Campaign Action
House Intelligence Committee ranking Democratic member Adam Schiff is now out with a response to Rep. Nunes' baffling decision today to brief the Trump White House as to new details of the intelligence investigation against them. He sounds a bit peeved.
If accurate, this information should have been shared with members of the committee, but it has not been. Indeed, it appears committee members only learned about this when the Chairman discussed the matter this afternoon with the press. The Chairman also shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity, given that the matter is currently under investigation. I have expressed my grave concerns with the Chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way.
Which, one presumes, is exactly why Trump transition team member Devin Nunes is doing it.
As to the substance of what the Chairman has alleged, if the information was lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials, that would mean that U.S. persons would not have been the subject of surveillance. In my conversation late this afternoon, the Chairman informed me that most of the names in the intercepted communications were in fact masked, but that he could still figure out the probable identities of the parties. Again, this does not indicate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agencies. Moreover, the unmasking of a U.S. Person's name is fully appropriate when it is necessary to understand the content of collected foreign intelligence information.
In a press conference this afternoon Schiff blasted Nunes, questioning his independence and stating that Nunes “will need to decide if he is the chairman of an independent investigation or if he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House.”
So to recap, members of Donald Trump's campaign and/or transition teams, possibly including Donald Trump himself, had some of their own conversations incidentally recorded due to the other, foreign party on those conversations being the subject of a U.S. intelligence investigation. The House chair of the committee investigating those intelligence concerns, upon hearing of this, immediately set out to make sure Trump's team knew just what the intelligence community had recorded—despite there being no allegation that the intelligence community was acting improperly, and despite the ongoing nature of the investigations. He cut the rest of the committee out of the loop, only briefing them after returning from the White House.
Devin Nunes apparently believes revealing that U.S. intelligence investigations have now resulted in, according to him, multiple ties to the Trump team itself is somehow good news for Donald Trump. Or, alternatively, he's merely attempting to sabotage the related investigations by exposing details of their scope and targets, which would be a bizarre theory to make except for the part where Nunes seems to have done exactly that. Now the Trump team knows that people they've spoken to directly are the subject of FISA warrants. Now the people on the other side of those phone calls are aware of that too. Multiple persons in the know believe that Nunes' actions today are, were, in fact, criminal.
Towards what end? Protecting Donald Trump.
