The New York Times story on how the White House fed information to Devin Nunes appeared only minutes before the daily White House press conference began, but before the questions even opened it was clear that the Trump regime had thrown together a ragged, hasty response. The White House is sending a letter to both the House and the Senate intelligence committees, inviting them to come up to take a look at information that the White House believe is “very helpful.”
That letter was intended to cut off discussion of the matter. And for the most part it did, though it didn’t keep Spicer from clumsily stumbling around the topic.
Is the information that the congressmen are being invited to see the same as that that was handed to Nunes? Spicer wouldn’t confirm that (and there’s some evidence that Nunes never saw any actual documents).
What is the information? Spicer wouldn’t say. He would say that it is “Materials relevant to the area” though he followed up within a sentence saying that it was would be up to the visitors from Congress “to decide relevancy.” Spicer then rambled about how the congressfolk might see something they liked and ask for even more.
It’s clear that what they have is a bucket of things they hope provide some minimal support to Trump’s “wiretapp” tweet, and they’re hoping that if they show it to enough people, and hold it up to the light just so, at least one of them will find a reason to nod along with Trump.
Spicer insisted again and again that “process” wasn’t important, and that it was only the contents of the documents that mattered. Achieving tenth level guru self-contradiction, Spicer chided reporters for "your obsession with who talked to whom and when." That was the all purpose response of the day, including when Spicer was also confronted with his own statement that the idea that Nunes’ information had originated White House “didn’t pass the smell test.”
What’s clear is that the Trump White House brought Nunes in. Two operatives, one of them in the White House Counsel office, fed Nunes information they felt was vaguely supportive of Trump’s tweetstorm. At the time Nunes returned to talk to Ryan about this information, he had only a broad feel for the material, and according to Ryan, hadn’t seen the documents. Nunes then returned to the White House where he … briefed Trump on information provided by his own counsel and a man Trump had personally selected as the conduit for this information.
It was clear that reporters were frustrated, but one “answer” from Spicer summed up his attitude toward providing information.
"I never said I would provide you answers. I said we would look into it."
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