White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano’s claim that the British intelligence service surveilled President Donald Trump on then-President Barack Obama’s behalf. Napolitano has promoted conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terror attacks and other events, and a British security official has denied the “absurd” claim, suggesting that Spicer is willing to imperil the “special relationship” with the United Kingdom to bail out the president.

Over the past 24 hours, the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have said that they have seen no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the presidential election. In an effort to defuse the situation during today’s press briefing, Spicer read aloud from a series of news articles that he falsely claimed supported Trump’s statement. This included Napolitano’s March 13 statement on Fox & Friends that, according to “three intelligence sources,” Obama relied on “GCHQ,” the “British spying agency,” to obtain transcripts of “conversations involving President-elect Trump” with “no American fingerprints on this.”

Here is Spicer suggesting that our allies in the U.K. spied on the current president on behalf of his predecessor, based on Napolitano’s reporting:

And here is Napolitano telling Alex Jones, the founder of the 9/11 Truth movement -- which claims the U.S. government carried out the 2001 terror attacks -- that it is “hard for me to believe that” World Trade Center Building 7 “came down by itself,” and that “twenty years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us”:

Napolitano has pushed a wide array of conspiracy theories over the years, including floating the possibility that Osama bin Laden was still alive and the government was “pulling a fast one to save Obama's lousy presidency."

The suggestion that Obama asked British intelligence to surveil British intelligence appears to originate in part from conspiracy theorist and former CIA official Larry Johnson, who made the claim during an interview on state-sponsored Russian news network RT. The interview was widely circulated by hyperpartisan and conspiracy theory websites in the days before Napolitano’s appearance.

A British security official denied the claim on March 14, telling Reuters it was “totally untrue and quite frankly absurd.” But now it’s been promoted from the podium by the president’s spokesman.

Spicer also cited commentary from Fox host Sean Hannity to support Trump’s claim. As he was speaking from the podium, Hannity was on his radio show suggesting that President Obama and U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson, who last night granted a temporary restraining order against Trump’s revised Muslim ban, may have been “best friends in Hawaii” and used drugs together.