House minority leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also called for Nunes to recuse himself from investigations of any Trump connections with Russian Federation. Many White House staffers can sign off on someone coming to the grounds. “I’m not sure that that’s how that works”.
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Nunes was asked whether the president’s name came up in the reports he read.
Trump appeared to complain about controversy surrounding Nunes on Monday night. The claim has been denounced at the highest levels of the intelligence community.
According to a senior congressional official, Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) spoke with the White House counsel “some weeks ago” to warn that the committee would be seeking to speak with administration officials, including Kushner.
The day after Nunes viewed the intelligence, he briefed Trump on its contents and held a news conference.
Whatever documentation Nunes received, it didn’t show that Trump had been wiretapped but, rather, as Vox reports, “Trump officials had spoken to a foreign national whose communications were being monitored by US intelligence, so their conversations were picked up despite the fact that they weren’t targets of surveillance”. The conversations in question also happened after the election and, as observers have noted, could include remarks about Trump and his team.
People outside the Trump orbit are less impressed, however.
He has not named his source and did not indicate that it was from the White House itself. Rep. Schiff called that “bizarre” and “wrong”.
Nunes confirmed this week that he received intelligence about the alleged surveillance while visiting White House grounds.
Pelosi said Nunes’ “discredited behavior” had tarnished his office and that Ryan should force him to recuse himself. This can only be legally evaluated when more is known about the contents of the mysterious documents that are now causing such a controversy on Capitol Hill. The Trump administration was not aware of his visit, he said. On Thursday, spokesman Spicer mocked the idea.
The cancellation sparked a strong response from the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, who took to Twitter to slam the move as an “attempt to choke off public info”.
Nunes himself insisted that neither the West Wing nor the president had known that he was on the grounds that day meeting with his unnamed source, but said that he was there to “confirm what I already knew”.
“We’re letting this review proceed and we can address this after he decides to be clear about that”, he said of Nunes’ investigation.
Until Nunes’ recent actions, Castro had been complimentary of the California Republican, praising him for allowing the Russian Federation probe to proceed in a bipartisan manner.
Nunes has not identified his source. First, Trump’s wiretapping charge was about Trump Tower, not the White House (a point Langer later corrected). Schiff, a normally mild-mannered lawmaker, also suggested that Nunes couldn’t be trusted to oversee the probe. He later backtracked that claim and then apologized for not sharing the news with the House Intelligence Committee.
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Nor did Langer respond to a question about whether Nunes would resign from his position.
