House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Sunday said new evidence the FBI released to the committee on Friday regarding an investigation into President Trump’s allegations the Obama administration “physically” wiretapped Trump Tower in Manhattan during the presidential election last year did not affect the conclusion that there was no interference.
“A president doesn’t go and physically wiretap something. If you take the president literally, it didn’t happen,” Nunes told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. “Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No. There never was. The information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction.”
The California Republican said his committee’s newest concern is the possibility that certain campaign officials’ names were “unmasked” by the media.
“The other issue that is still remaining out there is the unmasking of names, the leaking of names. We have a lot of surveillance activities in this country and I think the concern that the Trump administration has is ‘were they actually using surveillance activities to know what they were up to?'” Nunes said. “We know that that happened with Gen. Flynn.”
The one crime, Nunes said, his committee can confirm that took place was the leaking of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s name through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act system.
Nunes said it was “pretty clear” that members of the intelligence community or FBI intentionally leaked information about Flynn in order to hurt the Trump administration.
Nunes said the unmasking issue may have been what President Trump was alluding to in an interview earlier this week when he said, “wiretapped covers a lot of things.”
The White House has said Trump was not necessarily speaking about a physical wiretap but more generally about surveillance.
“If he’s talking with the unmasking of names and so if there were other surveillance activities were names were picked up and then unmasking occurred, and that was spread throughout the intelligence community, that is very possible,” Nunes said. “And we don’t have the answers to those questions yet,” Nunes added. “I don’t know if the president has those or not. We had a deadline of Friday for the [National Security Agency] to get those names to us, that were unmasked through the FISA system. We didn’t get those names on Friday. Until we get those names, we can’t rule those out.”
FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify before Nunes’ committee on the issue Monday. He will also address the House committee’s probe of whether the Trump campaign had contact with Russia during the election.
Nunes added that the FBI’s newest information to his committee showed no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
