Tension has increased between the White House and the FBI since President Donald Trump claimed that former President Barack Obama ordered wiretaps on his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower, CBS reported Tuesday.
Senior FBI officials asked the Justice Department several days ago to publicly reject the president’s allegation, but they have remained silent, adding to the unease, CBS reported.
FBI Director James Comey reportedly was "incredulous" at Trump's claims.
The source said Comey felt "institutionally he has to push back on this," because the allegations make the FBI look bad and due to the magnitude of the claims he knows not to be true.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told ABC on Monday she doesn't think Trump accepts the reported denial of his allegations about being wiretapped.
This is the latest sign of a strain in the relationship between Comey and Trump, CBS reported. Last month the FBI declined a request from the White House to deny that there were contacts between Trump associates and Russian operatives.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley told CBS that "An FBI director cannot stand in this type of conflict with a president for very long," as tension between the two is a politically dangerous situation for both men.
"You have an executive branch that seems at odds with itself,” Turley said. “You have a president who is asking another branch to investigate his branch. You have an FBI director who is asking another department to correct the president publicly. That's all putting us in rather uncharted and uneasy waters."
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