Trump’s communications may have been captured
Info comes 2 days after Ohio congressman raised questions.
Days after Rep. WASHINGTON — Mike Turner asked the heads of the FBI and NSA whether it was possible that they inadvertently collected information about President-elect Donald Trump and his team by surveilling foreign governments, the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee said such surveillance took place.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes confirmed Wednesday that he had examined “doz-
ens” of intelligence reports that included details about the Trump administration’s conversations with foreign officials in the aftermath of the November elections, and said that the intelligence reports “unmasked” the identity of the transition officials involved.
Nunes did not say where he got the intelligence reports but characterized them as including “essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.”
He said he believed the information had been legally
collected but questioned whether the identities of the U.S. citizens involved in the legally surveilled information were properly “masked.”
The California Republican said none of the surveillance was related to criminal investigations.
Nunes said the information had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value,” but was nonetheless “widely disseminated” in intelligence community reporting.
Trump had previously made Twitter allegations that former President Barack
Obama “wiretapped” him. And Trump said Wednesday he was “somewhat vindicated” by the reports.
But House Intelligence Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff said the information “certainly does not suggest — in any way — that the pres- ident was wiretapped by his predecessor.”
Schiff said he had not heard about the intercepts before Nunes briefed the press and the White House.
“If the information was lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials, that would mean that U.S. persons would not have been
the subject of surveillance,” he said, adding that Nunes told him most of the names on the intercepts remained masked “but he could still figure out the probable iden-
tity of the parties.” “Again, this does not indi- cate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agen- cies,” he said. “Moreover,
the unmasking of a U.S. person’s name is fully appropriate when it is necessary to understand the context of collected foreign intelli- gence information.”
At a Tuesday hearing of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey both said they hadn’t seen any evi- dence that Obama had wiretapped Trump, and Comey said Obama would’ve needed a court order to do so.
But Trump’s initial allega- tions — made in early March — were that Obama himself had “wiretapped” his conversations before the November election.
Nunes said that the infor- mation he has involved con- versations in November, December and January — all during the transition period to the new presidency. And Nunes said O bama had not directly “wiretapped” Trump, as Tr u mp had alleged, but that the con- versations were picked up because of monitoring of the foreign countries involved in the conversations.
Still, he said, the names of U.S. citizens whose conversations were picked up should not have been released.
Nunes’ comments come after Turner, R-Dayton, asked Rogers and Comey on Monday whether it was possible that the intelligence community picked up Trump’s conversations because of their surveillance of others during a rare open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.
“The reason why this is important is because intuitively we would all know the incoming administration would have conversations with those that the intelligence community may be collecting against either by making phone calls to them or receiving phone calls from them,” Turner said.
In an interview Monday, Turner said he had been concerned for some time about whether or not conversa
tions picked up “incidentally” through surveillance of other countries involved
the “unmasking” of U.S. citizens involved in those conversations. He said the law allowing surveillance of foreign countries acknowledges
that private conversations of private U.S. citizens will “inevitably” be intercepted.
“The question is, ‘What happens next,’” he said.
Nunes briefed both House Speaker Paul Ryan
and Trump about what he’d learned, and said he had requested additional information on the information from the FBI, CIA and NSA. After that meeting, Trump told CNN that he felt “somewhat” vindicated by Nunes’ information.
Nunes said none of the surveillance he’d learned about “was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities.”