Curiouser and Curiouser

This week it emerged that [House Intel Committee Chair Devin] Nunes had met his whistleblowers on the grounds of the White House. [...] Today [Thursday, March 30] we learned definitively that the whole performance was a charade.

The intelligence chairman’s sources, according to the New York Times, were a pair of Trump appointees: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and now senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, an assistant White House counsel for national security affairs.

[...]

If the Times report is accurate, there seem to be two significant breaches of the rules governing classified information.

[...]

Three named officials—two Trump appointees and arguably his leading defender on the Hill—appear to have engaged in precisely the behavior that the president describes as the true national security threat posed by the Russia debate. Secrecy regulations, including SF312, the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, do not permit Ellis and Cohen-Watnick to distribute sensitive compartmented information through a back channel to Nunes.

[...]

That is the first apparent breach of secrecy rules. The second, of course, is the impromptu Nunes news conference. There is no unclassified way to speak in public about the identity of a target or an “incidentally collected” communicant in a surveillance operation.

Two more questions raised today look even more serious to me. [...] Under the intelligence community’s “minimization” rules, names of American citizens and green card holders are normally removed and replaced with some variation of “[MINIMIZED U.S. PERSON].”

[...]

There are well-established procedures for the “customers” of an intelligence report to request that the names of Americans be unmasked entirely. The governing standard is supposed to be that the names are essential to understanding the meaning or significance of the report.

[...]

If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.

[...]

[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?

Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?

  Barton Gellman

Hmmmmm.  How did they know there were any surveillance reports to ask that the names be revealed?  Did they just assume it because they knew of some Trump-Russia communications?  Did I miss something?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.