The mystery surrounding President Donald Trump's claim that he was wiretapped by Barack Obama during the 2016 election campaign deepened on Monday, when it was revealed that House Intel Committee Chair Devin Nunes was on the White House grounds where he reviewed classified information the day before he announced he had seen intelligence that showed members of President Trump's transition team had been caught up in surveillance operations.
U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, who has been embroiled in a firestorm of controversy over the past week, visited the White House the night before announcing on Wednesday that he had information that indicated some Trump associates may have been subjected to some level of intelligence activity before Trump took office on Jan. 20. According to a Daily Beast report, Nunes "went off the grid" that night to meet a source and view dozens of intelligence reports, including accounts of meetings involving President Donald Trump's advisers.
Nunes admitted he was on White House grounds, but not in the White House itself, for meetings "to confirm what I already knew," and he noted no one in the White House knew he was there. Nunes then declined to comment further because he didn't want to "compromise sources and methods."
Then it gets weirder.
As Bloomberg's Eli Lake adds, "CNN is reporting that Nunes had in fact slipped off to the White House grounds last Tuesday to view the documents. And then on Wednesday, after briefing reporters on what he had found in those intelligence reports, he went back to the White House to inform the president."
One question that has emerged since the details of Nunes' visit were revealed, is why would the Republican Intel Committee Chair need to brief the president on documents he viewed at a facility on White House grounds? The White House directed questions about the episode to Nunes. "We have been made aware through public reports that Chairman Nunes confirmed he was on the White House grounds on Tuesday and any questions concerning his meeting should be directed to the Chairman," the White House said.
In an interview Monday, Nunes told Lake that he ended up meeting his source on the White House grounds because it was the most convenient secure location with a computer connected to the system that included the reports, which are only distributed within the executive branch. "We don't have networked access to these kinds of reports in Congress," Nunes said. He added that his source was not a White House staffer and was an intelligence official.
Nunes, it should be said, has a history of cultivating independent sources inside the intelligence community. He made contact, for example, with the U.S. intelligence contractors who ended up saving most of the Americans stuck in the Benghazi outpost when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2012. More recently, Nunes has reached out to his network of whistleblowers to learn about pressure inside the military's Central Command on analysts to write positive reports on the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State.
In this case, Nunes had been hearing for more than a month about intelligence reports that included details on the Trump transition team, and had been trying to view them himself. He told me that when he finally saw the documents last Tuesday evening, he made sure to copy down their identifying numbers so he could request access to them formally for the rest of the committee.
Confirming Lake's account, Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said in a statement that Nunes "met with his source at the White House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source."
Comment from Chairman Nunes' spox about his whereabouts the day before his announcement Trump/associates may be swept up in surveillance pic.twitter.com/OZ06gSejbH
— Alex Moe (@AlexNBCNews) March 27, 2017
As Reuters adds, it was the latest twist in a saga that began on March 4 when Trump said on Twitter that he "just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory." FBI Director James Comey told Congress last Monday he had seen no evidence to support the claim. Trump's mention of wiretapping drew attention away from U.S. intelligence agencies having said that Russia tried to help Trump in the election against Democrat Hillary Clinton by hacking leading Democrats and spreading disinformation. Moscow denies any such activities. Trump has also dismissed them.
Nunes told reporters on Wednesday that he had briefed Trump "on the concerns I had about incidental collection and how it relates to President-elect Trump and his transition team and the concerns that I have." After an uproar over the allegations and the fact that he briefed Trump first before members of his own committee, Nunes apologized on Thursday for the way he handled the information. A congressional source said congressional investigators have questioned agencies directly to try to find out what intelligence reports and intercepts Nunes is referring to, but that as of Monday the agencies were still saying they did not know what Nunes was talking about.
Earlier on Monday, the Washington Post reported that Nunes was on his way to an event late Tuesday when he left his staff and went to review classified intelligence files brought to his attention by his source, whom he has not identified.
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Meanwhile, the White House has seized on Nunes' remarks to bolster Trump's unproven assertion that Obama wiretapped his campaign headquarters in Manhattan's Trump Tower. Nunes and some other Republicans have focused much of their concern over the investigation about the possibility that some Americans' names have been improperly "unmasked" and released to the public in leaks about the investigation of whether Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow. Nunes spokesman Langer cited concerns about the exposure of citizens' names in his statement.
"The chairman is extremely concerned by the possible improper unmasking of names of U.S. citizens, and he began looking into this issue even before President Trump tweeted his assertion that Trump Tower had been wiretapped," Langer said.
Democrats have questioned, given his actions, whether he can remain independent during the Intelligence Committee's own investigation of Russian meddling.
It remains unknown who was Nunes' source and whether he was doing the White House's bidding in saying the transition team has been surveilled. Nunes said last week that the surveillance was not related to Russia and that the Trump officials had been caught up in legal snooping.
Previously, CNN reported that Nunes was with a staff member at the White House when he reviewed the intelligence. A spokesman said the intelligence could not have been taken to the House.
“The information comprised executive branch documents that have not been provided to Congress,” a Nunes spokesman said. “Because of classification rules, the source could not simply put the documents in a backpack and walk them over to the House Intelligence Committee space. The White House grounds was the best location to safeguard the proper chain of custody and classification of these documents, so the Chairman could view them in a legal way."
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Going back to Lake, the Bloomberg reporter said that "Nunes told me these reports were sent to the Obama White House among other executive branch agencies. Nunes until now had only said the reports he viewed were widely distributed inside the government. "The reports included details about the Trump transition, meetings of Trump and senior advisers, they were distributed throughout the intelligence community and to the White House," Nunes said. "In some cases, there was additional unmasking of Trump transition team officials."
As Lake concludes, "this is suggestive, though not yet proof, that White House officials privy to the Russia investigation wanted keep tabs on Trump and his advisers in the period after the election and before his inauguration. It also fits together with other facts in this story as well. For example, on March 1, the New York Times reported that Obama White House officials sought to preserve intelligence in the final days and weeks of his presidency on Team Trump's connections to Russia and Russia's campaign to influence the election. Though Nunes says the reports he viewed had nothing to do with Russia."
The implications are two-fold as per Lake:
The good news is that we will soon get a second and third opinion. Nunes told me that he expects that his committee's members, including Democrats, will be able to read these documents themselves at secure locations outside of Congress as soon as this week.
If it turns out that intelligence about the Trump transition was included in dozens of reports that were sent to the White House, then the House Intelligence Committee really has two investigations. The first is of course a probe into how the Russian state meddled in the election and whether it did so with the aid of Trump's associates or campaign. The second is about whether the Obama White House inappropriately spied on Trump and his advisers during the transition to power.
While incomplete information and partisan innuendo continues to swirl, both sides are accusing each other of conducting a misdirection campaign meant to cover up either Trump's links to Russia, or Obama's surveillance of Trump for reasons still unknown. If Lake is correct, the mystery over Nunes' White House visit will soon be resolved. As to whether Trump is an alleged puppet of Putin, or if Obama was actively spying on Trump, sadly that particular inquiry is only just starting.