The top spokesman for President Trump declined to rule out that someone at the White House may have given or alerted the House Intelligence committee chairman about documents revealing intelligence collection involving Trump campaign associates. On Wednesday California congressman Devin Nunes briefed the press and later President Trump on information he had obtained that showed “the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in his Friday briefing that he did not know who provided the documentation to Nunes, a Republican. When asked if he could categorically rule out that someone at the White House had done so, Spicer said he could not answer the question because he was unaware of where the document came from.
“I’m not aware of where he got the document from. I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know where he got it from, he didn’t state it, so I don’t have anything for you on that. So I cannot say anything more than I don’t know at this point.”
Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, declined to say if the White House was the chairman’s source. “To protect the source and to reassure anyone else considering sharing information with the committee, Chairman Nunes has refused to comment in any way on any speculation about the source of the documents,” said Langer in an email Friday.
Nunes has said the identifying information was collected via legal surveillance of one or multiple foreign entities, and that the Trump-related information collected was incidental and that Trump associates were not the target of the surveillance. Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the Intelligence committee, has said the Trump associates’ identities were redacted in the intelligence reports that had been distributed within the government.
Following Nunes’s revelation, Trump said he felt “somewhat vindicated” by the news. Earlier this month the president had tweeted that Barack Obama had, during the campaign, ordered wire taps on Trump and Trump Tower. Nunes has said there “never was” any evidence of a wiretap on Trump Tower.
