The House Intelligence Committee will subpoena information from law enforcement and intelligence agencies if necessary to investigate potential surveillance violations tied to former Trump national security adviser General Mike Flynn, the committee’s chairman said Wednesday.
The committee is probing the leak of pre-inaugural communications between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak as part of a broader investigation of illicit Russian activities. Flynn resigned in February after admitting that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes told reporters that Flynn’s communications were picked up via “incidental collection,” meaning that they were swept up during intelligence surveillance of an approved, likely foreign target. Flynn’s name was then potentially unmasked or exposed, Nunes said. The names of U.S. persons caught in incidental collection are typically redacted and only revealed under certain circumstances.
In a letter to directors of the NSA, FBI, and CIA sent Wednesday, the committee requested information about the officials and procedures behind the unmasking of a U.S. person’s identity. The committee also requested the names of U.S. persons who had been unmasked between June 2016 and January 2017 in similar intelligence gathering activities.
“I have been very clear about my concern about … the incidental collection on General Flynn, how that was put into a product, how it was unmasked, how it was leaked to the public,” Nunes told reporters. “Several crimes have been committed here.”
Nunes raised the possibility that incidental collection or unmasking took place even beyond Flynn, as well as the potential abuse of surveillance for political ends.
“Did additional names get leaked to the media, or were people using that information for other purposes that wouldn’t have had intelligence value?” he said.
Per the committee’s request, agencies have until Friday to provide information on matters including: the approval process for unmasking a U.S. person and disseminating that information, the names of any Trump or Clinton campaign-related U.S. persons whose names may have been unmasked and disseminated, and the names of the officials who may have requested or authorized the unmasking.
While the mechanism by which Flynn’s conversations were collected remains unknown, Nunes suggested the involvement of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“FISA is a critical tool that our intelligence agencies use,” he said. “We want to make sure that it’s done lawfully and legally.”
Nunes has previously suggested that Obama-era holdovers were behind the leaks.
“The number of people that would actually have known that General Flynn, who was the national security advisor designee, was having conversations with the Russians had to be a very, very small number,” he said in February on Face the Nation. “It had to be at the highest levels of the Obama administration.”
