[W]hy would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to the Russian government. Were the president's men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?
Those are very good questions. I'd initially assumed the White House officials went looking for something to substantiate Trump's wiretap conspiracy theory, but consider this detail from the
Washington Post's
report:
[Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council,] gathered the cases of incidental collection on Trump campaign operatives after arriving at the NSC. One official said Cohen did so as part of research unrelated to Trump's wiretapping tweet. Instead, the official said, Cohen was assembling materials out of concern that intelligence information on U.S. persons was being shared too widely and that unmasking rules were being abused.
The
New York Times' report said something similar: Cohen-Watnick "came upon the information as he was reviewing how widely intelligence reports on intercepts were shared within the American spy agencies."In other words, this wasn't about Trump's odd conspiracy theory; it looks like White House officials snooping into snooping -- during an ongoing FBI investigation.As
Rachel recommended on the show last night, "Do keep an eye on this question about the National Security Council staffers and White House counsel staffers. If they really were reviewing raw FBI intercepts of foreign surveillance involving members of the Trump transition, why were they reading that stuff? And is it possible that the White House has been tracking the FBI probe into the Trump-Russia scandal? Using the intelligence community's capacities, using the surveillance capacities of the U.S. government in order to track the investigation into themselves? If so, I really don't know what the fixes for that."One last thing. White House Counsel Don McGahn
wrote a letter to the House Intelligence Committee's leaders yesterday, referring to materials uncovered "in the ordinary course of business." It's not entirely clear if he was talking about the same intelligence shared with Nunes, but if so, I'll look forward to hearing McGahn explain his definition of "ordinary course of business."
