Donald Trump loves to level a charge of “leaker” at people with no evidence, and often over information that wasn’t protected in the first place. However, there was a clear violation of protected information from a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, and Daily Beast is reporting that information went straight to Trump’s attorneys.
Former McCain staffer David Kramer testified for the House Intelligence Committee in a closed door session. During that session, he fielded a lot of questions from Republicans interested in his role in bringing the Steele Dossier to the attention of the FBI.
And then ...
A few days after Kramer’s testimony, his lawyer, Larry Robbins, got a strange call. The call was from Stephen Ryan, a lawyer who represents Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen. Cohen is facing scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators regarding potential coordination between Trump’s team and the Kremlin. He featured prominently in the Steele dossier—the document that Kramer handled—and is currently suing Buzzfeed for publishing it.
Ryan told Robbins he reached out because someone from the House told him that Robbins’ client, Kramer, had information about the Steele dossier that could help Cohen.
So, someone at the House Intelligence Committee didn’t just leak information straight to one of Trump’s attorneys, they leaked information to an attorney who is himself under investigation, on a topic directly relevant to the investigation. In other words, whoever made this leak deliberately provided information that could provide legal advantage to someone under investigation.
Kramer’s attorney followed up the call from Cohen’s attorney by writing to the committee to complain that his client’s testimony had been improperly shared. Rep. Mike Conaway denied that the information had been leaked, but didn’t provide an explanation for how the information came to Cohen’s attorney.
And just who could this leaky person be? There’s one really good candidate.
Devin Nunes may have semi-recused himself from chairing the House Intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, but he’s still kept himself in control behind the scenes—and that includes at Kramer’s hearing.
Nunes already tried to pass off a scheme cooked up inside the White House as a “whistleblower” pointing out issues with past intelligence gathering.
He created his infamous memo, deliberately distorting and editing records in an effort to suggest that the FBI had acted improperly in securing a FISA warrant against Carter Page.
[Representative Devin Nunes] gave an evasive and equivocal answer to committee Democrats who asked if Nunes or his staff collaborated in any way with the White House on his memo, which presented a counternarrative on Russia highly convenient for Trump.
And senators know that some Republican on the committee has been leaking information from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.
Those texts ended up in the hands of Fox News.
So when it comes to who might have leaked important testimony to someone on the inside at the White House, it seems logical to look at the person who has been lying and scheming to help the White House since before the investigation began.