Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Zack Beauchamp: Devin Nunes's Wiretapping Claims: "Nunes—the lawmaker charged with leading an investigation into the administration’s unfounded wiretapping allegations...
...used information he received from the Trump White House itself to publicly try to deflect blame from Trump.... Nunes was misleading the American public when he said his sources were whistleblowers.... Nunes’s sources... are Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, and Michael Ellis, a White House counsel attorney.... The calls that Nunes was briefed on... were intercepts of foreign officials’ conversations about the Trump team, not taps on Trump or his associates’ phones.... Put more bluntly: Members of the Trump White House selectively leaked classified intelligence that doesn’t actually support their boss’s claim to a credulous congressman who uncritically parroted the information in a press conference just hours later....
So, to recap: A young White House official who owes his job to Trump personally begins sifting through wiretaps right after the president claims he was wiretapped. What he finds makes it into the hands of an attorney who used to work for the chair of the House panel investigating the Trump White House’s wiretapping allegations. This attorney briefs his former boss on what he learned, but leaves him with such a garbled understanding of it that it seems like the wiretaps might vindicate Trump’s claim that Obama spied on him—even though they clearly didn’t. When the congressman goes public with the information, he omits the fact that he got the information from the White House....
The Trump White House is deliberately politicizing intelligence to defend the president’s wackiest and most unsubstantiated tweets. It suggests the head of the House Intelligence Committee, who is nominally supposed to investigate the Trump White House’s wiretapping claims and ties to Russia, is complicit in this whole process.
