Eli Lake has the story that everybody should be talking about today — the case of Devin Nunes’ mysterious intelligence reports on Trump transition officials has apparently been solved:
White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter….
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
Lake notes that the standard for whether this sort of unmasking of the names of U.S. persons is lawful is that “it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything.” And at least in the case of foreign officials merely discussing Trump transition team members, you could imagine a situation in which an exiting administration would want to warn the incoming one of what foreign powers were doing to undermine it or take advantage of it.
The thing is, we don’t know yet if this was the purpose, and the circumstances don’t point to that. Rice’s requests were only discovered weeks after Trump took office — on a national security database kept in the White House, which Nunes visited in order to inspect (another mystery solved).
It bears repeating that Nunes said the intercepted communications he claimed he had seen were not related to Russia. Not only that, but he opined that there was no apparent intelligence value to what he saw. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation, but it would be much more politically consequential if it turns out that the unmasking of the names had little purpose besides satiating the curiosity of someone taking advantage of her high position.
