UPDATE:
Devin Nunes Vanished the Night Before He Made Trump Surveillance Claims
Hours before the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee announced his shocking claims about surveillance of the
Trump transition team on Wednesday morning, he practically disappeared.
Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an
Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone, three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. After the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts.
By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual.
The
Republican chairman had a bombshell to drop.
“The intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes told reporters Wednesday morning.
Nunes reviewed “dozens of reports” produced by the U.S. intelligence community that showed this, he added. Though the surveillance was done legally, Nunes said he was “alarmed” that information about transition officials was widely disseminated throughout the government, and that in some cases their names were “unmasked,” meaning not hidden as is usually the case when when a U.S. person’s information is collected through foreign surveillance.
Immediately after the press conference, Nunes went to the White House to brief the president. Afterwards, Trump said he felt “somewhat” vindicated by the briefing for his false claim that President Obama “wiretapped” him during the election. (Nunes has maintained this is not true.)
Asked to explain why he decided to brief the president,
Nunes told Sean Hannity on Thursday he had done so because the information concerned him and that the president was receiving criticism from the press.
"It’s clear that I would be concerned if I was the president, and that’s why I wanted him to know, and I felt like I had a duty and obligation to tell
gush, gush, gush
Devin Nunes Vanished the Night Before He Made Trump Surveillance Claims