Trump to Merkel: Germany owes money to the US

WASHINGTON — Recycling an incendiary and unsubstantiated charge, President Trump on Friday joked that he and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have one thing in common: being spied on by Barack Obama’s administration.

“As far as wiretapping, I guess, by, you know, this past administration, at least we have something in common perhaps,” Trump said at a joint press conference with the German leader. His remark drew laughter from some in the audience, a mix of reporters and aides to the president and the chancellor.

Merkel gave her host a quizzical look.

He appeared to be referring to revelations in 2013 that the Obama administration had listened to Merkel’s cellphone conversations. The disclosure inflamed U.S-Germany relations, and angered Merkel, who was born in what was then East Germany and experienced life under its feared secret police, the Stasi.

Trump had been asked by a German reporter about his March 4 claim that Obama personally ordered spying on him and Trump Tower. The reporter also asked whether Trump thought it was a mistake for White House press secretary Sean Spicer to cite a Fox News analyst’s claim that Obama used British intelligence to do surveillance on the future president.

“We said nothing,” Trump said. “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn’t make an opinion on it. That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox. And so you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Trump during their joint news conference at the White House. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Earlier, Spicer and Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, sought to soothe British anger at the press secretary putting the White House’s credibility behind the allegation.

In a contentious Thursday briefing for reporters, Spicer had tried to defend the president’s March 4 charge that Obama personally ordered spying on Trump at Trump Tower last year. At one point, Spicer quoted Fox News media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano, who claimed on the air that three intelligence sources had told him Obama used Britain’s GCHQ — its equivalent to the National Security Agency — to spy on Trump so that “there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

After Spicer put the weight of White House behind the claim, Britain issued furious denials. The dispute arose as the Trump administration refused to say whether it possessed evidence to back up the president’s charge and top lawmakers disputed the allegation.

McMaster spoke to his British counterpart, while Spicer spoke to Britain’s ambassador to Washington.

“The calls were very cordial,” a senior U.S. administration official said. “They explained that Sean was simply reading news stories; he was not endorsing anything.” The official, who requested anonymity to describe private conversations, declined to describe the calls as apologies. The Telegraph, citing intelligence sources, had reported earlier that both Spicer and McMaster offered formal apologies.

In a brief question and answer session with reporters after the press conference, Spicer defiantly denied doing anything wrong.

“I don’t think we regret anything,” he said. “We literally listed a litany of media reports that are in the public domain.”

Read more from Yahoo News:

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Obama presses Trump not to back away from clean energy

President Barack Obama cast the adoption of clean energy in the U.S. as "irreversible," putting pressure Monday on President-elect Donald Trump not to back away from a core strategy to fight climate change.

 Obama, penning an opinion article in the journal Science, sought to frame the argument in a way that might appeal to the president-elect: in economic terms. He said the fact that the cost and polluting power of energy have dropped at the same time proves that fighting climate change and spurring economic growth aren't mutually exclusive. "Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States," Obama wrote. He peppered his article with subtle references to Trump, noting that the debate about future climate policy was "very much on display during the current presidential transition."

 As he prepares to transfer power to Trump, Obama has turned to an unusual format to make his case to Trump to preserve his policies: academic journals. In the last week, Obama also published articles under his name in the Harvard Law Review about his efforts on criminal justice reform and in the New England Journal of Medicine defending his health care law, which Republicans are poised to repeal. The articles reflect an effort by Obama to pre-empt the arguments Trump or Republicans are likely to employ as they work to roll back Obama's key accomplishments in the coming years.

Yet it's unclear whether Trump or the GOP could be swayed by scholarly arguments in relatively obscure publications. Secretary of State John Kerry, one of Obama's top allies on climate change, echoed the president in a speech Monday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kerry said the answers to climate change are relatively straightforward and depend on the U.S. relying on cleaner sources like solar, wind, biomass and nuclear energy, but added that he didn't know what policies Trump and the next secretary of state would pursue. "In the time I've spent in public life, one of the things I've learned is that some issues look a lot different when you're actually in office compared to when you're on the campaign trail," Kerry said. "The truth is that climate change shouldn't be a partisan issue. It's an issue that all of us should care about, regardless of political affiliation." During the campaign, Trump vowed to reinvigorate the U.S. coal industry and dismantle Obama regulations targeting coal-fired power plants. More recently, he's suggested he's keeping an open mind about climate change and about whether he'll pull the U.S. out of the global emissions-cutting deal struck in Paris in 2015 that Obama helped broker.

In Science, Obama argued that as the cost of clean energy sources drop, businesses are independently coming to the conclusion that it makes financial sense to wean themselves off of coal and other dirtier fuels.

He also said that if Trump pulls out of the Paris agreement, the U.S. would "lose its seat at the table" on global climate policy. Obama said a key advantage of the U.S. political system is that each president determines his or her own policies.
 "President-elect Donald Trump will have the opportunity to do so," Obama wrote. "The latest science and economics provide a helpful guide for what the future may bring."



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