Nunes flashback

March 2017:

On Monday, FBI Director James Comey testified before Nunes' committee that his investigators were looking at possible "coordination" during the presidential campaign between Russian officials and people close to Preisdent Trump.

Tuesday night, Nunes went to the White House where someone showed him documents related to U.S. intelligence surveillance, according to his statement.

On Wednesday, Nunes announced to reporters that he had seen evidence indicating that people close to Trump had been subjects of surveillance during the transition. He then went to the White House, saying that he needed to brief Trump about the revelations.

[...]

Asked to explain Nunes’ actions, Langer said in an email, “The information comprised executive branch documents that have not been provided to Congress. Because of classification rules, the source could not simply put the documents in a backpack and walk them over to the House Intelligence Committee space. “

  LA Times

The source could, however, have walked them into the President's office. Why did they need to go outside to Nunes to get someone to brief the president about the document/s? Rhetorical question.

Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

That does not appear to be the case. Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee. Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.

[...]

Mr. Cohen-Watnick, 30, is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who served on the Trump transition team and was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser.

He was nearly pushed out of his job this month by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who replaced Mr. Flynn as national security adviser, but survived after the intervention of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist.

[...]

There were conflicting accounts of what prompted Mr. Cohen-Watnick to dig into the intelligence. One official with direct knowledge of the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick began combing through intelligence reports this month in an effort to find evidence that would justify Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts about wiretapping.

[...]

The officials’ description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s characterization of the material, which he said was not related to the Russia investigations when he first disclosed its existence.

  NYT

A little white lie that had to be modified later.

On Thursday, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he needed clarification on whether White House officials had pursued “a circuitous route” to feed Mr. Nunes the materials so he could then hand them to Mr. Trump.

It would certainly appear so, and a page out of the Dick Cheney playbook.

The revelation that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, was on White House grounds the day before he briefed President Donald Trump on documents related to surveillance of his transition team has fueled speculation that the White House itself was Nunes' source.

Nunes, who was a member of Trump's transition team, told Fox on Tuesday afternoon that he would "never reveal" the source of the classified documents he obtained, not even to other members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes on Monday said he had gone to the White House last week to view the documents because Congress didn't have "networked access" to those reports.

  Business Insider

Serioiusly?

His spokesman later told Business Insider that Nunes had been there to view the documents in a secure compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to "safeguard the proper chain of custody and classification of these documents," but did not respond when asked why an executive branch source would not go directly to Trump, instead of to Nunes, with documents they found suspicious.

Didn't hear the question, I think.

"This is insane," Juliette Kayyem, a CNN national-security analyst and former official at the Department of Homeland Security, told Business Insider on Monday. "You only go to the White House to get briefed by the White House. It's not a meeting point like a McDonald's off the turnpike."

[...]

The White House "is not an internet café," [Democratic Rep. Eric] Swalwell told MSNBC. "You can't just walk in and receive classified information."

At least that wasn't possible in previous administrations.

Swalwell also wondered why Nunes couldn't have viewed the documents inside an SCIF at the Capitol after consulting with his fellow committee members.

"If this was done the proper way, they could have brought it over, shared it with both parties of the committee," he said, referencing what he said was the bipartisan nature by which intelligence-committee investigations are typically conducted.

Of course, nothing is typical of this administration, and this Republican Congress has completely broken typical Congressional activity. The Nunes-directed House Intel Committee has, from the beginning, refused to cooperate with the Democrats on the committee. A bigger Trump cover could not possibly be found.

"To come onto these grounds at the White House, you must be authorized," Jeff Zeleny, CNN's senior White House correspondent, said on Tuesday. "Someone invited him in, cleared him in, escorted him in. This White House has made the decision to not say who that was."

Republican Sen. John McCain agreed that Nunes' move was unusual.

"I've been around for quite a while, and I've never heard of any such thing," he said on Tuesday morning on CBS.

[...]

The day after he went to the White House, Nunes announced in an unexpected press conference that the president and his advisers may have had their communications "incidentally collected" by the intelligence community during the transition period.

[...]

"There was no legitimate justification for bringing that information to the White House instead of the committee," Schiff added.

This was the background Nunes laid for the current memo flap, and for his faux recusal from the investigation. This guy is Trump's right-hand man in the House. And perhaps - if his desperation moves are any indication - implicated in some way in the Mueller investigation.

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