Report: 2 White House officials provided spying info to Nunes
WASHINGTON - House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes received information about intelligence reports mentioning President Donald Trump from two White House officials, according to a report in The New York Times.
The Times, citing anonymous sources, said the officials were Ezra CohenWatnick and Michael Ellis. Cohen-Watnick is the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council; Ellis works in the White House counsel’s office on national security issues.
Neither the White House nor the intelligence committee would confirm the report, but White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House discovered relevant additional information and has invited members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to the White House to review it.
But Spicer was careful not to address the Times story directly. “In order to comment on that story would be to validate things that I’m not at liberty to do,” Spicer said.
A spokesman for Nunes also would not confirm the sources of the chairman’s information. “As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources,” said Jack Langer, communications director for the House Intelligence Committee.
If true, the report would further call into question the independence of the House investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign. And it would add a new wrinkle to the intrigue over Trump’s allegation that President Barack Obama ordered wiretapping on Trump Tower last year.
That saga exploded last week when Nunes, a California Republican, made what seemed to be a startling disclosure: Reports he had viewed suggested that intelligence agencies had collected information about people connected to Trump’s presidential transition committee.
While that collection of information was “incidental” to legal electronic monitoring of non-Americans, Nunes said he was concerned that agencies distributed those reports within the intelligence community in violation of laws requiring “minimization” of information collected on Americans.
Nunes briefed Trump about that information at the White House. But Nunes later acknowledged that he had visited the White House complex the day before, and the New York Times story suggested he spoke with the two White House officials.
Democrats have demanded that Nunes recuse himself from the investigation.