're not suggesting though, that spying occurred?"

Barr said: "I don't … well … I guess you could … I think spying did occur. Yes, I think spying did occur."

The Senate chamber went silent.

Trump earlier suggested that Obama likely knew about the weaponization of the U.S. government against a political opponent.

In an interview in June with ABC News in the White House, he said: "I would say that he certainly must have known about it because it went very high up in the chain, but you're gonna find that out. I'm not gonna make that statement quite yet, but I would say that President Obama had to know about it. This should never, ever be allowed to happen to another president again. A previous administration used the intelligence data and the intelligence agencies to spy on my campaign."

Asked if he thought Obama spied on his campaign, Trump said: "I don't know. But hopefully we're gonna find out."