House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes went to the White House on Wednesday afternoon to personally brief President Trump about intelligence he says he has seen regarding surveillance of foreign nationals during the presidential transition.
The surveillance could have inadvertently picked up the president or members of his transition team, the chairman said.
“What I’ve read seems to me to be some level of surveillance activity, perhaps legal. I don’t know that it’s right,” Nunes said to reporters outside the White House. “I don’t know that the American people would be comfortable with what I’ve read.”
“The president needs to know these intelligence reports are out there,” Nunes added. “I think the president is concerned, and he should be.”
Trump was asked whether he felt vindicated after his meeting with Nunes in his claims that he was wiretapped during the campaign at his Trump Tower headquarters by President Barack Obama’s administration. That claim has been roundly rejected by members of the intelligence community, including FBI Director James B. Comey and Nunes himself, who again dismissed the wiretapping allegation Wednesday outside the White House.
“I somewhat do. I must tell you I somewhat do,” Trump said when asked the question by reporters. “I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found.”
Before heading to the White House, Nunes said he briefed House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) on what he learned, and he also spoke with reporters. He said that U.S. intelligence agencies may have picked up communications involving Trump as part of court-approved surveillance of foreign intelligence targets in the period between Trump’s election and his inauguration.
Nunes did not, however, brief his ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), about the contents of what Schiff said were intercepts.
Schiff said that he now has a “profound doubt” about whether the Intelligence Committee can conduct a credible investigation. He contended that Nunes’s actions in informing the White House before speaking to colleagues are proof that an independent commission should be formed to investigate Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Trump associates and Russian officials.
“You don’t take information that the committee hasn’t seen and present it orally to the press and the White House before the commitee has even had a chance to vet whether it’s significant,” Schiff stated. “It casts quite a profound cloud over our ability to do our work.”
Schiff said that he hoped the latest developments were not part of an effort by the White House to divert attention from the fact that Comey denied that the previous administration had wiretapped Trump’s phones.
“I have to hope that this is not part of a broader campaign by the White House to attempt to deflect from the director’s testimony earlier this week.”
Nunes (R-Calif.) told reporters that Trump was one of various members of the Trump team whose communications probably were intercepted through “incidental collection,” or surveillance of the communications of foreign nationals who may be in contact with or talking about U.S. citizens.
The chairman would not answer the question of whether anyone associated with the White House was the source of the new information.
“From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection,” Nunes said. “We don’t know exactly how that was picked up, but we’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”
He added that “it’s possible” that Trump’s personal communications were captured that way by the U.S. intelligence community.
Nunes stressed that he has no information that Russia had anything to do with the surveillance. The intelligence panel — along with the FBI — is investigating Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and the suspected ties of Trump’s associates to the Kremlin.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Nunes was headed to the White House on Wednesday afternoon to brief the president. Spicer said he did not know anything more about the matter than what Nunes had just said on Capitol Hill.
“He briefed the media before he briefed us,” Spicer said at his daily news briefing, adding, “Hopefully, we can share more” after the meeting.
U.S. intelligence agencies targeting foreign nationals regularly pick up communications to, from or about U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. residents, and U.S. corporations and organizations, a category referred to as incidental collection.
Nunes said the situation will be clarified after he receives a full list of American citizens who were “unmasked” during the surveillance. He said he expects to receive such information by Friday from the National Security Agency, the FBI and the CIA.
The NSA sweeps up phone calls and emails around the world, looking for intelligence that might be of interest to U.S. officials. When they hear something or read something of interest in a call, an email or a fax, intelligence analysts will write up a report based on the information.
In those reports, the names of U.S. people are “minimized” to remove their identities and protect their privacy. But senior U.S. officials can ask the NSA and other intelligence agencies to provide them with the names if they believe the information would allow them to better understand the intelligence.
The House Intelligence Committee chairman emerged to make the new claims in a series of public statements on Wednesday afternoon, two days after a public hearing by his panel in which Comey rejected Trump’s allegations that he had been wiretapped by Obama during the campaign.
“President-elect Trump and his team were put into intelligence reports. It’s probably fine, but the president himself needs to see this because clearly there was surveillance that was conducted,” he said.
Nunes’s statements came on the same afternoon that House Republicans were struggling to secure enough votes to pass their health-care overhaul. Ryan and Trump have put their political muscle behind the plan, which Ryan hoped to get to the House floor by Thursday. More than two dozen conservatives do not support the plan, said a spokeswoman for the House Freedom Caucus, which would be enough to defeat the bill if they continue to oppose it.
Schiff explained that in his talks with Nunes on Wednesday afternoon, most of the names of American citizens were not “unmasked” in the intelligence reports to which Nunes referred, but were concealed in such a way that made it easy to ascertain their identities.
“Because the committee has still not been provided the intercepts in the possession of the Chairman, it is impossible to evaluate the Chairman’s claims. It certainly does not suggest — in any way — that the President was wiretapped by his predecessor,” Schiff stated.
Nunes delivered a series of statements to the press to explain what he described as new information. He said he was especially concerned with “who ordered the unmasking” of individuals in intelligence reports that were “disseminated widely” throughout the Obama administration.
“The unmasking really bothers me. There has to be a reason for the unmasking,” he told CNN after going to the White House. “We have to know who ordered the unmasking.”
Nunes said that Trump “has every right to get a hold of these reports just like the last administration was able to read them.”
Outside the White House on Wednesday, Nunes focused on the dangers inherent in incidental collection.
“The reason that we do this and that we have all these procedures in place is to protect American citizens” Nunes said, adding that there is a “certain threshold met to make it into intelligence products.”
“Maybe they didn’t meet the minimum qualifications. There are things to me that don’t reach the level of intelligence value. You have to ask yourself why did they end up in intelligence reports.”
On Monday, Comey denied publicly that Trump had been wiretapped in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Comey also stated that the FBI was investigating Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and the suspected links of Trump’s associates to the Kremlin.
[Comey confirms probe of possible coordination between Kremlin and Trump campaign]
The intelligence chairman is the first high-ranking lawmaker to assert that intelligence agencies may have picked up conversations between Trump and foreign nationals. Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, has focused more squarely in his rhetoric on leaks to the intelligence community about Russia’s alleged intent during the presidential campaign and communications between Trump aides and Russian officials. He has said the only “major crimes” he is aware of are the leaks to the news media on those topics.
At least one Trump adviser was caught up in the incidental collection. Michael Flynn was ousted as national security adviser after U.S. intelligence officials intercepted his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The president dismissed him because Flynn misled Vice President Pence about the content of those calls.
John Wagner and Adam Entous contributed to this report.