In his press conference today, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., talked about executive branch surveillance of members of the Trump administration. In doing so, he referred to an earlier scandal from when the Obama administration had incidentally collected conversations that members of Congress had with foreign officials.
Here’s the story he was referring to — and it’s about the Obama administration, while spying on Israeli officials, incidentally collected conversations involving members of Congress. Given that Nunes said the surveillance of the Trump team had nothing to do with Russia, this may be quite a significant reference.
In December 2015, the revelation that President Obama was monitoring Israeli officials was embarrassing for a couple of reasons. First, he’d promised earlier not to spy on friendly heads of state after earlier revelations of spying on German authorities, among others. Second, even the hint that the executive branch was spying on legislators was something White House officials understood could be politically explosive, especially amid disagreements about the Iran deal.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears — an “Oh-s—- moment,” one senior U.S. official said — that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that the administration tried to hide what it was doing by not formally requesting the information, but instead leaving it to the NSA what to give the White House:
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Perhaps Nunes only brought this up because it was a similar case of incidental intelligence collection on Americans. Or perhaps he brought it up because the surveillance he is discussing, whose dissemination within the government he described as alarming, has something to do with discussions between Team Trump and the Israelis.
