The New York Times reports that two White House officials were involved in uncovering and distributing intelligence reports that wound up in the hands of House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes last week. “Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee,” writes the Times.
A person with knowledge of the matter tells me Cohen-Watnick was not directed by anyone at the White House to find the reports, which Nunes has claimed reveal improper unmasking of Trump campaign and transition team associates through likely legal surveillance. Instead, the source says, the NSC staffer discovered them while researching the unmasking procedure. And in a Thursday letter to Nunes and his Democratic counterpart Adam Schiff, White House counsel Donald McGahn indicated that some documents were discovered “in the ordinary course of business” by the NSC. McGahn states in the letter that the White House would facilitate Schiff reviewing these documents.
The source says Cohen-Watnick did not alert Nunes to the documents. Cohen-Watnick allegedly alerted the White House counsel’s office about his findings. Ellis, a lawyer in the office, is considered a part of the NSC’s legal team. He also once worked on the committee Nunes chairs, both under Nunes and former chairman Rep. Mike Rogers.
After visiting the White House grounds on the evening of March 21 to view the documents, Nunes briefed House speaker Paul Ryan on the information he learned on the morning of March 22. That same day, Nunes gave a press conference and mentioned some details from what he had seen. He later traveled back to the White House that afternoon to brief President Trump.
Nunes has declined to confirm or deny Cohen-Watnick was a source. “As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources,” said Nunes spokesman Jack Langer. Earlier this week Nunes told Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake that his source was not a White House staffer but an intelligence officer.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer also declined to engage on questions about the Times reporting. “I’m not commenting on the reports,” Spicer said at his Thursday press briefing. “We are not going to start commenting on one-off anonymous sources that publications publish.”
Spicer also reiterated his call for journalists to stop questioning the “process” and instead look into the “substance” of what Nunes revealed to the public last week.
There remain several unanswered questions about the nature of the information collected by U.S. intelligence and whether the identities of Trump officials were improperly revealed in reports that were distributed within the government. According to the Times, the reports “consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.”
