A crowd at President Trump‘s rally Sunday evening chanted “lock him up” after the president accused his predecessor, former President Obama, of being caught “spying” on the 2016 Trump campaign.
During the event in Henderson, Nev., Trump told attendees that the former president “got caught spying on my campaign,” referring to longstanding accusations from him and his allies that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia in 2016 was orchestrated by the Obama administration in an attempt to sink his candidacy, a claim for which there is no evidence.
In response, many attendees began chanting “lock him up!”, a riff on the “lock her up” chant the president encouraged during his 2016 run against Hillary Clinton (D), during which he alleged that his opponent had committed crimes by operating a private email server as secretary of state.
The president has ratcheted up his rhetoric aimed at Obama in recent months, accusing the former president in June of committing “treason” while touting the upcoming results of the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the probe into the Trump campaign.
“Treason. Treason. It’s treason,” Trump told CBN News in June.
“They’d been spying on my campaign,” the president added at the time. “Turned out I was right. Let’s see what happens to them now.”
His repeated baseless claims come as the Justice Department’s own inspector general previously told the Senate late last year that neither the former president nor former Vice President Joe Biden (D) were involved with the decision to begin the investigation.
“We certainly didn’t see any evidence of that in the FBI’s files or the department’s files,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December.