Two White House officials gave the House Intelligence Committee chairman reports on surveillance.
WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by U.S. spy agencies.
The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Nunes then discussed with Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.
Nunes has also been faulted by his congressional colleagues for sharing the information with Trump before consulting with other members of the intelligence committee.
The congressman has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe coming to the committee with sensitive information. He first disclosed the existence of the intelligence reports on March 22, and in his public comments he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.
Several current U.S. officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of former President Barack Obama, Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.
Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, the top Democrat on the committee, have held dueling news conferences in the days since Nunes’ revelations, fueling criticism that the committee is unable to conduct a serious, bipartisan investigation.