A former top official in the Obama Administration admitted on live television to gathering intelligence on current US President Donald Trump.

Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, admitted to taking part in the intelligence gathering on Trump's alleged ties to Russia during an on-air with MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski.

“I was urging my former colleagues, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration. Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people [from the Obama Administration] who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy...that the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about their...the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence,” Farkas said.

"That's why you have the leaking. People are worried," she answers.

Trump has accused the Obama Administration of illegally carrying out surveillance of him and people associated with his campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

Last week, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election, and that their identities were not redacted in the reports despite that being the standard protocol when US citizens are accidentally included in intelligence reports.

Nunes said that the evidence he had seen had been widely disseminated across the intelligence community despite having "little or no apparent intelligence value."