Most of the Trump transition members whose communications were allegedly collected via pre-inaugural incidental surveillance had their identities redacted in intelligence reports, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday. The chairman of the committee informed him of that detail, he said.
The remarks from ranking member Adam Schiff came in the wake of a press conference that committee chairman Devin Nunes held this afternoon. Schiff said that he and other intelligence committee members did not know about Nunes’s allegations prior to the press conference.
Nunes told reporters Wednesday that Trump transition members’ communications were repeatedly intercepted during legal surveillance on a foreign target, otherwise known as incidental collection. These communications were then disseminated in intelligence reports, despite having “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value.” A number of Trump transition members’ names were also revealed through a process known as “unmasking,” he said.
Schiff said that, according to conversations with the chairman that took place after the press conference, many of the names in the communications remained masked. Nunes took issue with the intercepts because he was able to infer the identity of the Trump team members despite their being masked, Schiff said.
“Most of the names in the intercepts were in fact masked, and the chairman’s concern was that he could still figure out the identities of some of the parties even though the names were masked. Well, that doesn’t mean that the masking was improper,” Schiff told reporters. “The chairman has provided no evidence that any names that were unmasked were unmasked improperly.”
April Doss, a former NSA lawyer who spent over a decade at the agency, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD earlier in March that intelligence officials are required to follow strict procedures governing foreign intelligence collection. These procedures protect the identity of U.S. persons.
“If the communication appears likely to be worth reporting on—there’s a reason why other people in government need to see an intelligence report that says, “here’s what our foreign target was doing”— they’ll write the report in a way that focuses only on the foreign target and that doesn’t name the U.S. person, that literally inserts something like ‘U.S. person number one,'” Doss said.
A U.S. person’s name can be unmasked in some circumstances, such as if it is necessary for context to understand the intelligence.
Schiff on Wednesday also criticized Nunes for holding a press conference on the intercepts prior to informing the committee about them. The House Intelligence Committee is conducting an investigation into illicit Russian activities that includes intelligence leaks and potential collusion between the Trump team and Russia.
“I only learned about this the way that all of you did, when the chairman briefed the press in advance of briefing his own committee members, and that is a deep, deep problem,” Schiff said.
He stressed that the committee still has not seen the intercepts, and said that Wednesday’s events highlight the necessity of an independent commission in addition to intelligence committee probes.
“The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation,” Schiff said, “or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House. Because he cannot do both.”
FBI director Jim Comey publicly confirmed the existence of an investigation into Russian election interference at a House Intelligence Committee hearing Monday. The probe includes the possibility of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
