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On 4 March 2017, the web site The Last Line of Defense published an article positing that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of former president Barack Obama over the (unsubstantiated) claim that he had illegally ordered wiretapping of telephones at Trump Tower prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election: None of this was true. Barack Obama was not arrested, nor was a warrant issued for his arrest. No FBI spokesman named Todd McMartin made a statement about Obama's supposed imminent arrest to Fox News, nor to any other news organization (and an FBI spokesman would not be able to publicly comment on an investigation in progress in any case). And, of course, the notion that President Trump could order a wiretap solely via executive order to incriminate another president who ordered a wiretap without a federal order legally authorized by a judge is an amusing irony. This news about Barack Obama's imminent arrest originated with The Last Line of Defense, a well known satirical (i.e., fake news) web site whose disclaimer notes that: The Last Line of Defense followed up this spoof article the following day with another fabricated piece detailing Obama's supposed arrest in Canada: The story re-emerged in late March 2017when it was picked up by dubious aggregator sites, but remains false.
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