Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
White House: Come see key files
Official offers to show lawmakers intel reports apparently tied to House panel chair
WASHINGTON — The White House offered Thursday to show lawmakers intelligence reports that purportedly mention associates of President Donald Trump, raising new questions about whether the president’s staff previously leaked details about the classified documents it is now offering Congress.
In a letter Thursday, White House Counsel Donald McGahn invited the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees to review the classified documents — apparently the same reports mentioning Trump transition officials that Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the House committee chairman, said he was shown at the White House last week.
Nunes and White House press secretary Sean Spicer have repeatedly refused to answer questions about the identities of those involved in unearthing the intelligence reports or arranging for Nunes to review them at the White House complex — although Nunes at one point said his source was not a member of the White House staff.
The developments seemed to confirm that the initial disclosure of the reports to Nunes alone was at some level a White House effort to shift attention away from the president’s discredited claim that thenPresident Barack Obama ordered him to be wiretapped.
“In the ordinary course of business, National Security Council staff discovered documents that we believe are responsive” to a request from the House panel about intelligence information collected on Trump associates, McGahn said in a letter to the lawmakers. “We would like to make these available for … inspection.”
The White House offer came after The New York Times reported that two White House officials — Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office — helped Nunes gain access to the reports.
The Washington Post reported that according to White House officials, John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, was also involved in handling the material.
Ellis had worked closely with Nunes when Ellis was the general counsel for the House Intelligence Committee. Cohen-Watnick, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official, advised the Trump transition team along with Nunes.
Ellis reports to Eisenberg, and Ellis and Eisenberg report to McGahn, the White House counsel.
Cohen-Watnick is “in over his head” in the job, a senior intelligence official said. He was brought into the White House by Michael Flynn before Flynn was fired as national security adviser in February, and several senior intelligence officials said they were surprised he wasn’t replaced when H.R. McMaster took over Flynn’s job.
During a preliminary meeting this month to discuss the possibility of Flynn testifying before Congress, Flynn’s lawyer said he wanted to explore the possibility of his client receiving full immunity in exchange for his participation.
Intelligence committee lawyers responded to the lawyer by saying that immunity request, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was premature. “That’s not on the table,” an official said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, DCalif., told reporters he would review the documents but was troubled by the “cloak-and-dagger stuff” and the “circuitous route” that the White House appears to have used in providing the materials to Nunes, who has refused to disclose the source he received them from. “If that was designed to hide the origin of the materials, that raises profound questions about just what the White House is doing,” Schiff said.
He added that if the White House goal was to distract the committee from its investigation into whether the Trump campaign had contacts with the Russian government, “it will not be successful.”
It remains unclear whether the intelligence reports referred to by the White House describe actual conversations between Trump transition officials and foreign officials under U.S. surveillance, or whether the Trump associates are only mentioned by others in intercepted conversations, emails or other communications.
Trump said last week he felt partly vindicated by Nunes’ disclosure, saying that it backed up his previous claim that he had been “wiretapped” before the election by President Obama. Nunes, however, said that “never happened” and that the surveillance he referred to took place after the election, was legally authorized and did not involve Russia.
Nunes set off a firestorm last week when he disclosed that an unidentified source had told him of “dozens” of intelligence reports from court-authorized surveillance that included the names of transition team members. He said he was going immediately to the White House to brief Trump on the information.
Nunes subsequently admitted that he had received the information at the White House complex, claiming it was the only place where he could examine the highly classified intelligence report.
His spokesman conceded that Nunes did not know “for sure” that any Trump aides had actually been subject to surveillance, only that their names had appeared in intelligence reports.