Trump team spied on before he was nominated’.
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Nunes said he had not seen any evidence to support Trump’s claim, explaining the president’s communications may have been incidentally gathered when USA spy agencies conducted foreign surveillance in accordance to a warrant issued by a FISA judge in federal court.
Nunes was shown the documents last week by White House officials surreptitiously, then announced to reporters the next day that he needed urgently to go to the White House to brief Trump about them.
Nunes compromised his credibility by working behind the scenes with the White House and perhaps intentionally muddied the real issues at play: Russia’s hacking and its ties to Trump. The CIA also perceived Cohen-Watnick as a threat because he shared Flynn’s distrust of the national intelligence community.
What Trump really meant was that he wanted Flynn to testify before congressional committees, Spicer said. Cohen appealed to White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and chief strategist and senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon and remained in place. An early iteration of the review explored eliminating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella agency created after the September 11, 2001, attacks to streamline and coordinate intelligence.
Obama administration officials have acknowledged that there were efforts to preserve information that could be related to the Russian investigations, as was first reported in The New York Times.
“We want to make sure that the people who are conducting the review have that information, have access to it”, Spicer said, declining to comment on whether it was the same information seen by Nunes. “No more whistles = no more blowers”, said the president.
When questions were raised about where he received the information, Nunes told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that his source had not been a member of the White House staff. A former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent said after the hearing that Russian Federation had also used social media campaigns to smear other GOP presidential candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush and South Carolina Sen.
“We need people to investigate who actually have an interest in an independent investigation”, said protester Annaliese Herms, a 23-year-old office worker from Fresno. If it ever does produce a report, who could be expected to believe it?
Cohen-Watnick was a protege of Flynn, having worked for him at the Pentagon’s intelligence shop.
For the White House, it was another chaotic day in which its attempt to regain control of the political conversation – this time through two executive orders on trade – was relegated to an afterthought in Washington. His position also gives him the ability to request intelligence products from agencies. In 2016, China’s goods trade deficit with the USA stood at $347 billion, by far the largest figure. On Thursday, however, reports surfaced that three White House officials had helped provide the intelligence documents to Nunes. Their disclosures, he insisted, will show they have “set aside a lot” to serve the public.
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In the exchange with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Pelosi also noted that not all Republicans involved in investigating Russian Federation have compromised themselves, but the most important player in the House investigation right now – Devin Nunes – has shown a complete inability and unwillingness to lead a bipartisan inquiry.
