Senate Intelligence Committee members Jim Lankford and Angus King told reporters Thursday they did not receive the information that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says proves surveillance of Trump campaign associates.
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“The reality is that [Nunes] made a decision”, Spicer said at Thursday’s White House press briefing.
He also said the communications were not related to investigations into potential ties between Trump associates and Russian Federation, and that their intelligence value was negligible. Former Vice President Joe Biden weighed in on Twitter, saying the chairman of a committee investigating the White House can’t share information with that White House. He expressed concern that the names of Trump transition aides had been “unmasked” – meaning they were identified in reports disseminated across the intelligence community.
However, Nunes said Wednesday that any surveillance of Trump and transition officials appears to have been “incidental” to unrelated investigations, and said he did not support Trump’s claim that President Obama illegally “wiretapped” Trump Tower.
President Trump said on camera that he felt somewhat vindicated by Nunes’s findings. But after speaking with Nunes, Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said that only one name in the report Nunes viewed was “unmasked” – and that name had nothing to do with the Trump team. “I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found”, Mr Trump said in brief comments before a meeting in the White House.
The communications were not linked to Russian Federation, he said, adding that they appeared to have “little or no intelligence value”.
Democrats said Nunes may have revealed classified information with his comments to reporters but the congressman’s spokesman said that he did not. It was highly unusual because Nunes had not yet shared that information with members of his own committee.
The US intelligence agencies regularly, and legally, monitor foreigners, and the communication of Americans is often incidentally collected. Nunes must “decide if he is the chairman of an independent investigation or if he’s a surrogate for the White House”, said Schiff. He signaled that the intelligence community may have, in his mind, included certain names in their reports that did not belong there. “We need to see the evidence”. Because a wiretapping is, you know, today it is different than wire tapping.
Representative Nunes and other members of Congress are right to investigate the source of these leaks as it is clear that there is an activity conspiracy to undermine the U.S. States government, namely President Donald Trump.
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“This can not be conducted in Congress in the impartial, independent way that the American people are expecting”.
