In the time since President Trump’s March 4 tweets alleging he had his “‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” shortly before last year’s election by President Obama, there’s been no evidence revealed that strictly supports his claim. Trump opponents view this lack of evidence as proof the president made it up as a distraction. Republican House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes’s disclosure last week about “incidentally collected information” of Trump associates by the intelligence community suggested there could be a nugget of veracity to Trump’s claim. Trump himself said he felt “somewhat” vindicated, even if Nunes himself says what he discovered was not a wiretap of Trump or Trump Tower.
Unfortunately, clarity on this issue—what occurred, why it occurred, and whether any of it was illegal or improper—has been hard to come by. All parties seem to have taken advantage of the partial picture for their own political purposes. And Monday’s revelation that one of Nunes’s sources for the relevant intelligence reports was in the White House complex only added more confusion to the equation.
Nunes’s White House Excursion
So who was Nunes’s source for these documents? Nunes had refused to say for days. Neither his Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, nor the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, said they knew who had tipped off Nunes. Sean Spicer, asked at least twice in public if the source of the information was from someone at the White House, said he didn’t know and declined to rule it out.
Spicer, it turns out, was wise not to deny that possibility. After the Daily Beast reported over the weekend that Nunes had “disappeared” from his staff the night before he announced his finding on Wednesday, the California Republican confirmed to CNN Monday morning that he had gone to the White House grounds to view the information in a secure location.
In an interview with journalist Eli Lake on Monday, Nunes said he met his source at the White House grounds (which also includes the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) last Tuesday evening to see the documents. As House Intelligence chair, Nunes has access to classified intelligence reports, which can be viewed in secure rooms on Capitol Hill. But these documents, it seems, were only available to the executive branch.
“Nunes told me that he ended up meeting his source on the White House grounds because it was the most convenient secure location with a computer connected to the system that included the reports, which are only distributed within the executive branch,” Lake reported.
Lake says Nunes told him that his source was an intelligence officer, not a White House staffer. A spokesman for Nunes declined to clarify if this source was an intelligence agency employee detailed to work in a particular office in the Executive Office of the President (such as the National Security Council) or an officer who remains answerable to his respective agency but works in a White House office.
Unknown, too, is what sort of protocols for revealing these classified documents did Nunes’s source have to abide by in order to allow Nunes access to the system for executive-branch only reports. Nunes spokesman Jack Langer declined to comment, and a senior White House aide claims to be unaware of any such protocols.
Regardless of who helped him access the documents Tuesday night and how, Nunes was back at the White House the next afternoon to brief the president on what he had seen.
‘What Was Wrong With Going to the White House?’
Defenders of Nunes say there’s nothing remarkable about this episode. “What was wrong with going to the White House?” House Intelligence committee member Trey Gowdy told my colleague Jenna Lifhits. “If that’s where the information is, and the information is relevant, and it’s authentic, and it’s reliable, wouldn’t you go where the information was?”
That sounds straightforward enough. But if the relevant information is at the White House, why does President Trump need a member of Congress to find and deliver that information to him? Put another way: Why didn’t Nunes’s source at the White House go directly to the president with such important information?
Tax Reform and Infrastructure
On the post-AHCA legislative front, Jonathan Swan at Axios reports the White House is looking at pushing for tax reform and infrastructure spending “concurrently.” Here’s Swan:
Song of the Day
“Walking On Broken Glass,” Annie Lennox.
