The subject of Devin Nunes’ antics dominated much of the afternoon press conference with Sean Spicer as reporters tried to make sense of what seemed to be an information loop beginning and ending at the White House. Under questioning, Spicer claimed that the White House is “not concerned” about that there might be a source within the executive branch. Asked whether Nunes can still lead an impartial investigation as chairman of the House Intelligence Committtee or whether the White House would support a special prosecutor, Spicer pivoted to saying that there were two issues, one of which was that everyone who has been briefed by FBI Director James Comey on the Russia issue says there’s nothing there—which is an absolute lie. He claimed the second is that there are leaks, which is a concern. Neither of these issues resembled the question that was asked, but then, neither did Spicer’s answers.
Spicer denied that what happened with Nunes was a leak, saying that Nunes is cleared for classified information and it wasn’t at all like when someone informs a reporter “for nefarious purposes.” Incredibly enough, Spicer said that Nunes had been “fairly open with the press about who he spoke to and why.”
The back and forth generated such twisted little moments of reality as ...
Reporter: Does the White House have knowledge of the information that Chairman Nunes received from the White House and does the White House know who he got it from?
Spicer: I’m not aware.
Spicer frequently pushed back against the idea that the person Nunes had talked to was a White House staffer, referring repeatedly to Nunes’ own statement that his source was an intelligence official. Spicer also insisted that Nunes had “multiple sources” and that it was “irresponsible” to say whether the information Nunes talked about in either of his recent press conferences was the same as that he collected while skulking in the shadows of the White House.
But the idea that Nunes came to the White House and reviewed this information on the basis of an invitation from a low-level intelligence official is somewhere south of ludicrous.
What Spicer completely left open was the prospect that someone in a higher position on the White House staff invited Nunes in to see the documents, which were then displayed to him by third person. In fact, Spicer seemed to be explicitly keeping this answer open by reminding the press that Trump had invited Congress to conduct an investigation. He repeated this point in explaining why they weren’t concerned about Nunes’ actions, and again in discussing why the White House itself didn’t release the information if Nunes’ documents were from executive sources.
Spicer’s words were very easy to interpret as “we wanted this information out there, but didn’t want to do it ourselves.”
It seems clear that: Someone in the Trump White House informed Nunes of the information, someone in the Trump White House signed Nunes into the White House grounds, someone at the Trump White House provided Nunes access to an executive branch system, and someone in the Trump White House displayed for Nunes a series of documents indicating that some Trump associates may have been caught up in intelligence collection on foreign sources. One of those people may have been an intelligence official, but certainly not all.
What continues to be extremely confusing is simply the process here. The general system for distributing classified information from the executive branch to the legislative branch is simply to deliver that information to the Congressional office. So why all the spy vs. spy nonsense of Nunes slipping unknown into the White House grounds to peek directly into an executive branch computer?
In the end we still don’t know who Nunes saw, and we don’t know what documents he viewed. However, we have Nunes’ own statement that what he saw “had nothing to do with Russia,” and that certainly provides a good possibility of what lit Nunes’ hair on fire.
The Wall Street Journal report shows that not only was Flynn under investigation for his relations with Turkey, but Nunes himself was present for at least one meeting with Turkish officials. If what was revealed to Nunes was that his own name was showing up on the FBI radar as someone possibly connected to an investigation, it certainly might have rattled the House Intelligence head, and would feed directly back into his repeated statements that his major concern was “unmasking” of Americans involved in a investigation.
In other words, Nunes may have been engaged in a heavy dose of CYA rather than in protecting Donald Trump’s nether regions. Someone at the Trump White House may even have gone out of their way to make it clear that there was information out there Nunes would definitely not want leaked.
There’s also the possibility that there was something in the reports that’s genuinely damning—maybe not for Nunes, maybe not for Trump, but maybe for someone that they’d just as soon not see doing at lot of talking in front of a jury.
Certainly nothing that Spicer or Nunes provided on Monday gave any sort of reassurance that the chairman’s actions were anything less than bizarre … because they were bizarre.