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Barack Obama and his administration must have been told about the bugging of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, a senior Russian lawmaker has argued. Obama has reportedly told the German leader he had known nothing about the NSA operation when the two of them spoke earlier this month. "You can’t possibly believe that the Obama administration knew nothing about Merkel’s tapping due to a huge amount of NSA operations," tweeted Alexei Pushkov, Russian parliament’s chief of foreign affairs committee. "It’s just laughable," he opined. Earlier, the Wall Street Journal cited its sources in the US government as saying that the National Security Agency had been spying on 35 foreign leaders for over five years. The massive data scooping program then caught the attention of Obama’s administration, which ordered to halt them. Some of the operations were stopped at once while others are still pending, the paper says. Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine also said Obama and Merkel had a phone call where the US leader apologized for the NSA’s activities and vowed he had been kept in the dark on them. He reportedly claimed he would have scrapped the program as soon as he had learned that the spy agency was monitoring the chancellor’s phone. Germany has "no new information on US spying claims The German government said Monday it has "no new information" on allegations of wiretapping by the United States' intelligence services. "We are in the process of clearing up this serious case," said government spokesman Steffen Seibert. "Germany and the US can solve these problems together," he said. Voice of Russia, RIA, dpa. Source: Voice Of Russia
