SPYING
revelation, Committee Chairman Devin Nunes pointed out that the new information does not confirm Trump’s assertions about Obama wiretapping him before the election.
And Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the panel, said “Trump’s claims remain as baseless today as yesterday ... There’s no evidence to support the content that the president was wiretapped by his predecessor.”
Schiff renewed his party’s calls for an independent probe of Trump campaign links to Russia in addition to the GOP-led panel’s investigation. Schiff said he had seen “more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump associates colluded with Russia.
The surveillance development came just two days after Ohio Congressman Mike Turner asked the heads of the FBI and National Security Agency whether it was possible that they inadvertently collected information about Trump and his transition team while conducting surveillance on foreign officials.
Nunes characterized the intelligence reports — which he does not possess but were described to him by sources he did not identify — as including “essentially a lot of information on the presidentelect and his transition team and what they were doing.” He said he thinks the information was legally collected but questioned whether the identity of the U.S. citizens involved in the information was properly “masked.”
The California Republican said none of the surveillance was related to criminal investigations or Russia. He briefed House Speaker Paul Ryan as well as Trump about what he’d learned and said he had requested additional information from the FBI, CIA and NSA.
The information, Nunes said, had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value,” but was nonetheless “widely disseminated” in intelligencecommunity reporting.
He told CNN that “President-elect Trump and his team were put into intelligence reports.”
“Clearly there is a lot of information in the reports that I’ve seen, which were dozens, that would lead me to believe that the last administration and numerous agencies had a pretty good idea of what Presidentelect Trump was up to and what his transition team was up to and who they were meeting with,” Nunes said.
It was unclear whether Trump’s own communications were monitored. Nunes initially said “yes” when asked if Trump was among those swept up in the intelligence monitoring, but then said it was only “possible.”
During an Intelligence Committee hearing Monday, NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey both said they hadn’t see any evidence that Obama had wiretapped Trump, and Comey said Obama would’ve needed a court order to do so.
Nunes said the information he has involves post-election conversations in November, December and January — all during the transition period to the new presidency.
Turner said, “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.”
In an interview Monday, the Dayton Republican said he has been concerned for some time about whether conversations 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’ officials acknowledges that private conversations of private U.S. citizens will “inevitably” be intercepted.
“The question is what happens next,” Turner said.
In 2009, a Capitol Hill newspaper reported that a NSA wiretap had picked up then-Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage charges against two representatives of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee if the agent lobbied then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to name her chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman denied she sought such an agreement.
Schiff complained that his California colleague on the intelligence panel did not inform him of the new information before telling the White House and briefing the press.
“This really impedes our ability to do this investigation the way it should,” the Democrat said.
Later, in an interview with MSNBC, Schiff said evidence “that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of an investigation” exists of Trump associates colluding with Russia as it interfered in last year’s election. He did not outline that evidence.
“This is a bizarre situation,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on MSNBC. “I’m calling for a select committee because I think this back-andforth shows that Congress no longer has the credibility to handle this alone.”